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AI coding at home without going broke

stephen.bochinski.dev

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Re: AI coding at home without going broke

#141

Post by vitally3643 »

tunesmith wrote: post #47

I feel like I must have plateued and don't know what to do next to level up. I'm currently on the $100/month codex plan and it seems fine using 5.5-xhigh all the time. I think of what to do next, have a chat session to determine exactly what to ask for up to the point of being ready to implement, and then codex churns on a commit-sized task whereupon I briefly check it on my local dev server. If necessary I ask for a…

That's because you're treating the problem as an engineer instead of an "influencer" or "10xer" or whatever. You're treating it as a problem to be solved with engineering and AI is merely a tool to do so. It is, in my experience, vanishingly rare for an engineer to have a problem that needs to be solved with multiple hours of unattended AI code generation.

I've only found one single application where it makes even the slightest amount of sense to have an AI grind away for hours on end. I'm reverse engineering a widget which contains five separate firmware images. I've dumped the binary from the widget and I set the AI to decompile and reverse engineer these interrelated firmware projects. It's a compelx task, but very well bounded. It's not complicated work, but it's a lot of work, and the end result is a C-shaped pile of text that is only informative, it never would be compilable on its own even if I did it by hand. The quality of the output is tightly bounded by the input assembly and the overall output artifact is documentation in the shape of code.

I don't have any qualms about letting an AI go ham on it unattended because the stakes are zero. But if the AI can beat the assembly into a recognizable C project, it's much easier for me to read and reason about. Easy win, I think.

Re: AI coding at home without going broke

#142

Post by janpeuker »

The biggest issue I've seen with people burning through tokens is using very long sessions, especially starting with plan mode and then "iterating" over extended periods. I was burnt badly by extra usage so now I run on $20 Pro. I ruthlessly create new sessions/agents, always ask to create markdown files first (no plan mode) and minimise context aggressively - for example I have a lot of skills that use lazy loading and a small local MCP for lookups plus openrouter with a local model for image detection and fulltext search. Basically I use Claude Code in pi.dev style.

Re: AI coding at home without going broke

#143

Post by Footprint0521 »

Yoric wrote: post #78
atreids wrote: post #2

I find just going via Deepseek's platform API directly, using their V4 flash model, and hooking into a harness like Opencode more than acceptable. Think I've spent maybe $10 over a couple of weeks. I did explore self-hosting models but hardware right now is just too expensive.

Directly at DeepSeek? It was my understanding (but I didn't check) that some other AI operators were providing (some of?) DeepSeek's model for cheaper prices. Still, that's interesting. What do you get for that price? Only coding, or also e.g. image generation?

I’ve been doing this too, it’s a cheat code! 1/100th of the price of Claude/openai prices for 95% of the quality. Site is platform.deepseek.com for that. No image generation, just text, but if you use it right it works great

Re: AI coding at home without going broke

#144

Post by jmkni »

dpcan wrote: post #136

I cannot figure out what people are doing to spend all this money. I have used a $60 per month Cursor plan on auto, and have never come close to using up my included usage, and I probably have it planning and coding and working for me all through the evenings 4 nights a week. What on earth are people doing differently that it's costing them so much? Maybe enabling on-demand usage or other paid models, or on higher mo…

Totally agree, but then a lot of the same people will be talking about all of the custom instructions/rules/skills/features etc they have set up, so that's eating up a lot of the context window before you even start

When I do use AI, it's just the pure tool itself, and the context is the exact code I'm working with (because I'm trying to see if it can help me solve a specific problem), and I understand the rest of the codebase well enough to know if it's giving me good answers or bad ones

Re: AI coding at home without going broke

#145

Post by asdff »

enraged_camel wrote: post #6
isatty wrote: post #3

> The first is to self host. You buy the machine, run open source models locally, and pay nothing per token after that. Power is not free. What I’ve found is that you’re basically paying a premium for privacy, and that’s worth it for me.

>> Power is not free. There's actually an interesting thought experiment here: if it takes you a full day to build something that AI would otherwise build in a day, do you end up using more power, or less? What is the break-even point, purely from a power consumption perspective?

