Observation: On an api, paying premium rates by the token, I can go through about $6,500 a month, at this point, and be quite happy and productive. It's true.
That's me running two main agent windows, and generating somewhere in the area of 180,000 lines of high quality, fully tested, secure, perfectly reviewed code that's ready to deploy.
I think that, because I pay for this stuff out of pocket, even when I'm contracting, there's a sense of restraint there. I try to balance my spend on inference time, with the best possible process I can manage.
Could I scale that up to use more tokens? Sure. I could add agents to automate more processes, experiment with new things. Make robots dance, design apps and video games that have no reasonable right to exist. And... if I wanted to, I could do it all in the background, so I don't even see what's actually happening.
It would be less than universally helpful, but if tokens are the metric we care about, we are allowed to have a little fun.
You know what else would drive my token count way up? Failure. Yep, actual honest to god failure.
Here's a good case study. Say for example, Anthropic starts lying to me about which version of Claude I'm using again, and I don't catch it, because for whatever reason, I've optimized for maximum productivity over diligence (this does happen), and the agent's been optimized for "if she's not looking, it's not important," and my code starts melting down, because the project is too complex for Claude Haiku 3.5 to understand.
And, say that it's been melting down for a week, because the pull request agent doesn't understand the culture of the project, and hasn't read/fully understood my agents.md file.
And, to make it worse, say... I don't see the problem at all, until poor little Haiku, who's not allowed to acknowledge when it doesn't understand something tries to rebase my repo, and totally nukes my app, and the entire chain of custody that led up to the current state.
Well... I'm right about fucked at that point, and what follows is six windows of cli agents, token counts absolutely exploding, and an unhappy manager as I scramble to make my deadline, as I now have to reconstruct the entire app essentially from scratch.
Yay.
I've now blown through $27,000 in tokens in two weeks, ended up exactly where I started, lost a ton of time, and accomplished net nothing.
But if tokens generated is the metric they're using to judge me... it's been a huge fucking success.