alt Hacker NewsYC's Garry Tan uses AI agents so much, he spends up to $200K a year on tokens
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As many others have said, that's not even slightly impressive. Someone maxing out a single claude ultra plan on opus 5.5 is already doing ~$160k+ per year if the massively inflated API prices are used. I personally have 5 and the only thing stopping me getting more is concern about being banned, I could easily double my usage if it was safe and convenient. Hell, I could probably 10x it or more.
Once you make the jump to agents managing agents the only limit is your budget and your harness's ability to coordinate. We'll all be using far more tokens than this in a year or two.
I can't recall software being conspicuous consumption until the advent of the AI token. Maybe the first "I am rich" app in the app store for $999.
For a normal person outside the Startup world this news is super confusing and frustrating while most people who already use ai heavily think this is nothing and they are surprised by the fact that he is not even spending that much!
> he’s suffered from “cyber psychosis” and sometimes barely sleeps
Sleep is one of the most important things in the world. Why not have the agents work while you sleep?
Someone needs to tell this guy about the subscriptions
YC seems big on quantitative metrics. Is there anything that says he is more efficient than 3 or 4 years ago. Is YC as a whole?
I cannot even comprehend how someone spends that much without realizing you can just buy GPUs.
He’s gotta pump those numbers up, those are rookie numbers in this racket
Might make sense for him to invest in hosting his own models locally. Prices are only gonna keep going up.
the question is not spend it's outcome.
what has he produced with that?
As someone who has only ever used these free AI agents and who is not a software developer or computer scientist by trade, could someone please explain the concepts of tokens and their worth and harnesses and what exactly all of those things accomplish?
This figure really depends on whether it's API rates or actual spend. One Claude Ultra subscription ($2400/year) gives you nearly $100k a year in tokens if fully utilized.
> As an early OpenClaw adopter who is now a power user, Tan says one thing he’s learned is not to treat AI agents like traditional software. Some people are so worried about “repeatability and safety that they actually trade off all of the beautiful parts of working with an AI agent, which basically can be so similar to a human,” he said.
This is insane. He's turning the failure of his AI assistants to do what he wants every single time and to do it in a safe manner into a positive thing. Failure as a positive!
Anyone worked out the carbon footprint of that ?
An employee uses 200k of electricity. Do we fire or promote him?
> ...his agent also helps him run his life. “It’s read all of my email and all of my Dropbox. It’s read, like, all of my Apple Notes, even my therapy notes going back 20 years”.
> He describes using AI agents as getting help with “almost anything that you do in your day-to-day life. (...) Almost anything you want to do, it knows you, and it’s there to help. And it will actually sort of run ahead and say, ‘What about this?’ Or it’ll help you see around corners.”
Wow, impressive. Both the capabilities and how much he's willing to share.
Is it worth $17k per month? For me, absolutely not. But people spend more on luxurious cars and such, so if you've got money to spare...
> Y Combinator is also using an agent that is “rebuilding the way we operate at YC. We now have an internal AI agent, for instance, named Stray Light that kind of has a personality, and then it has a company brain. It actually has the total context of every founder we’ve ever backed, anyone who’s ever emailed us, like all the applications.”
Holy anthropomorphization. But besides that, what's the goal of doing this? Keeping a handy overview of when and why someone said something?
Interesting he doesn't get free accounts?
So what has he shipped - let me guess - nothing of wrong.
Come on. If you have a Claude Max 20x plan ($200/month) you're massively subsidized and your API cost is anywhere from $5000-14000 per month.
(Figures vary, see e.g. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/christham_4-weeks-on-claude-2... for $13,700/mo.)
If you hit your limits on two Max 20x plans, you could very well be exceeding $300k/yr in token use at current API rates.
His tools, gstack, are 360K lines of code. That's probably a lot of tokens and context.
git clone https://github.com/garrytan/gstack
cd gstack/
git ls-files | xargs wc -lThat's only 1 SWE or half with sloppy results.
What does he have to show for it? It helps him out to do research, seems like an expensive helper.
Kind of low isn't it?
I love that the world’s dumbest guys all get up and pay the computer to tell them they’re big special boys then publicly say stuff like “my brain is bad in a video games way”
> he’s suffered from “cyber psychosis” and sometimes barely sleeps
I wonder how many of those agents get lost in a loop and just uses tokens, asking the same questions over and over and responding and asking
Headline aside, I agree with him wholeheartedly that the future of AI is personal agents, and that costs have to come down for that to happen.
Not cloud costs, though; consumer costs. These agents must run on-device for privacy protections, because anything less will be a global non-starter. That means we need models that excel on phones, tablets, laptops, and desktops; we need home compute modules to run larger, “frontier”-class models for bigger tasks but without guzzling electricity (the Mac Mini’s power envelope is an ideal target); we need smart harnesses that can foist off inference to bigger models elsewhere on your private network of devices as needed without the user prompting for specific thinking modes or model names. All of this has to happen automatically, privately, securely, without leaking data to advertisers or surveillance companies.
It’s hard work, but it’s definitely the future of AI. I would argue the business case is solved with being able to build bespoke stacks of kit and run models through neocloud providers with ZDR policies. It’s the consumer angle that’s hard to crack, because everyone wants a repeat of Web 2.0 for ad-dollars instead of a privacy-centric modern tech stack that forces companies into lower revenue streams.
hmm isn't that the job of a concierge, or an assistant ?
"Do my job, make no mistakes"
That's basically gstack
I spend that much at API rates with a couple subscriptions
he just needs to put the finishing touches on g-stack and then programming will be solved. just another $50k will do it i think!
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Just 200k a year? If this amount is for some folks news worthy get a reality check.
The common trope is, "keep an eye on what the rich want."
Gary is rich. Let's assume now, he spends between $10-20K/month USD on tokens. Whether he gets overwhelming tangible value out of that token spend is immaterial.
What he's getting out of it is a mix of social signaling value and actual perceived productivity. I don't know, but I doubt he has measuring the ROI on the token investment.
Much like someone gets various kinds of value out of a a personal tutor for their child. Or a high powered executive who continues to request budget for a "Chief of Staff" and related personnel in 2026.
The question is whether this is signal, or noise. Will everyone who has the budget aspire to spend money on tokens as a subtle way of projecting value with some tangible benefit? How long of a runway does this have?
Much like a Chief of Staff office, there's more to manage...but you you get some tangible benefit by having people to whom you can [in theory] delegate tasks and trust they will be completed. To some degree none of this matters, value is in the eye of the beholder.
What a time to be alive. Rich people continue to spend money with abandon, just on different things.
Edit: I work at technology company. If I were spending $10-20K/month USD in tokens I would immediately get flagged by Finance and receive a note from my EVPs Chief of Staff/Business Admin. My usage and prompts would get audited and I would be asked to create a report justifying the business impact of the spend.
The thing is, it's not actually that hard to spend at that kind of rate.
I wouldn't say this was the norm, but I have burned through £1k of tokens in a couple of days before. And, on that same gig, I realised a test I was considering running would burn £2.5k worth of tokens over the course of a few hours so spent a couple of hours of my own time re-engineering it to get that down to £150.
The point is that I don't necessarily know that spending a shitload of money on tokens really tells us anything useful. If he's getting a return on that investment, fine, whatever.
Obviously most of us couldn't afford to spend that much ourselves, no matter how much value it might deliver, and many of our employers wouldn't be too happy if we spent it on their dime either. Equally, if you can, and it's delivering real value, then I don't see why you wouldn't?