Claude Opus is my current most favorite model. I had a few blissful months of using it. Generated some good PRs, got stuck in debug loops not as many times as with previous models. I ended up extending the spend limit multiple times.

Opus Cocktail Bar, Sofia

After burning through far too many tokens, I had to stop and think. Is my usage really appropriate? Is it worth thinking how much tokens each prompt consumes? Is it because of the MCPs? Why does it make all these API calls to my dev server? How much does all of that even cost? It’s not clear from the dashboard at all.

While I’m rethinking my life’s choices, I switched to Codex and GPT 5.2. I feel like between the 4 AI editors that I have, I may have enough agent time available to last until the end of the billing period.

Being stuck with one option is not ideal. The situation is not like I have to write code without agents but my overuse of Opus is giving me a glimpse into a future where these models may start costing as much as people.