Ask HN: How much are you spending on AI coding at work?

#1

Post by habosa » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 1:02 AM UTC

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.

Re: Ask HN: How much are you spending on AI coding at work?

#2

Post by supernova215 » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 1:05 AM UTC

About $50 a day

Re: Ask HN: How much are you spending on AI coding at work?

#3

Post by wallabydesigns » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 2:03 AM UTC

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?

Re: Ask HN: How much are you spending on AI coding at work?

#4

Post by daemonologist » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 2:06 AM UTC

$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...

Re: Ask HN: How much are you spending on AI coding at work?

#5

Post by timothyshen123 » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 5:05 AM UTC

[dead]

Re: Ask HN: How much are you spending on AI coding at work?

#6

Post by Remi_Etien » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 6:31 AM UTC

[flagged]

Re: Ask HN: How much are you spending on AI coding at work?

#7

Post by speedgoose » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 7:59 AM UTC

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.

Re: Ask HN: How much are you spending on AI coding at work?

#8

Post by Remi_Etien » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 8:25 AM UTC

[flagged]

Re: Ask HN: How much are you spending on AI coding at work?

#9

Post by linesofcode » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 12:14 PM UTC

wallabydesigns wrote: post #3

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?

That’s exactly what we’re doing. Connect the agent to your GitHub issues, tell it implement each one and spin on a loop until it’s finished. There’s more nuance to it than that but at a high level yeah, that’s how some people are using it.

Re: Ask HN: How much are you spending on AI coding at work?

#10

Post by eleventhborn » Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 1:34 PM UTC

~$250 in 3 weeks at work. Its not steady, equal token distribution per day. There are days when it is $40 and there are days when it is (Sidebar: There is a prediction that the traditional roles of Designer, Product Owner and Programmer are disappearing and converging into one single specialized role. (Claude Code has a blog about this) and I feel there is truth in this.)

So, my runrate right now is ~$4,200 per year, but I won't be surprised if it goes up. It depends on several factors.