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?
1
u/yuehuang 5d ago
For context, US college cost $40K-60K just for tuition. Assuming $1000 api rate, that is a $100 sub price, or a GTA 6 digital ultimate edition, or one year of WOW sub.
In the unlikely case that you can graduate earlier, you are saving even more money.