this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2026
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If you've ever spent 10 minutes using an AI agent, you'd know that there's no way to predict how many tokens it's going to use before you give it a task. It can be $0.20 worth sometimes or $20 other times. Or anything, really.
It's only after watching it churn away for a few minutes that you can assume it's gotten stuck and have the option of pulling the plug before the bill gets run up too high. But you need to watch it like a hawk and you need to be the one paying the bill otherwise you're not going to care (e.g. workers using AI at work aren't paying for it, their company is).
I asked the "free" copilot one time to make a 6x6 grid of letters where each row and each colum formed a word in English, and none of the words formed were re-used in the grid.
Copilot chewed on that for about 15 minute and finally gave up and told me I could solve it myself.
Easy way to spend a lot of tokens doing nothing.
Bold of you to assume these old people even engage with the business they claim to own.
Computerphile demonstrated this using copilot(timestamp 20:50), where he created a screensaver sort of thing with just a few prompt back and forth, and that used up 2 million input tokens and 47k output token. That's about $6 to $10 just to create that screensaver.
I'd rather buy a used php book from my local bookstore for $10
i think the ones creating AI videos would be the highest costs.