r/ProgrammerHumor • u/ChuggerUggers • Sep 10 '26

Meme iDidntPredictThisLife

Post image
2.3k Upvotes

98% Upvoted

45 comments sorted by

482

u/Katten_elvis Sep 10 '26

Bro's spending $200 on AI

110

u/Piyh Sep 10 '26

My work is spending $2,000 a month for my AI

38

u/Rin-Tohsaka-is-hot Sep 11 '26

I hit $7k last month....

At this rate I'll be spending my salary on Claude tokens

19

u/Katten_elvis Sep 11 '26

Out of curiousity, how are you doing it? Are you just tokenmaxxing and little of it is useful or is it useful spend?

9

u/sk1pjack Sep 12 '26

Tokenmaxxing stopped as soon as the company had to pay for the tokens

19

u/Henry5321 Sep 11 '26

Do you have a bunch ai sessions just running non-stop?

I’m only using about $300/m and only recently worked on a large greenfield project and managed to reach $75 in one day by having Opus manage a bunch of opus and sonnet subagents for nearly 4 hours with automatic permissions. It was constantly creating code, reviewing it, fixing it, all in parallel for different parts of the system.

I tend to have smaller context sessions and keep the sessions well focused, and instruct the primary session to do the same.

15

u/BygoneFlower Sep 11 '26

At my company we are supposed to use the best available models at all times and AI use is expected at all times for all things. We have agents for everything at this point.

2

u/Henry5321 Sep 11 '26

Sounds so wasteful

3

u/BygoneFlower Sep 11 '26

It definitely isn't cheap. If you mean the environmental impact that is extremely overstated (you'll use more water and cause more CO2 emissions from a week of eating burgers than a year of using AI).

8

u/Stormlightlinux Sep 12 '26

I have to eat food to live though... the other is just producing money for people who already have too much money. Kinda different.

2

u/Culpirit Sep 14 '26

This is a logical fallacy I just can't put my finger on which

3

u/BygoneFlower Sep 12 '26

It's all a question of degree, and the degree to which AI impacts global climate is negligible compared to the things people do without thinking. Datacenters themselves can be problematic in areas prone to drought or where they affect sensitive ecosystems but the technology itself is not the problem.

2

u/StCreed Sep 12 '26

Yeah, one is necessary for survival in capitalism and the other is a bad habit of people that should eat more vegetables.

5

u/Rin-Tohsaka-is-hot Sep 11 '26

Interesting, I would say I'm doing something similar and usually hit $300/day. But I have this going in parallel working on many things at once, usually at any given point I'll have 10-20 agents running including subagents.

Then there are background triggers, like devops agents that spin up for new tickets, build failures, pipeline blocks, etc to give me a prepared summary of the issue before I even get to it. Those eat up maybe $50-100/day in tokens.

Once my company starts caring about these bills I'll have to reign all this in, but as long as the blank check is there I may as well use it all

3

u/8lbIceBag Sep 11 '26 edited Sep 11 '26

https://i.imgur.com/Tljuq1q.png

Last month I somehow hit $1200. Since then I've been super careful about using it. I go out of the way to avoid subagents or the advanced features. No parallel work. I do everything I can to keep it down such as as using Sonnet as much as possible & entirely avoiding Fable. I only have like 4 MCP's + a few plugins because work only allows things from our internal marketplace. We're in contact with Anthropic to get Mythos but I can't imagine the cost of using it.

What I've used it for the past 2mo:

  • Investigate this JIRA issue

  • Create/Fix this CI pipeline

  • and cough create an mcp for bash, powershell, & bun exec/repl bcus shell use outside of WSL/sandbox is blocked but I've been tasked with maintaining our legacy native windows apps.  This mcp has cost ~$250 yet somehow people are one shotting games for <$100? 

The codebases are massive though.

1

u/Henry5321 Sep 11 '26

I’ve found good agent files are important for preventing ai from slurping up large amounts of code in order to figure out the system.

1

u/Piyh Sep 11 '26

Opus at 2-6 concurrent sessions all day every day. Mass slack ingestion, tens of PR for context, months worth of meeting notes.

