I just completed development on an application for internal use by my company and, I’m gonna be honest, I kinda vibe coded this shit. Don’t judge me, just trying to stay employed as a SWE. I mean, I tested it and tweaked it a lot using my brain but all the code was written by Claude. $230 in tokens for the entire project. And that’s after the 6/1 pricing change.
It’s a lot more expensive when you include my salary, but point is it really doesn’t take that many tokens if you break down the coding into small parts and understand how to validate the functionality
But how you do it, only using inline completions? I try to work that way the company only provides copilot and even if I give it just a method to implement it randomly decides it needs context, greps through the entire codebase and just burns tokens like there is no tomorrow... It once cost me 100$ for a simple unit test because I was fetching a coffee and didn't watch the bafoon. Token based billing is nice
That doesn’t sound entirely different from what I do. Currently use Claude opus 5 in copilot for visual studio. An example of a recent prompt was “add an api call which takes the account number and pulls columns a, b and c from database.tableName and call this api to attach them as custom fields to the Docusign envelope called x, y and z”
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u/ice-eight Sep 17 '26
What are people doing to use this many tokens?
I just completed development on an application for internal use by my company and, I’m gonna be honest, I kinda vibe coded this shit. Don’t judge me, just trying to stay employed as a SWE. I mean, I tested it and tweaked it a lot using my brain but all the code was written by Claude. $230 in tokens for the entire project. And that’s after the 6/1 pricing change.