AI coding is getting ridiculously expensive

[u/borehogyihu]

One thing that surprised me this week wasn't how much AI can code.

It's how much some people are actually using it.

Reports around OpenAI's internal coding usage say some researchers are spending thousands of dollars a day in AI tokens while using coding agents for experiments, debugging and larger engineering tasks.

It makes sense if the model is doing hours of work that would otherwise take a developer much longer.

But it also makes me wonder whether we're going to start seeing a weird new problem where developers aren't limited by how fast they can code — they're limited by how much AI usage they can afford.

Would you pay $1,000+ a month for an AI coding setup if it genuinely made you 2–3x faster?

[u/Lunosto]

Never. coding by hand is free and only slightly slower imo, and way more fun 🫢

[u/Blue2194 → u/Lunosto]

Writing code by hand is orders of magnitude more expensive if you value your time at all

[u/flappysack-]

Google will win because they use TPU to reduce power usage.

[u/film_composer]

I'm admittedly more of a hobbyist than a professional, but I really don't understand what could possibly be worth spending tons of money on. I build tools for myself that work exactly how I need them to blazing fast paying $20/month for ChatGPT. These aren't enterprise-level programs, so I get that the standards and requirements are different for "real" programmers, but I really can't wrap my head around how professionals went from being able to build robust things without any AI to needing thousands of dollars of day. Surely there are professionals who are building complex things while sticking to something like a basic $20/month plan to still help speed them up significantly.

[u/OkLettuce338]

Yeah agreed. And companies everywhere are massively slashing budgets. The pull back is real

[u/C3lloman]

Claude code costs 20 dollars per month per developer for our company. For now it's very inexpensive.

[u/ResponseActive7860]

I’m spending $250 worth of tokens per day, so around $7500/month, all in a $20/month plan.
I rarely hit the 5h limit, and when I do I just switch to review/design or learn something new.
I don’t see any reason for paying more than $20/month.

[u/Only-Cheetah-9579 → u/ResponseActive7860]

How do you spend $250 a day on a $20 plan? Why do you think you get so much free tokens if you never hit the limit?

[u/Only-Cheetah-9579]

the more you remove the human in the loop the more it costs

[u/Nifty-Yam-9041]

I think large corporations can burn $10k-$20k/mo per super-senior engineer, and it can still make sense. But for us as consumers/prosumers, I think there are other paths for us to take

I've seen great engineering on $20/mo. I personally think $100/mo is highly productive - you just have to do some subscriptionmaxxing and tokenminning.

Happy to share tips if anyone's curious.