Hearing my "before I die" math and code ambitions, a psychiatrist friend tried to convince me to hire a full-time programming assistant. Then came AI.

Money is relative. I retired at less than the average professor salary (all ages) at a not-rich school. I would have made more in tech. I still have weeks where the market goes up 2000x my AI budget, just the retirement savings from my salary. Anyone who isn't living in a van and eating peanut butter if they must, to save the max toward retirement, isn't recognizing how profoundly our system is rigged to favor saving.

When you consider the cross section of the tech community posting on HN, is it really that surprising?

It’s mad for sure, but I’d bet 99.9% of people spending money on AI aren’t spending their own hard earned sooo… “YOLO it’s a business expense/investment”…

$200 for Claude, $50 to Open AI, and maybe $100 for Openrouter, and a second Claude account paid by a client... Likely to increase.

It easily pays for itself 10x over.

I had a similar opinion a couple of years ago, content with more of an autocomplete.

Now I'm happy with agents as the models and harnesses have improved significantly but the token usage comes at a cost.

some are spending 100/day or even 1000/day. they must really be mad :)

To get the equivalent of a junior developer that would cost $80,000/yr + benefits?

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