Engineer's real numbers: 20B tokens in 4 months, agents still beat hiring by a mile
thechrisperry · x · 2026-10-27
Allen Hutchison shares a firsthand cost breakdown of agent-based coding. Running ccusage over every Claude Code session since May: 20 billion tokens, just under $14,000 at API prices (19B of them cached reads), roughly $30K/year — even tripling to $100K/year is still cheaper than one engineer.
His two-person team merged 657 PRs in 30 days, about $1.50 per PR. Actual spend is far lower than API pricing suggests: two Codex subs at $200/mo, Anthropic Max plus team seats at $550/mo, Greptile $1,500/mo — under $2,300/month total.
Key thesis: when agents are cheap, human attention—not tokens—is the bottleneck; agent triage and review should reserve people for changes needing care, and a bounded service owner scales supervision better than another coder.
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