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Comment by jmuguy | Hacker News Reader

Yeah this is where I stopped. I use AI every day for work but 10k spend to me is a signal that OP is doing something extremely stupid with their AI use.

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That's the cost of one employee (and not an expensive one). Do you think it's impossible he's getting more value from the AI than he would from a single employee?

If it's an employee, which I doubt but ok, it's an employee you constantly have to probe, talk to, give instructions to, so, not a really good employee.

Neither of us have any idea whether his manufacturing startup is successful. It looks to be a 5 person team. A google search suggests they had a funding round early this year.

It might, in fact, be that you are more successful with your approach. I have no idea. Congrats if so.

I mean, he must be pretty successful to be able to burn 10k in tokens. If he is successful because or despite of the AI, I don't know and I don't really care ? That wasn't the question.

It's not the case that someone successful is doing everything right and someone unsuccessful is doing everything wrong, I'd grant.

But I think it's odd for you to now say it doesn't matter whether or not his AI token use is leading to success or not. I personally think it's actually really important to learn whether/when this approach is smart.

Depends how you use the tokens. It's not 10k, but I have an agent do an investigation automatically when I get paged, so by the time I get to the computer I have a nice summary. But that's costing me like $5/mo at most.

But you could use tons of autonomous agents for all kinds of things. Probably shouldn't, but you can.

I use AI every day, and I use it quite a bit, and I use Opus more than I maybe should, and even then I'm not even at $2000 in tokens this year. I don't understand how people are tokenmaxxing as much as they are.

Doesn't seem that wild if youre doing large green field dev with frontier models.

Im spending about 2-3K a week on personal projects and 5K a week on corporate stuff.

Crazy. I use claude pro and I barely hit the quota working on greenfield stuff.

You could realistically be burning through ~5k of tokens without hitting the quota. The subscriptions are crazy subsidized relative to the API rates.

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