I looked at our anthropic bill this week. Saw that one of our best engineers was spending $300/day on Claude. Leadership was psyched about it.

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pydry 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

I was told that I wasnt using it enough by one arm of the company and that I was spending too much by another.

Meanwhile, try as I might I couldnt prevent it from being useless.

I know of no better metaphor than that of what it's like being a developer in 2025.

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protocolture 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Is he using it to code or just chatting up his AI girlfriend.

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sdesol 5 days ago | parent [-]

Joking aside, if he is one of the top developers in the company and if he is "actually" a good developer, when compared to others outside of the company, then I can see this bill.

The current feature that I'm working on, required 100 messages to finalize things and I would say the context window was around 35k - 50k per "chat completion". My model of choice is Gemini 2.5 Flash which has an input cost of $0.30/1M. Compare this to Sonnet which is $3.00/1M.

If the person was properly designing and instructing the LLM to build something advanced correctly, I can see the bill being quite high. I personally don't think you need to use Sonnet 99% of the time, but if somebody else is willing to pay the bill, why not.

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mlnj 5 days ago | parent [-]

Meanwhile an entire lake has evaporated in Northern Canada to deliver me a slightly different version of yet another payment options page.

	▲	protocolture 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Awesome. That must be on the same planet where 300% of the worlds power goes to processing a single bitcoin transaction.

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merlincorey 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Claude is making $72k a year for a consistent $300/day spend.

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PhantomHour 6 days ago | parent [-]

Bear in mind those are revenue figures, they're costing claude hundreds a day.

One imagines Leadership won't be so pleased after the inevitably price hike (which, given the margins software uses, is going to be in the 1-3 thousands a day) and the hype wears off enough for them to realize they're spending a full salary automating a partial FTE.

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ojosilva 6 days ago | parent [-]

But, by the looks of things, models will be more efficient by then and a cheaper-to-run model will produce comparable output. At least that's how it's been with OSS models, or with the Openai api model. So maybe the inevitable price hike (or rate limiting) may lead to switching models / providers and the results being just as good.

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racc1337 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

There is an interesting substack post about this. LLM costs are dropping 10x/year but the amount of tokens used have gone up like crazy https://open.substack.com/pub/ethanding/p/ai-subscriptions-g...

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krainboltgreene 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> But, by the looks of things, models will be more efficient by then and a cheaper-to-run model will produce comparable output

So far there's negative evidence of this. Things are getting more expensive for similar outputs.

	▲	etoxin 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		And this varies widely between models based on how they are told to reason.