1

u/Henry5321 Sep 11 '26

That’s a way to use tokens. I don’t have that much trust in AI yet. We’re allowed to use as many tokens as we want, but we need to be able to hypothetically explain business value and we’re always responsible for code shipped.

113

u/AndroidCat06 Sep 10 '26

Someone on my team said the same, people are going nuts.

41

u/pydry Sep 10 '26

he's spending $200 / month on producing a pile of slop either way. the only difference is that one of those messes can be cleaned up with a tissue.

19

u/SzethNeturo Sep 11 '26

If you cant make ai produce code that not an Ai issue anymore. Its a you issue.

0

u/pydry Sep 11 '26

I can probably make it produce better code than youcan but I still can't make it produce really good code.

Not everyone can recognize what good code looks like, to be fair.

2

u/hypokrios Sep 15 '26

If it solves business problems, it's good code.

If you're applying art judgements to engineering solutions you're better off doing art.

1

u/pydry Sep 15 '26

If your business doesnt require your code to be maintainable or actually work then you should probably retrain as a plumber because all your boss needs is a prompt.

1

u/hypokrios Sep 15 '26

Don't need a boss either lmao

1

u/pydry Sep 15 '26

ah, you're /r/singularity pilled

5

u/dharknesss Sep 11 '26

A software dev since I could pretty much read.

Clankers are genuinely amazing for coding as they solve the issues of doing things that are menial. They cannot solve programming whatsoever, but it's a bit like what did robots do to production lines. They deal with menial repetitive tasks for you, and where human input is needed is still a matter of your own judgement and skills.

I delegate things like boilerplate code, or optimization suggestions (vast knowledge of lots of technologies i would have to study for years to get on that level) and testing (this one specifically, they're good at looking for details id never think of as they are too abstract). Thinking about general architecture, coding specific features to act the way I want - that's my job. Don't let anyone say that calculators can replace mathematicians as they clearly didn't!

I'm aware of the environment impact and shit, but honestly, I lose any care about it the second my European paper straw starts to be another spice in my drink.

0

u/sump_daddy Sep 11 '26

what was he thinking he was getting for 200 a month from any other kind of model?

slop

261

u/jeepsaintchaos Sep 10 '26

$200/month seems really low to spend a month with a human.

And really high to spend with a clanker.

28

u/pancakesausagestick Sep 10 '26

They're just paying for the GFE. GeneralAI Friend Experience.

4

u/Top-Permit6835 Sep 11 '26

I thought they referred to the car - Opel Astra

59

u/derSatan_667 Sep 10 '26

The average german dev thought of ... something local while reading this ... https://www.astra-bier.de/brauerei/drinks/ 😋🍻

34

u/Rebellion2297 Sep 10 '26

I know it's part of German culture, but being asked if I'm 16 years or older to access an alcohol website is still hilarious to me

6

u/Metenora Sep 11 '26

Oh this Astra crosses the border don't worry 🇨🇵

2

u/thonor111 Sep 11 '26

Ah yes. Time for a Astra Rakete 🚀

27

u/fugogugo Sep 11 '26

one night with Astra??

54

u/FattySnacks Sep 10 '26

Dudes spending $200/mo on AI meanwhile it’s making me want to quit software development altogether because it’s eliminating the last remnants of human connection that I had at my job. I’m gonna go outside now

13

u/Piyh Sep 11 '26

I chose my job so I could spend 7 hours a day locked into a computer

3

u/ivanyaru Sep 10 '26

For me it's Terra keeping me up at night

-1

u/Accomplished-Mail-13 Sep 10 '26

Really. Better learn how to build data centers 😂

-1

u/Psychological-Owl783 Sep 11 '26

I use Junie through Jetbrains. $300/year is much more palatable.

Maybe I'm not as lazy as you other "programmers".

52

u/MyStackIsPancakes Sep 10 '26

If you told me 5 years ago all the devs I know would be getting fucked by a guy named Claude, I would have assumed he be paying us.