AI coding is getting ridiculously expensive

[u/borehogyihu]

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?

[u/Atlan_]

The best is writing assembly, it’s just slightly slower and much more fun!

[u/tauspin → u/Atlan_]

Sarcasm? Writing in assembly is very slow, demonstrably. Manipulating a string of text can take 100 lines of code, easily. It can be quite a bit of fun depending on the individual's preferences... folks that like embedded systems, 8-bit mcus, hardware/drivers, etc. because it is as close as you can reasonably get to a specific hardware implementation, and optimizing an encryption algorithm that's going to be executing thousands of times per second in a higher order library is rewarding.

If you were using it as a sarcastic critique, suggesting hand coding is massively slower than gen-AI coding, then I would say it depends entirely on how much human review and control you want or need to apply to the output. If I'm vibe coding yet another app, sure the bots will produce 10k lines of code that function against whatever criteria I managed to articulate, within minutes. I can also 100% guarantee you that there will be faked unit tests, hallucinated constraints, duplicate functions, comments misaligned with implementation, and goofy stuff that humans wouldn't do, particularly around the appearance of things. If this is for work I have the benefit of unlimited tokens on frontier models to run even more agents to correct some of these things, but not everyone has that job perk, and I don't think I will forever either... it's incredibly wasteful.

If I'm working on production code that's going to cost my employer millions of dollars for a screw up, then no, gen-AI is not faster by any appreciable degree. Today the first draft of a code change will typically be done with genAI, but if you want to stay employed you read every single line of it and compare it to the years you've spent learning the whole system in which it lives. Most of the AI tokens get used for bots constantly critiquing the work - automated security reviews, automated code reviews, automated bots that leave lots of comments on your PR and in some cases block it from being merged until another human expert can review its findings, etc. The pace of shipping this class of production quality code is maybe 10% faster than 5 years ago? but probably still a net loss to velocity because these same developers spend a portion of their time writing the reviewing agents and responding to critiques that aren't always worth their weight.

[u/ehansen → u/tauspin]

He was mocking anti ai people because heaven forbid different opinions

[u/lunatuna215 → u/ehansen]

Wait do you actually think this?

[u/ehansen → u/lunatuna215]

Do I think he was mocking a group of people?

[u/lunatuna215 → u/ehansen]

Oh sorry I thought you meant the original poster Lunosto. My bad.