I also find that it's easy to spend like that, but also easy not to with little impact on productivity. At the current moment I'm stuck with rider + copilot (not ideal), but e.g. using GPT 6.1 luna is really, really cheap, and lots of tasks are quickly and decently dealt with even at lower reasoning levels, (added bonus of having low latency). And that model is so cheap, I can't see a hitting 1500$ at api prices realistically - not even close. But it also depends on the harness and codebase.
I don't have the mental capacity to do a lot of context switching between active work streams, so I'm not doing stuff like leaving a big agent workflow running while doing other things.
All through claude code.