Sounds a lot like paying for online ads, they don't work because you're not paying enough, when in reality bots, scrapers and now agents are just running up all the clicks.

You pay more to try and get above that noise and hope you'll reach an actual human.

The new "fast mode" that burns tokens at 6 times the rate is just scary because that's what everyone still soon say we all need to be using to get results.

It feels like everyone's gone mad.

Here I am mostly writing code by hand, with some AI assistant help. I have a Claude subscription but only use it occasionally because it can take more time to review and fix the generated code as it would to hand-write it. Claude only saves me time on a minority of tasks where it's faster to prompt than hand-write.

And then I read about people spending hundreds or thousands of dollars a month on this stuff. Doesn't that turn your codebase into an unreadable mess?

I think the output of companies that can invest on tokens vs those who cannot will lead to crazy different outcomes in the next few years.