Only tangentially related, but today I found a repo that appears to be developed using AI assistance, and the costs for running the agents are reported in the PRs. For example, 50 USD to remove some code: https://github.com/coder/mux/pull/1658

This is the cost of Anthropics pay by the token plan.

To give an analogy, Anthropics pricing is $0.10 per grain of rice (pay by the token) or;

$20 a month for quarter cup of rice each day (claude pro)

$100 a month for 10 cups of rice each day (claude max 100)

$200 a month for a sack of rice delivered to your door each day.

It's a rather insane pricing scale and here they are paying $50 there because they don't understand the pricing model (which is fair, Anthropics pricing model is crazy). Never pay by the token with Antropic! Only ever use the subscription plans.

I'd like to suggest that dev lower their settings: sota model + high + thinking is definitely not needed to do this simple task. Lower settings could easily do it for less than $0.50, maybe even $0.05. I'd encourage people to operate on average to low settings and wind then up or down depending on the prompt task complexity.

That seems reasonable compared to an actual developer (depending on your region), but I had hoped for these models to make simple tasks like this fast and cheap so those developers can focus on the difficult stuff.