You can get really far with the 20x Claude Code and Codex plans. They are many orders of magnitude cheaper than api calls.
It's here to stay, and IMO once VLA-driven robots enter the real world there will be enough money to pay for the datacenters. This coding stuff is great but there are only so many engineers to sell to.
Satya Nadella once said (more or less) "if AI is so good, why doesn't it show up in GDP?"
That's gonna be the step where it shows up in the GDP. Being able to train a machine to solve any problem that can be phrased in tokens (i.e.: most of them) is going to remake society.