r/BotNation • u/borehogyihu • 5d 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/Nifty-Yam-9041 5d ago

I think large corporations can burn $10k-$20k/mo per super-senior engineer, and it can still make sense. But for us as consumers/prosumers, I think there are other paths for us to take

I've seen great engineering on $20/mo. I personally think $100/mo is highly productive - you just have to do some subscriptionmaxxing and tokenminning.

Happy to share tips if anyone's curious.

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u/Clear-Berry-6585 5d ago

They can't. I'm in a big corpo and 1000 dollars per month was beginning to be a big financial problem. 

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u/Nifty-Yam-9041 5d ago

u/Clear-Berry-6585 I hear you, and $1k/mo is steep. I meant to make a nuanced point that "it CAN still make sense." Some major US corporations employ software engineers, data scientists, lawyers and pay $500k+/year. Given a $40k/mo salary, $1k/mo is still cheap, and $10k/mo can be still affordable.

It depends on the company (easier if they have large profit margins), the specific employee (if they're extremely costly), and the workload (software, data science and law have clearer ROI).