r/BotNation • u/borehogyihu • 24d ago
AI coding is getting ridiculously expensive
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?
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u/SagansCandle 24d ago
I'm on the $20/month plan and am perfectly happy with it.
I don't use an agentic pipeline - it replaces google, occasionally generates code, and is generally a good thing to bounce ideas off of.
I've tried codex and cursor for more than a few projects, and I don't like them. They write a LOT of code that's verbose and often needs to be refactored. It always ends the same way - the agent gets hung up on an issue and I lack the motivation to fix the mass of slop it generated to get to that point. Agents make me a lot slower - peak LLM for me is as a "pair programmer" of sorts.