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Comment by paulbjensen | Hacker News Reader

I find it nuts that I can use Claude Code for $20pm - I imagine that won't last forever but have to say it is great value for money.

So when I see monthly budgets in the thousands for developers at some larger companies, I'm curious to learn how they are managing to spend that kind of figure: how much code/documentation are they feeding into their prompts, are they using agent orchestration systems to make the code factory run 24/7, and how much value is coming out the other end versus before?

And, if they are pouring thousands into LLMs per developer, have they considered looking at alternatives like having LLMs running locally on own hardware with their own agent harness?

Those are the kind of questions I'd love to ask - I just wonder how much stuff is truly cutting edge and how much might be wasteful?

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Developers at big companies need to pay per token, they don't have subscription available. So in case you use that, you likely spend way more than $20 in tokens.

As for how to spend that much -- not that hard, to be honest. Just give it a lot of context and some relatively open-ended problem and it will easily eat through tons of tokens.

I have $200 subscription for Codex and it is crazy what it can do in terms of debugging. I have a pretty complex Electron setup with some native code linked via Node addons, a few App Extensions and it can easily read the source code to see how the builder works internally (e.g. if your end Info.plist is not correct), debug the xcodebuild output to see at which step something is not linked correctly (like after XCode major version bump), etc.

It is not a silver bullet but if you are not the one paying for it, there is no downside to throw a problem at it and see if it can come up with a fix.

> And, if they are pouring thousands into LLMs per developer, have they considered looking at alternatives like having LLMs running locally on own hardware with their own agent harness?

I am curious about that myself. I have a good machine now (Macbook Pro M5 Pro with 48GB memory), so I'll give it a try; I don't have high expectations so if it is actually helpful would be very neat.

I just looked at ccusage for a personal project. In 5 days (doing it as a hobby) I've managed to spend $250 in API tokens on a $200 subscription. 5 days, and thats on one computer (I split time using 3 of them). If I had to pay $2000 a month -- no fricking way, not worth it.

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