[ai-christianson]

I've ended up with $5K+ in a month using sonnet 3.7, had to dial it back.

I'm much happier with gemini 2.5 pro right now for high performance at a much more reasonable cost (primarily using with RA.Aid, but I've tried it with Windsurf, cline, and roo.)

[skeptrune]

Hoooly hell. I swear the AI coding products are basically slot machines.

[Implicated]

Or the people using them are literally clueless.

[triyambakam]

That's the largest I've heard of. Can you share more detail about what you're working on that consumes so many tokens?

[ai-christianson]

It's really easy to get to $100 in a day using sonnet 3.7 or o3 in a coding agent.

Do that every day for a month and you're already at $3k/month.

It's not hard to get to $5k from there.

[triyambakam]

Sure but how? Still wondering more specifically what you're doing. And 3-5k is unfortunately my entire month's salary

[ai-christianson]

I'm developing an open source coding agent (RA.Aid).

I'm using RA.Aid to develop itself (dogfooding,) so I'm constantly running the coding agent.

That cost is my peak cost, not average.

It's easy to scale back costs to 1/10 the cost and still get 90% of the quality. Basically that means using models like gemini 2.5 pro or Deepseek v3 (even cheaper) rather than expensive models like sonnet 3.7 and o3.

[ilrwbwrkhv]

Just try the most superior model deep-seek