Moreover, if you spend that much on tokens, that sounds like a skill issue and you may be creating a lot of technical debt. I don’t see how anyone can have the brain capacity to handle enormous code bases.

(Sidebar: There is a prediction that the traditional roles of Designer, Product Owner and Programmer are disappearing and converging into one single specialized role. (Claude Code has a blog about this) and I feel there is truth in this.)

So, my runrate right now is ~$4,200 per year, but I won't be surprised if it goes up. It depends on several factors.

I cannot imagine productively spending $250k/year on LLM coding - you'd need some kind of massive tree of agents reviewing each other's work and I think even then you would struggle to keep them on-task and sanity-checked. However, I don't make $500k a year so what do I know...