alt Hacker NewsI find that "vibe coders" (that is, people who do not know anything about programming, but nevertheless produce useful tools for themselves and others) are using a lot more tokens than we do as programmers.
I think this is partially because we're still attached to pre-LLM notions of architecture, good design and code quality (which are still important, but maybe less important than they once were and that we think they are), partially because their projects are in a messy state, so models have to work around the technical dept.
They're essentially trading off programmer time for LLM time (which is a good trade financially speaking).
I think this is valid now, but not guaranteed to be valid forever. For engineers, there was a period where more checks, more tests, more auto code reviews improved results quite a bit. People were consuming tokens like crazy (including me). Then things improved via better effort/thinking levels, where you could see repeated code reviews plateaued, so now people don't really do that quite as much.
There was also a period where specifically OpenAI models would always have to comment something in code review and the builders were agreeable up to listening to each nitpick. If you'd have a loop of build->review->build->review, it would take maybe 5-7 rounds for it to 'settle' and not find the smallest nitpicks to argue about. Tried it this week with Astra reviewer and it's about 0-2 review loops (never had a LLM accept a change without nitpicking first try before Astra).
There was also a period where you'd have to give quite specific instructions for agents to keep iterating, but now agent are pretty proactive and try to finish tasks you give them unsurprisingly most of the time.
So, while there's a shortcoming of LLM+harness and engineers observe more tokens improve things even logarithmicly, you'll see more tokens seemingly abused by engineers.