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Comment by christkv | Hacker News Reader

I'm just flabbergasted at the massive inefficient usage of tokens. What are people doing to spend 500 usd/day in tokens. I just don't understand what you could possibly be doing that would be not complete spagetti at the end if you run something in an autoloop.

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Using Claude code with Opus 4.7 and xhigh effort for a few hours will definitely cost hundreds of usd.

I am not sure if you would call claude code "an auto loop", but you don't need to be running something crazy like gas town to spend a lot of tokens with Claude.

No employer is telling their employees to use tokens thoughtfully. They might even have token usage leaderboards. One of my team’s agents runs on Opus 4.6 for a fairly narrowly defined scope of a few MCPs and skills. But everyone’s getting their promos and bonuses based on this alone. Next year we’ll get another bonus when we save $1000/day by switching it to Qwen 32B on a Mac Studio

It looks like a “People respond to incentives (prices)” situation.

If something is cheaper than alternatives, spending patterns change. People subsidize corn or power and so consumers alter behavior to take advantage of those prices.

> What are people doing to spend 500 usd/day in tokens

1) They're lying

2) Status signalling

There is status in showing your inefficiency ?

That's almost all status signalling ever is.

A $500 Gucci belt doesn't hold up your pants any better.

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