[jjmarr]

I don't think about controlling cost because I price my time at US$40/h and virtually all models are cheaper than that (with the exception of o1 or Gemini 2.5 pro).

If I spend $2 instead of $0.50 on a session but I had to spend 6 minutes thinking about context, I haven't gained any money.

[owebmaster]

Important to remind people this is only true if you have a profitable product, otherwise you’re spending money you haven’t earned.

[jasonjmcghee]

If your expectation is to produce the same amount of output, you could argue when paying for AI tools, you're choosing to spend money to gain free time.

4 hours coding project X or 3 hours and a short hike with your partner / friends etc

[jjmarr]

If what I'm doing doesn't have a positive expected value, the correct move isn't to use inferior dev tooling to save money, it's to stop working on it entirely.

[oezi]

There might be value but you might not receive any of it. Most salaried employees won't see returns.

[ngruhn]

Come on, every hobby has negative expected value. You're not doing it for the money but it still makes sense to save money.

[jasonjmcghee]

If you do it a bit, it just becomes habit / no extra time or cognitive load.

Correlation or causation aside, the same people I see complain about cost, complain about quality.

It might indicate more tightly controlled sessions may also produce better results.

Or maybe it's just people that tend to complain about one thing, complain about another.