alt Hacker News...pay for API tokens and adjust your use of CC so that the actions you have it take are worth the cost of the tokens
Do you feel there is enough visibility and stability around the "Prompt -> API token usage" connection to make a reliable estimate as to what using the API may end up costing?
Personally, it feels like paying for Netflix based on "data usage" without having anyway for me to know ahead of time how much data any given episode or movie will end up using, because Netflix is constantly changing the quality/compression/etc on the fly.
Time is a relatively good proxy for spend. There are also more ex post diagnostics like count and cost it can write to the status line.
I agree that ex ante it’s tough, and they could benefit from some mode of estimation.
Perhaps we can give tasks sizes, like T shirts? Or a group of claudes can spend the first 1M tokens assigning point values to the prospective tasks?