What are your agents implementing day and night…sheesh. Built anything useful for anyone yet?

It's wild how different usage patterns are between users.

I have seen the Cursor leaderboard on my company and the vibe coders consume about 5x more tokens than the developers. They and other office workers also have Claude and their limits are often over around Wednesday.

People are using millions of tokens to do very simple HTML reports. I have seen someone asking the LLM to download the entire data into the context and asking it to sort.

Those usage patterns don't correlate to output.

Likely the user doesn't know what they're doing or has extermely bad workflows. They're prob not managing their cache, and dont use compaction.. Letting context get to 500k and invalidating their cache every 10 tool calls because they have no providor fallback settings.

I was running deepseek v4.1 pretty much non stop during work hours, with heavy tool/mcp usage and finding it very difficult to spend more than $75 in a month.

Also the cheapest providers on Openroutrr can often have terrible cache hit %, short TTLs resulting in their effective price being much more expensive than people realize. 75% cache pretty much destroys any savings from a super cheap token perspective.

> But aren't you developing bad habits and learning patterns that won't work long term?

2 reasons - there's an advantage now, use it. 2nd the frontier providers, this is the "early cheap days" like when uber was initially cheap to compete vs standard cabs. they want you to become hooked and boy are we hooked.

I use the frontier openai/anthropic models at work but exclusively open weight models (on cloud/hosted inference) for personal stuff and I think about it like this; 1) I don't see any reason GLM and DeepSeek won't eventually be as good as Claude, it's just a matter of time and 2) the open models are well and truly capable enough for most of what I'd want to do. I don't need nor want an LLM chewing away on a horrible enterprise spaghetti codebase, my employers can pay for that privilege.

No one involved in this is thinking about the long term

Long term, we will see what happens and adapt. At worst we all go back coding by hand. Meanwhile what can I do, tell my customers that I'm raising my fee because I have to pay for token? The Claude Pro $20 plan is good enough for me and even in auto mode I never had to wait for the 5 hours reset.

I expect by that point we'll have local models that can do a decent job, I would guess give it a decade and we'll be running custom accelerators that are smarter than current frontier models.

In the same way that only supercomputers used to have multiple processors and caches but it's now standard.

Or.. BYOK Deepseek because OpenRouter's UX is much nicer?

One of the reasons I use OpenRouter is because they offer zero data retention. As far as I can tell, DeepSeek's own API doesn't support ZDR.

I'm all in for saving money and _can_ move to using DS directly from them, but maybe I am missing something here:

OpenRouter Pricing:

$0.02/M input tokens $0.60/M output tokens

DeepSeek Pricing (cache miss, off-peak):

$0.15/M Input $0.60/m output

DeepSeek trains on your inputs. That's why people go on OpenRouter and choose ZDR providers.

Interesting. Are all of the providers on OpenRouter simply losing money? How does that even work out?

Are you sure about that? My impression was most providers on openrouter were purely selling tokens for profit...