Cool story, bot.

AI bubble popping is that gif of the crash test truck.

Our company pays by token usage.

Claude opus 4.5 costs about 25$ per one million input tokens.

Well I manage to get to about 50 million input tokens per day regularly on the agent. Not everyday, but at least 7 per month. So I am alone cost the company about 2000$ extra on top of my salary.

Well they fixed it by implementing some great caching for the tokens and using sonnet instead of opus I can save some money too. Also gemini flash is much cheaper and similar performant. So you can fix it so you don’t burn money on ai

A big context costs a lot more

What are you using? Which product? I got 2k last month and was told to use cheaper models indeed

I do it on purpose

If you run “agentic coding harness” or any kind of goal oriented loop then tokens goe brrrr.

And LLM sellers are pushing for that (duh), as they managed to convince people to use infinite monkeys typewriting until they make Hamled.

(Type made on purpose)

I tried Warp terminal because now that’s bankrolled by openai’s magic infinite money you can use your own openai api keys without a subscription. So I put one from my work account. I do a git commit (manually) and then it comes a prompt under it “push it, open a PR and switch to main?”. I click yes, it used one million tokens for that… (And it took about a minute because it did like 20 requests, so there was no time saving at all vs doing it manually)

I wget something, it comes a prompt under it “now compare the hash?”. Boom, another 500k tokens

Some companies had leaderboards and encouraged AI usage until they got their bills.

If you click the most expensive model and then click max/fast mode, the same task can easily cost 10 or 20x of the cheaper models

I’ve heard “loops” will burn a lot of tokens. Haven’t tried it myself. A person could also spool up multiple loops to work on multiple branches at the same time.

I am not able to use the tokens provided by a Claude Max account either.
But if someone tries to be clever and have 10 employees use a single Max account, they probably run into the limits often. And if the response is to let them just buy API-prized tokens instead of getting more accounts, that gets very expensive very fast. The single-user accounts are subsidized. The extra token prices are not.
Actual business accounts are prohibitively expensive. And at least Anthropic terminates subsidized accounts when they see extensive use.

Real token prices are insane. Most businesses couldn’t afford them. And eventually the VC capital will dry up. The cheap AI bubble will burst. And then the market is in for a real sticker shock.
Better be prepared to switch to local inference for as many use cases as possible.

I read they were automating everything whether it needed AI or not just to get credit for using AI.

Agent loops for SWE burn a LOT of tokens.

I’m unfortunately temporarily disabled and can’t use my hands for another 2 months. So I’ve leaned heavily into AI based workflows to keep my job in the meantime.

Aside from the nightmare of keeping quality high, not atrophying skills, and avoiding a lack of domain knowledge. It works reasonably okay.

Token usage is insane though. A productive day might cost a few hundred dollars in tokens all things considered. Quality is expensive as well, a good 1/4 of that are automated systems that exist to identify defects, quality, coherence…etc issues early.

Doesn’t work

Im self-employed, and my employer has no idea what they’d do with AI, so it’s not an issue for me.

I thought a token was a credit for an inquiry, but from reading about this, I’m getting the idea that a token is a word or phrase that forms the prompt for the AI to respond to. So a single prompt could cost multiple tokens if there are multiple words or phrases. Further, since the more parameters you give the AI, the more likely you’ll get a decent response, so a good prompt may cost a lot of tokens. Is that correct?

If so, then using more tokens to get a better response is likely to be a more efficient use, than multiple inquiries with mediocre results. But now we seem to be entering a era where they are more focused on the costs than the results, which is always stupid.

For a buncha geniuses, this AI stuff all seems pretty fucked up. Nobody seems to know what they’re doing, or even what they want out of it, but they’re spending literal fortunes on it. A scenario like that will NEVER have a good outcome.

People have benchmarked this. It’s not really any better than saying “be succinct”

…said every day now for a year

Itd have to be some kind of bubble and that would mean we were in a lottttt of danger and should reasses our use of it.

Well yeah, but if it were the only sector propping up the whole economy and we reassessed it, the economy would be in a loooooot of danger anyway.

Luckily, that would never happen…

Imo its because people will lazily ask the llm to remove or change simple code instead of doing it themselves

Heh, re ass.

We just bought everyone individual Claude Max subscribtions (Anthropic has done nothing about it so far lol). The most expensive tier is 200$/M I think - that’s already much more than most people could possibly spend in tokens.

I am more than happy with the 100$ tier. For a business, that’s a rounding error. Given the productivity boost, I’d say it’s a no-brainer (although you should train your people on it as well).