Dev's token usage jumps 100x to 5B/day as multi-agent swarms go mainstream

gleech · x · 2026-09-27

Developer Florian Brandt reports his personal token usage grew from under 100M to over 5B tokens/day in six months using only open models, likely exceeding 10B/day by year's end. He credits more reliable models running unattended for hours, more experimentation, and early multi-agent swarms. Swarms shine on data work and broad research via agent-to-agent communication; open SOTA models can maintain persistent subagent fleets. He sees wall-clock time as the new scaling axis and notes "time pressure" emerging as a penalty theme in model outputs.

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