Coding with LLMs (Claude Code, OpenAI Codex) is often presented as the ‘killer app’ for Generative AI. But looking at data, it seems the one piece of the puzzle missing is actual cost. …
But if you use the $100 a month Claude Max plan, and you would use it to the weekly limit by going full ‘agentic coding’ (so almost no human in the loop) you would use an amount of tokens that would cost you more than $1000 at API-pricing.
If I watch 600 movies every day on my netflix subscription I am using more energy than I pay them for. Obviously everyone is like me. Therefore they are losing money overall.
Wait, their (netflix) earnings say they made a profit last quarter. But my calculations were waterproof!
Probably anthropic are not net positive, but they are not spending 10x what people pay them for tokens.
Except that you would need 50 devices to do that and the most expensive Netflix plan only lets you stream up to 4 devices at a time. Considering the average 2 hours per movie, that’s 48 movies per day. That’s without mentioning that you’d need to automate this because you’d be asleep for 8 of those 24 hours.
The point is, your analogy doesn’t work. There’s no reason why someone would do what you’re describing and it’d also be very hard to do.
Using up all of your tokens though? Just use agentic coding, set the ““thinking”” to max and you’ll ser how quickly and easily you can burn through them. Share your account and you’ll burn them even faster.
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If I watch 600 movies every day on my netflix subscription I am using more energy than I pay them for. Obviously everyone is like me. Therefore they are losing money overall.
Wait, their (netflix) earnings say they made a profit last quarter. But my calculations were waterproof!
Probably anthropic are not net positive, but they are not spending 10x what people pay them for tokens.
I mean it’s not very hard to use up your Claude Max plan, but I find it hard to believe a majority of users do so consistently.
Except that you would need 50 devices to do that and the most expensive Netflix plan only lets you stream up to 4 devices at a time. Considering the average 2 hours per movie, that’s 48 movies per day. That’s without mentioning that you’d need to automate this because you’d be asleep for 8 of those 24 hours.
The point is, your analogy doesn’t work. There’s no reason why someone would do what you’re describing and it’d also be very hard to do.
Using up all of your tokens though? Just use agentic coding, set the ““thinking”” to max and you’ll ser how quickly and easily you can burn through them. Share your account and you’ll burn them even faster.