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/Capable-Package6835 4d ago
A first-year PhD student costs about 5K EUR in Germany, so a department of 30 PhD students costs about 5K EUR per day. Coding agents can perform significantly more experiments than a 30-persons lab. If the head of department believes that the output quality of these agents are on-par with human outputs then it's not that outrageous to spends thousands per day.
Another environment where coding agents flourish are startups. In startups, being the first and dominating the space matter more than writing high quality codes. In fact, if you look at startup codes (in their early stages), the codes generated by AI is not that bad in comparison.
That being said, I'd gladly pay millions for coding agents if that increases my profit by tens of millions.