From my rough understanding, tokens are about five to ten times more expensive than the prepaid plans
I’m basically replicating myself multiple times for a ~10% salary surcharge.
In my mind it’s impossible to not see it that way, unless you just want to capture the subsidy surplus for free.
Yes, LLMs are awesome and let me do things faster but I would be using them far less if my only option was the API. I used coding agents prior to subscriptions (Aider) and spent <$200 total before abandoning it due to cost. The results were good, but not worth the price for me.
I'm happy to answer more questions if that doesn't cover what you were looking for. I'm not sure if "coding" is all you wanted or if you wanted more details.
What would you say is the split of your token use (between main job / side project)? Do you use agents for everything?
I'm asking because I feel I'm weird in my usage, which is very much structured like 1. organising the context and then 2. send off requests to 1-2 models and continue down the rabbit hole from there. I've found agents take longer and make me learn/retain less about the system I'm building.
It fluctuates, but never less than 30% on either and I get to 95%+ of my weekly usage. I also spend some tokens on “personal” stuff, like with my Obsidian notes or helping to manage other tech in my life (Home Assistant, Unifi, NAS, 3D Printer, other servers).
> Do you use agents for everything?
Increasingly so. It’s just so much faster in many cases or even if it takes the same time or more, I can do something else while it’s working. All my communications are 100% me, (sms/iMessage/HN/Slack/etc) but anything I consider “busy work” I try to farm out. I find the edges of what it can do then back off a bit or stop using it for that task.
> I'm asking because I feel I'm weird in my usage…
I like using skills to replicate the steps I want taken. It’s far from perfect and I want a way to enforce stricter workflows but skills with “Step 1, Step 2, Step 3…” do work. Currently once I’ve filled out a ticket (often using an agent to bounce ideas or grill me on my ideas) I can hand that off to an agent to plan, it will do its planning, present the plan, then spin up a worktree running an isolated dev stack, do the work (asking me questions as needed), then tell me it’s done (providing me with one-click login urls for the various roles in my system) with a link to the running dev stack, I then review the work, it kicks off 2 reviews, and fixes any issues they surface. Then a PR is created, this is normally when I look at the code if I need to, then 2 agents review the code (more of a smoke test but they find things), the original agent waits for the agents on GH Actions to finish, then deals with their findings, then it kicks off another review (up to 2 rounds). I decide then if any remaining issues are worth not merging (if you’ve used LLMs for code review you know they can go on endlessly with increasingly unreasonable edge cases).
All that said, my workflow is flux as I try out new things regularly. Does that slow me down? Perhaps, but things are changing too quickly to “settle in” to any workflow just yet. You could compare it to the JS Framework Cambrian explosion but it’s easier to switch.
> I've found agents take longer and make me learn/retain less about the system I'm building.
Fair point, some parts I scrutinize, and some areas I’m less concerned. I have E2E tests on the important flows, I perform manual testing constantly, there are extensive unit tests (front and backend), and the code is structured and abstracted better for testing than it’s ever been. All that to say is I feel confident of foundation, some of which was built pre-LLM and some of it was built by LLMs.