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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

#191

Post by rsanek »

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…

While it's a little unstable, I've found Docker's sbx to be a great sandbox to run agents with --dangerously-skip-permissions

Re: AI coding at home without going broke

#194

Post by conradkay »

closeparen wrote: post #118

>Around $400 a month of plans buys roughly $2800 of API usage at list prices, which is a real bargain right up until you hit the ceiling. The plans are metered, and any large AI native workflow will chew through the included tokens fast I don't think that's true at all. I'm doing 8-12 PRs a week at work, all primarily Claude Code, and the usage at API billing has never broken $500/mo.

I'm almost certain $2800 is actually too low if you're really hitting weekly limits.

I'm on the $100/m plan and used $300 at API billing yesterday (according to ccusage)

Seems like one session is >$100 and I can get 10 full sessions per week

The $200/m plan is supposed to be 4x that in usage, so with 2 of those you could use 4*2*100*10=$8000 in just a week

Using Simon's numbers here as a bare minimum https://simonwillison.net/2026/May/27/product-market-fit/#en... you'd get 1200*4*2=$9600 a month

Re: AI coding at home without going broke

#196

Post by epicureanideal »

binarymax wrote: post #131
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?

Same for me. $20/mo is just fine and I use it to code daily. I suspect the people that burn through tokens have several subagents and 50 skills loaded and 40 MCP tools. All those load up the context on every single turn.

Only the front matter of the 50 skills would be loaded, right? 40 MCP tools would be a much larger use of context, right?

Re: AI coding at home without going broke

#197

Post by gabriel-uribe »

Random09 wrote: post #187
gabriel-uribe wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Deterministic scripts are awesome, and they certainly power my internal dashboards. But I'm a human - I will miss things. I maintain too many apps to have entire codebases in memory at this point. Or to continue monitoring all these streams. Logging is cheap - I log as much as possible because an AI will scan it for me. I just want scoped pull requests to review proactively against the slew of things that can happen…

It seems you could use a human instead then? If you have so many apps, you could hire a junior to help you. There is additional satisfaction of bringing new person to the IT too.

Honestly, would love to do that. Main issue is margin. Earning just enough to even consider hiring, but not nearly enough to hire someone great that will stick around. Have tried hiring a few times now, but it hasn't worked out for various reasons.

Kicking the can down the road for now.

Re: AI coding at home without going broke

#199

Post by 12_throw_away »

dozerly wrote: post #176
sunrunner wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've found that adding "Make no mistakes." to my prompt usually helps with this kind of problem...

We are so many layers deep in AI hype that I honestly can’t tell if this is /s or not

"Make no mistakes" is I thought a phrase used to make fun of "prompt engineering," not something people really do?

Re: AI coding at home without going broke

#200

Post by isubkhankulov »

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…

Claude enterprise plans are 30-40x more expensive vs the consumer plans.

I used to spend $200/mth on the Max plan at a small startup. Now spending single digit thousands on Claude enterprise with the same usage levels.

Anthropic is subsidizing consumer usage, and also charging a nice margin for enterprises for zero data retention (ZDR)

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