Ask HN: How much are you spending on AI coding at work?
5 points
9 hours ago
| 4 comments
| HN
Jensen Huang recently said that he thinks an engineer who makes $500k should spend at least $250k a year on “tokens” which is an astounding figure. I personally don’t know how I could spend that much if I tried. Obviously he has a huge financial incentive to convince people that $250k per engineer is reasonable, but it got me thinking that it’s time for a survey.

How much are you and your coworkers spending on AI coding tools at work? I’m talking about Cursor, Claude Code, etc. Not all AI-powered SaaS, just the stuff that’s metered by token.

speedgoose
2 hours ago
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The Microsoft GitHub Copilot Pro Plus Premium Ultra Max at $40 a month is enough for me. My job isn’t only about coding.

Moreover, if you spend that much on tokens, that sounds like a skill issue and you may be creating a lot of technical debt. I don’t see how anyone can have the brain capacity to handle enormous code bases.

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daemonologist
8 hours ago
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$40/month at work and $10/month at home, and it's more than I can use.

I cannot imagine productively spending $250k/year on LLM coding - you'd need some kind of massive tree of agents reviewing each other's work and I think even then you would struggle to keep them on-task and sanity-checked. However, I don't make $500k a year so what do I know...

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wallabydesigns
8 hours ago
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It is crazy when I hear how much some people spend on AI! Having an agent cut out some of the boilerplate code is useful, but beyond that, are people just creating a backlog wishlist and then walking away?
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supernova215
9 hours ago
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About $50 a day
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