alt Hacker NewsTokens are insanely cheap at the moment. Through OpenRouter a message to Sonnet costs about $0.001 cents or using Devstral 2512 it's about $0.0001. An extended coding session/feature expansion will cost me about $5 in credits. Split up your codebase so you don't have to feed all of it into the LLM at once and it's a very reasonable.
Replies
Agentic tasks use up a huge amount of tokens compared to simple chatting. Every elementary interaction the model has with the outside world (even while doing something as simple as reading code from a large codebase) is a separate "chat" message and "response", and these add up very quickly.
You’d have to ignore the massive investor ROI expectations or somehow have no capability to look past “at the moment”.
>$0.001 cents
$0.001 (1/10 of a cent) or 0.001 cents (1/1000 of a cent, or $0.00001)?
It cost me ~$750 to find a tricky privilege escalation bug in a complex codebase where I knew the rough specs but didn't have the exploit. There are certainly still many other bugs like that in the codebase, and it would cost $100k-$1MM to explore the rest of the system that deeply with models at or above the capability of Opus 4.6.
It's definitely possible to do a basic pass for much less (I do this with autopen.dev), but it is still very expensive to exhaustively find the harder vulnerabilities.