Am I alone in spending $1k+/month on tokens? It feels like the most useful dollars i've ever spent in my life. The software I've been able to build on a whim over the last 6 months is beyond my wildest dreams from a a year or two ago.
If you don't mind sharing, I'm really curious - what kind of things do you build and what is your skillset?
Other than just dumping 10M tokens of chats into a gist and say read through everything I said back and forth with claude for a week.
But, I think I've got the start of a useful summary format: it that takes every prompt and points to the corresponding code commit produced by ai + adds a line diff amount and summary of the task. Check it out below.
https://github.com/sutt/agro/blob/master/docs/dev-summary-v1...
(In this case it's an python cli ai-coding framework that I'm using to build the package itself)
I’m not sure a single human could audit & review the output of $1k/mo in tokens from frontier models at the current market rate. I’m not sure they could even audit half that.
At any rate, I could easily go through that much with Opus because it’s expensive and often I’m loading the context window to do discovery, this may include not only parts of a codebase but also large schemas along with samples of inputs and outputs.
When I’m done with that, I spend a bunch of turns defining exactly what I want.
Now that MCP tools work well, there is also a ton of back and forth that happens there (this is time efficient, not cost efficient). It all adds up.
I have Claude code max which helps, but one of the reasons it’s so cheap is all of the truncation it does, so I have a different tool I use that lets me feed in exactly the parts of a codebase that I want to, which can be incredibly expensive.
This is all before the expenses associated with testing and evals.
I’m currently consulting, a lot of the code is ultimately written by me, and everything gets validated by me (if the LLM tells me about how something works, I don’t just take its word for it, I go look myself), but a lot of the work for me happens before any code is actually written.
My ability (usually clarity of mind and patience) to review an LLMs output is still a gating factor, but the costs can add up quickly.
I use it all the time. I am not into claude code style agentic coding. More of the "change the relevant lines and let me review" type.
I work in web dev, with vs code I can easily select a line of code that's wrong which I know how to fix but honestly tired to type, press Ctrl+I and tell it to fix. I know the fix, I can easily review it.
Gpt 4.1 agent mode is unlimited in the pro tier. It's half the cost of claude, gemini, and chatgpt. The vs code integration alone is worth it.
Now that is not the kind of AI does everything coding these companies are marketing and want you to do, I treat it like an assistant almost. For me it's perfect.
The AI might write ten versions. Versions 1-9 don't compile, but it automatically makes changes and gets further each time. Version 10 actually builds and seems to pass your test suite. That is the version you review!
—and you might not review the whole thing! 20 lines in, you realize the AI has taken a stupid approach that will obviously break, so you stop reading and tell the AI it messed up. This triggers another ~5 rounds of producing code before something compiles, which you can then review, hopefully in full this time if it did a good job.
I guess I see why the salesmen dont mention this... but it seems really important for everyone to know?
But it's true that I'm always surprised when people talk about using Claude on the beach or whatever, I love Claude Code but I have to test and test and test again per each incremental feature.
There's a lot of tokens used up quickly for those tools to query the code base, documentation, try changes, run commands, re-run commands to call tools correctly, fix errors, etc.
I would if there were any positive ROI for these $12k/year, or if it were a small enough fraction of my income. For me, neither are true, so I don’t :).
Like the siblings I would be interested in having your perspective on what kind of thing you do with so many tokens.
I do freelancing mostly for fun though, picking projects I like, not directly for the money, but this is where I definitely see multiples of difference on what you can charge.
What kind of software are you building that you couldn't before?