I still have never hit a ceiling with my Claude Max $100 account, much less the Max $200 account. I'm not burning tokens needlessly, nor running it all day, but I do use CC almost daily. What are these devs doing that they are burning more than $1500 in tokens a month?
Maybe it's just me, but I still find that I really have to "shepherd" the AI and work with it to get the results I want. And I read every line of code added and challenge the model's logic. So that limits my token burning. Maybe these people are just "vibe-coding" without really checking the results?
You are paying account pricing. Uber is paying API pricing.
You're $100/m plan is likely equivalent to thousands of dollars of API pricing. You are being subsidized by the companies using AI.
I would not be surprised if they have engineers vibecoding 2-3 projects each simultaneously, nonstop, on largely un-moderated review-suggest-iterate-test feedback loops.
All the code gets summarized and fed into their manager's agent contexts, probably duplicated several times across levels and departments, with some generated back-and-forth emails pinging around the org chart, eventually generating 2-3 long-winded reports that nobody will read chock full of generated visualizations that can all get consolidated into a generated slide deck that they'll show (maybe, at some point) to a handful of humans with more money than a human brain can conceptualize to demonstrate all of the innovation they're doing.
I am increasingly convinced that many of these companies are dead trees whose only function is to burn money lest it fall into the hands of the peasantry.