> I'm convinced that most of those folks and their elaborate workflows aren't really for productivity but for bragging rights about how much they use AI.

This is quite the reductive, charged statement. Can I ask what subscription plan you're using?

My personal experience is unlike this at all-- I work on ever-expanding codebases so I can easily burn tokens. Not to mention, structured agentic coding with adverserial reviews & task organization is not token-efficient. Additionally, for the problems I'm working on, only xhigh or high reasoning gives me worthwhile results while saving time. There are definitely configurations where default consumption doesn't work.

For reference, I used 15 billion tokens (most of it cached) last month on my day job's enterprise plan. That doesn't include my personal plans' usage.