3 ms·

I looked at our anthropic bill this week. Saw that one of our best engineers was spending $300/day on Claude. Leadership was psyched about it.

pydry 1y ago
I was told that I wasnt using it enough by one arm of the company and that I was spending too much by another. Meanwhile, try as I might I couldnt prevent it from being useless. I know of no better metaphor than that of what it's like being a developer in 2025.
merlincorey 1y ago
Claude is making $72k a year for a consistent $300/day spend.
- PhantomHour 1y ago
  Bear in mind those are revenue figures, they're costing claude hundreds a day. One imagines Leadership won't be so pleased after the inevitably price hike (which, given the margins software uses, is going to be in the 1-3 thousands a day) and the hype wears off enough for them to realize they're spending a full salary automating a partial FTE.
  - ojosilva 1y ago
    But, by the looks of things, models will be more efficient by then and a cheaper-to-run model will produce comparable output. At least that's how it's been with OSS models, or with the Openai api model. So maybe the inevitable price hike (or rate limiting) may lead to switching models / providers and the results being just as good.
    - krainboltgreene 1y ago
      > But, by the looks of things, models will be more efficient by then and a cheaper-to-run model will produce comparable output So far there's negative evidence of this. Things are getting more expensive for similar outputs.
      - etoxin 1y ago
        And this varies widely between models based on how they are told to reason.
    - racc1337 1y ago
      There is an interesting substack post about this. LLM costs are dropping 10x/year but the amount of tokens used have gone up like crazy https://open.substack.com/pub/ethanding/p/ai-subscriptions-get-short-squeezed?r=6e7vnk&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false https://open.substack.com/pub/ethanding/p/ai-subscriptions-g...
protocolture 1y ago
Is he using it to code or just chatting up his AI girlfriend.
- sdesol 1y ago
  Joking aside, if he is one of the top developers in the company and if he is "actually" a good developer, when compared to others outside of the company, then I can see this bill. The current feature that I'm working on, required 100 messages to finalize things and I would say the context window was around 35k - 50k per "chat completion". My model of choice is Gemini 2.5 Flash which has an input cost of $0.30/1M. Compare this to Sonnet which is $3.00/1M. If the person was properly designing and instructing the LLM to build something advanced correctly, I can see the bill being quite high. I personally don't think you need to use Sonnet 99% of the time, but if somebody else is willing to pay the bill, why not.
  - mlnj 1y ago
    Meanwhile an entire lake has evaporated in Northern Canada to deliver me a slightly different version of yet another payment options page.
    - protocolture 1y ago
      Awesome. That must be on the same planet where 300% of the worlds power goes to processing a single bitcoin transaction.

pydry 1y ago

I was told that I wasnt using it enough by one arm of the company and that I was spending too much by another. Meanwhile, try as I might I couldnt prevent it from being useless. I know of no better metaphor than that of what it's like being a developer in 2025.

merlincorey 1y ago

Claude is making $72k a year for a consistent $300/day spend.

PhantomHour 1y ago
Bear in mind those are revenue figures, they're costing claude hundreds a day. One imagines Leadership won't be so pleased after the inevitably price hike (which, given the margins software uses, is going to be in the 1-3 thousands a day) and the hype wears off enough for them to realize they're spending a full salary automating a partial FTE.
- ojosilva 1y ago
  But, by the looks of things, models will be more efficient by then and a cheaper-to-run model will produce comparable output. At least that's how it's been with OSS models, or with the Openai api model. So maybe the inevitable price hike (or rate limiting) may lead to switching models / providers and the results being just as good.
  - krainboltgreene 1y ago
    > But, by the looks of things, models will be more efficient by then and a cheaper-to-run model will produce comparable output So far there's negative evidence of this. Things are getting more expensive for similar outputs.
    - etoxin 1y ago
      And this varies widely between models based on how they are told to reason.
  - racc1337 1y ago
    There is an interesting substack post about this. LLM costs are dropping 10x/year but the amount of tokens used have gone up like crazy https://open.substack.com/pub/ethanding/p/ai-subscriptions-get-short-squeezed?r=6e7vnk&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false https://open.substack.com/pub/ethanding/p/ai-subscriptions-g...

protocolture 1y ago

Is he using it to code or just chatting up his AI girlfriend.

sdesol 1y ago
Joking aside, if he is one of the top developers in the company and if he is "actually" a good developer, when compared to others outside of the company, then I can see this bill. The current feature that I'm working on, required 100 messages to finalize things and I would say the context window was around 35k - 50k per "chat completion". My model of choice is Gemini 2.5 Flash which has an input cost of $0.30/1M. Compare this to Sonnet which is $3.00/1M. If the person was properly designing and instructing the LLM to build something advanced correctly, I can see the bill being quite high. I personally don't think you need to use Sonnet 99% of the time, but if somebody else is willing to pay the bill, why not.
- mlnj 1y ago
  Meanwhile an entire lake has evaporated in Northern Canada to deliver me a slightly different version of yet another payment options page.
  - protocolture 1y ago
    Awesome. That must be on the same planet where 300% of the worlds power goes to processing a single bitcoin transaction.