I realize the subscription rates are running at a loss for the LLM providers, but… costs are also dropping. Anyway, the Claude $200 per month subscription rate is more tokens than I could practically use doing heavy software engineering 40 hours a week. If I saturated it with jobs around the clock I could use up all the tokens in the $200/month subscription in about a week, but that’s 168 hours. Working a 40 hour schedule, even at 4.33 weeks per month that’s only 173 hours… I’d hope people spend at least 5 hours a month doing something besides babysitting their LLM console.

Now, one way to burn tokens at an epic rate is to launch multiple projects in parallel, three or even four sessions open at one time working on different things, or possibly different aspects of the same thing. That’s also a good way to completely lose the picture of what the LLM is building and have no idea how a thing works when it gets done. I’m sure there are plenty of software development houses trying to “optimize” their workforce this way - I suspect their risks are… significant.