There is no break even point, you always come out ahead doing it yourself because your caloric burn is the same for the day whether you build the tool or AI builds the tool. Only way the AI example might avoid that is if it tells you to jump off a cliff before starting the compute run.

Re: AI coding at home without going broke

#146

Post by bredren »

What is going broke for a programmer?

This is US centric but a $200 Claude code and $100 codex sub is a vast, vast amount of tokens. Enough to pay for itself many times over. It provides exposure to the very edge of harnesses and experience that is being hired for.

Isn’t there an argument this is possibly the best price to available performance for frontier models? Both due to subsidies and the distance between open and accessible alternatives?

Re: AI coding at home without going broke

#147

Post by datadrivenangel »

isatty wrote: post #3

> The first is to self host. You buy the machine, run open source models locally, and pay nothing per token after that. Power is not free. What I’ve found is that you’re basically paying a premium for privacy, and that’s worth it for me.

And paying more for hardware costs extra!

I ran the numbers and outside of privacy it doesn't make sense. But I did it anyways. [0]

0 - https://www.williamangel.net/blog/2026/05/17/offline-llm-ene...

Re: AI coding at home without going broke

#148

Post by Random09 »

gabriel-uribe wrote: post #122
mikgp wrote: post #98

What are people doing at home? I have like 5 different apps I code on the $20/month Claude plan and like sure I can hit rate limits but - What are people doing to burn through $3k in tokens?

YMMV but automations eat through the $100-$200 plans, which burn thousands in tokens alone. I have hourly automations for root cause analysis on customer support issues, daily automations for eg log analysis, weekly & monthly automations for KPI tracking & actioning. I will say, when I was building side projects that were 1) fairly well defined in scope and 2) without users/need for automations it was much easier to…

Most of it doesn't require AI. You could generate automation scripts that do that, except of customer support. People became dependent on AI in places where it never was required and now tech bros are doing the squeeze.

Re: AI coding at home without going broke

#149

Post by rbalicki »

vitally3643 wrote: post #141
tunesmith wrote: post #47

I feel like I must have plateued and don't know what to do next to level up. I'm currently on the $100/month codex plan and it seems fine using 5.5-xhigh all the time. I think of what to do next, have a chat session to determine exactly what to ask for up to the point of being ready to implement, and then codex churns on a commit-sized task whereupon I briefly check it on my local dev server. If necessary I ask for a…

That's because you're treating the problem as an engineer instead of an "influencer" or "10xer" or whatever. You're treating it as a problem to be solved with engineering and AI is merely a tool to do so. It is, in my experience, vanishingly rare for an engineer to have a problem that needs to be solved with multiple hours of unattended AI code generation. I've only found one single application where it makes even th…

I'll add another use case for letting an AI go ham: many small, atomic refactors where the name of the game is never breaking anything.

My personal OSS projects don't have the scale to necessarily make this worth it, but at work I run three pipelines using Barnum (https://barnum-circus.github.io/). First, one that ingests files, identifies refactors (from a pre-approved list), and places a precise description of the refactor to be done in a queue; second, one that reads from said queue, implements and creates PRs (there is a lot of "check that the PR is correct" here as well); and a third that babysits PRs until they land. I've landed hundreds of PRs in this way, with very little effort on my part.

Re: AI coding at home without going broke

#150

Post by dofm »

zozbot234 wrote: post #111
evrydayhustling wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brains are efficient, but civilized humans aren't. In the USA, adults consume at a rate of about 10kW -- only 1-2% of that being the human's metabolism, the rest being HVAC, electrical devices, etc. For comparison, a modern frontier model like Gemini 3.5 Pro consumes about 15kW -- so only about 1.5x the fully loaded human. In an 8h workday, that model would crank through ~80M tokens (~$5k at API prices). That's ~4 ma…

You forgot to mention that it takes a lot more energy to train that human before they're able to work.

The human in the scenario is on regardless. One has to assume. But I also think this sentence you typed is essentially a single line horror story and we should consider whether it is ever appropriate to say it out loud.
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