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Financial Barriers and Costs

Discussions about the high cost of running continuous agents (potentially hundreds of dollars a month), with some noting that the author's wealth (as a billionaire/founder) biases his perspective on affordability. Users question whether the productivity gains justify the expense for average developers or if this creates a divide based on access to compute.

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While agentic workflows promise massive productivity gains, many users are skeptical of advice from billionaire founders whose wealth insulates them from the "token anxiety" of costs that can exceed $500 a month. To mitigate these high expenses, savvy developers are engineering complex "gatekeeper" scripts that utilize cheaper models like Gemini for routine validation while reserving premium models for high-level reasoning. This has created a stark divide between those who see the "Anthropic tithe" as a justifiable investment for a speed boost and those who fear high-performance AI is becoming a luxury reserved for the elite. Ultimately, the community remains divided on whether the current price of compute justifies the output for the average software craftsman.

21 comments tagged with this topic

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Is there any reason to use Claude Code specifically over Codex or Gemini? I’ve found the both Codex and Gemini similar in results, but I never tried Claude because of I keep hearing usage runs out so fast on pro plans and there’s no free trial for the CLI.
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IME Gemini is pretty slow in comparison to Claude - but hey, it's super cheap at least. But that speed makes a pretty significant difference in experience. If you wait a couple minutes and then give the model a bunch of feedback about what you want done differently, and then have to wait again, it gets annoying fast. If the feedback loop is much tighter things feel much more engaging. Cursor is also good at this (investigate and plan using slower/pricier models, implement using fast+cheap ones).
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I do something very similar. I have an "outside expert" script I tell my agent to use as the reviewer. It only bothers me when neither it OR the expert can figure out what the heck it is I actually wanted. In my case I have Gemini CLI, so I tell Gemini to use the little python script called gatekeeper.py to validate it's plan before each phase with Qwen, Kimi, or (if nothing else is getting good results) ChatGPT 5.2 Thinking. Qwen & Kimi are via fireworks.ai so it's much cheaper than ChatGPT. The agent is not allowed to start work until one of the "experts" approves it via gatekeeper. Similarly it can't mark a phase as complete until the gatekeeper approves the code as bug free and up to standards and passes all unit tests & linting. Lately Kimi is good enough, but when it's really stuck it will sometimes bother ChatGPT. Seldom does it get all the way to the bottom of the pile and need my input. Usually it's when my instructions turned out to be vague. I also have it use those larger thinking models for "expert consultation" when it's spent more than 100 turns on any problem and hasn't made progress by it's own estimation.
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How much does it cost per day to have all these agents running on your computer? Is your company paying for it or you? What is your process of the agent writes a piece of code, let's say a really complex recursive function, and you aren't confident you could have come up with the same solution? Do you still submit it?
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The guy who wrote the post is a billionaire
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I thought this was a joke ie you need to be a billionaire to be able to use agents like this, but you are correct. I think we need to stop listening to billionaires. The article is well thought out and well written, but his perspective is entirely biased by never having to think about money at all... all of this stuff is incredibly expensive.
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Billionaires also tend to have a vested interest in the tech being hyped and adopted, after all one doesn't become a billionaire without investments.
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Very nice. As a consequence of this new way of working I'm using `git worktree` and diffview all the time. For more on the "harness engineering", see what Armin Ronacher and Mario Zechner are doing with pi: https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/1/31/pi/ https://mariozechner.at/posts/2025-11-30-pi-coding-agent/ > I really don't care one way or the other if AI is here to stay3, I'm a software craftsman that just wants to build stuff for the love of the game. I suspect having three comma on one's bank account helps being very relaxed about the outcome ;)
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I'm kind of on the same journey, a bit less far along. One thing I have observed is that I am constantly running out of tokens in claude. I guess this is not an issue for a wealthy person like Mitchell but it does significantly hamper my ability to experiment.
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This seems like a pretty reasonable approach that charts a course between skepticism and "it's a miracle". I wonder how much all this costs on a monthly basis?
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The comment by user senko [1] links to a post from this same author with an example for a specific coding session that costs $15.98 for 8 hours of work. The example in this post talks about leaving agents running overnight, in which case I'd guess "twice that amount" would be a reasonable approximation. Or if we assume that the OP can only do 4 hours per sitting (mentioned in the other post) and 8 hours of overnight agents then it would come down to $15.98 * 1.5 * 20 = $497,40 a month (without weekends). [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46905872
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>$15.98 * 1.5 * 20 = $497,40 a month Are people seriously dropping hundreds of dollars a month on these products to get their work done?
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If you make 10k/mo -- which is not that much!, $500 is 5% of revenue. All else held equal, if that helps you go 20% faster, it's an absolute no brainer. The question is.. does it actually help you do that, or do you go 0% faster? Or 5% slower? Inquiring minds want to know.
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> I've been building systems like what the OP is using since pgt3 came out. OP is also a founder of Hashicorp, so.. lol. > This is the honeymoon phase. No offense but you come across as if you didn’t read the article.
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> Immediately cease trying to perform meaningful work via a chatbot. That depends on your budget. To work within my pro plan's codex limits, I attach the codebase as a single file to various chat windows (GPT 5.2 Thinking - Heavy) and ask it to find bugs/plan a feature/etc. Then I copy the dense tasklist from chat to codex for implementation. This reduces the tokens that codex burns. Also don't sleep on GPT 5.2 Pro. That model is a beast for planning.
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This are all valid points and a hype-free pragmatic take, I've been wondering about the same things even when I'm still in the skeptics side. I think there are other things that should be added since Mitchell's reality won't apply to everyone: - What about non opensource work that's not on Github? - Costs! I would think "an agent always running" would add up quickly - In open source work, how does it amplify others. Are you seeing AI Slop as PRs? Can you tell the difference?
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Now that the Nasdaq crashes, people switch from the stick to the carrot: "Please let us sit down and have a reasonable conversation! I was a skeptic, too, but if all skeptics did what I did, they would come to Jesus as well! Oh, and pay the monthly Anthropic tithe!"
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There are so many stories about how people use agentic AI but they rarely post how much they spend. Before I can even consider it, I need to know how it will cost me per month. I'm currently using one pro subscription and it's already quite expensive for me. What are people doing, burning hundreds of dollars per month? Do they also evaluate how much value they get out of it?
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Low hundreds ($190 for me) but yes.
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I quickly run out of the JetBrains AI 35 monthly credits for $300/yr and spending an additional $5-10/day on top of that, mostly for Claude. I just recently added in Codex, since it comes with my $20/mo subscription to GPT and that's lowering my Claude credit usage significantly... until I hit those limits at some point. 20 12 + 300 + 5 ~200... so about $1500-$1600/year. It is 100% worth it for what I'm building right now, but my fear is that I'll take a break from coding and then I'm paying for something I'm not using with the subscriptions. I'd prefer to move to a model where I'm paying for compute time as I use it, instead of worrying about tokens/credits.
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We're literally full. Just a few 1x GPUs available right now. So far, I haven't been happy with any of the smaller coding models, they just don't compare to claude/codex.