> But I am fairly certain that someone whose job is prompting all day will generally spend several plane trips worth of CO₂.

I dont know about gigawatts needed for future training, but this sentence about comparing prompts with plane trips looks wrong. Even making a prompt every second for 24h amounts only for 2.6 kg CO2 on some average Google LLM evaluated here [1]. Meanwhile typical flight emissions are 250 kg per passenger per hour [2]. So it must be parallelization to 100 or so agents prompting once a second to match this, which is quite a serious scale.

[1] https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/measur...

[2] https://www.carbonindependent.org/22.html

Lots of things to consider here, but mostly that is not the kind of prompt you would use for coding. Serious vibe coders will ingest an entire codebase into the model, and then use some system that automates iterating.

Basic "ask a question" prompts indeed probably do not cost all that much, but they are also not particularly relevant in any heavy professional use.