They optimize because their work requires them to. 100k tokens is a few bucks and a couple minutes, then 15 more minutes to verify that the output does what it's intended for reasonably well, so it's more like $50 in total cost.

For an engineer paid $100/hr to write a 150 line Python script and test it to the same extent could take a few hours, so the total costs rise meaningfully.

I just suggest you use Claude to write the script for you. And then you run the script with cron. Really it’s not any more time, just takes a different view on what the goal is.

Yeah they rise from $100/hr to $150/hr.