I spend 400-500 dollars per day during active development at this point. However with more aggressive task breakdowns I can spend ~5k per day.

These spend rates are in part due to operating on a larger code base. Operating on a larger code base means more time searching and understanding the code, tests, test output. They are also due to going all-in on agentic coding.

It can feel painfully slow to go back to coding by hand when for a dollar you can build the same functionality in a minute. Now do this with multiple sessions and you can see where the cost goes.

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steveBK123 a day ago | parent [-]

Your reply answers how you are able to spend money, not if it is returning sufficient dollar value per spend..

> I genuinely challenge someone spending $5-$10k a month to demonstrate how that turns into $50-$100k in value.

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solenoid0937 a day ago | parent [-]

The problem with HN is that everyone here thinks like an engineer, not like a business owner.

$10k a month on tokens is just not that much when you're already making $2M per engineer. If their productivity has increased even 10% then the spend was well worth it.

Case in point, Meta made 33% more revenue this earnings report. Now you can nitpick and ask for attribution down to the dollar, but macro trends speak for themselves.

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steveBK123 a day ago | parent [-]

Go look up a multi-year chart of their revenue and find the inflection point where the AI made it go up faster (there isn't). In fact revenue growth used to be higher pre-2023.

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solenoid0937 a day ago | parent | next [-]

They were also a lot smaller pre-2023, 33% growth for a company of their size is simply insane. It is entirely likely that 33% simply wouldn't have happened without AI.

	▲	steveBK123 a day ago \| parent [-]
		Motivated reasoning

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aprdm a day ago | parent | prev [-]

lol. AI just started in the kind of usage being discussed in this thread, how would it make any difference on something that is quarterly reviewed