Ask HN: 100k/year individual token usage?

#1

Post by alecsmart1 » Sat, Mar 14, 2026, 5:58 AM UTC

I was watching the all in podcast where they are talking about devs spending $300/day on LLM tokens. I’m only able to do about $2k per month, that too on the high end, if I’m programming for 14 hours a day every day.

Is anyone spending that many tokens? How? What exactly are you’ll doing?

Here is the Instagram clip: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DV0Z0qmDa28

Re: Ask HN: 100k/year individual token usage?

#2

Post by codingdave » Sat, Mar 14, 2026, 10:33 AM UTC

So who has done the math on the price point where offshore coders are cheaper than LLMs? They both need good specs, guidance, and validation of their work. So it seems to me that when the effort to manage people vs. the effort to orchestrate LLMs is about the same, and the price is about the same... what are we actually gaining here?

Re: Ask HN: 100k/year individual token usage?

#3

Post by lemagedurage » Sat, Mar 14, 2026, 3:19 PM UTC

I can only imagine the cost of maintaining the 100K+ LOC codebases that are slopped out today. We can't keep growing the context windows and amount of agents, right? Or do we stick with greenfield projects?

Re: Ask HN: 100k/year individual token usage?

#4

Post by alecsmart1 » Sat, Mar 14, 2026, 6:38 PM UTC

codingdave wrote: post #2

So who has done the math on the price point where offshore coders are cheaper than LLMs? They both need good specs, guidance, and validation of their work. So it seems to me that when the effort to manage people vs. the effort to orchestrate LLMs is about the same, and the price is about the same... what are we actually gaining here?

Apparently some of the tweets are talking about marking offshore workers with AI. So best of both worlds.

Re: Ask HN: 100k/year individual token usage?

#5

Post by behehebd » Sun, Mar 15, 2026, 8:08 AM UTC

People fetishizing costs. It is like a sales guy saying "I spent $5k on flights this week, aiming for $20k next week" ... "well OK good for you!"