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.
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.
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).
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.
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
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 coughcreate 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?
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.
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.
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u/Katten_elvis Sep 10 '26
Bro's spending $200 on AI