Ask HN: How much are you spending on AI coding at work?

Jensen Huang recently said that he thinks an engineer who makes $500k should spend at least $250k a year on “tokens” which is an astounding figure. I personally don’t know how I could spend that much if I tried. Obviously he has a huge financial incentive to convince people that $250k per engineer is reasonable, but it got me thinking that it’s time for a survey.

How much are you and your coworkers spending on AI coding tools at work? I’m talking about Cursor, Claude Code, etc. Not all AI-powered SaaS, just the stuff that’s metered by token.

3 points | by habosa 3 hours ago

3 comments

  • daemonologist 2 hours ago
    $40/month at work and $10/month at home, and it's more than I can use.

    I cannot imagine productively spending $250k/year on LLM coding - you'd need some kind of massive tree of agents reviewing each other's work and I think even then you would struggle to keep them on-task and sanity-checked. However, I don't make $500k a year so what do I know...

  • wallabydesigns 2 hours ago
    It is crazy when I hear how much some people spend on AI! Having an agent cut out some of the boilerplate code is useful, but beyond that, are people just creating a backlog wishlist and then walking away?
  • supernova215 3 hours ago
    About $50 a day