[ShinyLeftPad]

> Companies are spending the most on coding tools, not email writing.

They probably spend more on having LLMs just parse documents than writing emails than writing code. You maybe forget that most people are not programmers.

[Gagarin1917]

It doesn’t matter what “most people” are, coding agents use an obscene amount of tokens, literally millions per day. Every request to an agent needs to parse at least several different documents/files.

[ShinyLeftPad]

All LLMs use obscene tokens just programmers are more aware of it

[Gagarin1917]

That’s not true. The different use cases of LLMs objectively use different amounts of tokens. AI coding agents can parse half a dozen or more files on each request, plus use a ton for thinking.

Writing an email barely uses any in comparison.

[ShinyLeftPad]

> thinking

LLM doesn't think

> AI coding agents can parse half a dozen or more files on each request

yeh people never ever ask LLMs to write emails based on a number of docs and spreadsheets and other emails and Slack chats plus some websites and definitely won't iterate on it multiple times...

and parsing source code is peanuts compared to parsing a PDF

[Gagarin1917]

>LLM doesn't think

You don’t realize I’m referring to the process of generating a ton of text in an attempt to better address the request - a process that these LLM companies call “thinking”? Are you out of the loop or are you taking some kind of pointless stand here?

>yeh people never ever ask LLMs to write emails based on a number of docs and spreadsheets and other emails and Slack chats plus some websites and definitely won't iterate on it multiple times...

A worker might have one or two of those large requests a day. That stop doesn’t come close to agentic AI token usage. I’ve been applying for jobs daily, uploading both my resume and the job posting upwards of 6-7 times per day to these chatbots. I still never hit the free limit.

Agentic AI coding obviously uses far, far more. This really shouldn’t be surprising.

[ShinyLeftPad]

1. You seem to think that non programmers don't ask LLMs to program for them. Maybe that's why you're comfortable here thinking you're definitely will keep being in demand. Believe me they do ask an LLM to write for them various tools and bots and what LLM writes can in turn consume tokens like crazy be agentic or whatever the latest hype word is.

2. even without that uploading a resume is not "write emails based on a number of docs and spreadsheets and other emails and Slack chats plus some websites and iterate on it multiple times". one of those requests can easily be a month worth of your resume uploads at that rate.