With Claude Code Ultrathink, I used 3 million tokens in 20 minutes. At API prices, that would be around 30$. So 90$/h. Model cost is not that much lower.
Congrats, now you’re paying an engineer’s salary to make your engineer at best 20% more productive.
Better to hire another engineer, or two jrs, and build up your in house talent.
If you’re doing a one-off project, sure. But if you’re coding like this full time, you’re paying the year’s salary anyway.
And faster? Not so sure about that. Sure they can write code faster, but writing code is a small part of building something.