To the moon
7.3 billion tokens, a month of coding agents, and the high you can't quite come down from.
Last month I burned 7.3 billion tokens and a little over five thousand dollars on coding agents. Twenty-five thousand prompts in thirty days, more than three thousand on a single Saturday. In one two-week stretch I merged 47 pull requests.
To the moon. Not a coin pumping — a rocket, actually climbing.
It felt like magic.
There were days I had four or five agents running at once and watched a week of work land in an afternoon. Things that would have been weeks of careful work for a team of good engineers — a service ported to a new language, moved onto new infrastructure — I picked up on a Monday and had merged and deployed by Thursday. Not because the work was easy. Because the typing was no longer the slow part.
Deep in a bug I’d been chasing for hours, the thing finally cracked open and I caught myself typing into the channel, all caps, I THINK I FOUND IT. And once, hitting merge on something big before I was really ready — half trusting it, half just unable to wait — I typed leap of faith and let it go.
That’s the word for it. Faith. The gap between I wonder if and it works had nearly closed, and I could hold an idea in my head and watch it become real before I lost the thread. You don’t run three thousand prompts on a Saturday because someone is making you. You do it because it feels like flying, and for the first time the sky isn’t the limit.
But here’s the part nobody mentions about climbing this high.
You stop thinking about syntax. You stop thinking about the loop, the off-by-one, the import you forgot. All of that drops away, and what’s left is the harder layer underneath — is this the right design, is this the right tradeoff, is this even the right problem. That used to be a slice of the day. Now it’s the whole day, with no mechanical stretches in between to rest in.
And it never lets up. Five agents running at once means five things finishing at once, each one turning back to you with the same question: is this right? Everything wants your attention, all the time, and you are the only one who can give it.
Late one night, half as a joke, I went looking for proof that I was crushing it — some number that would tell me I’d gotten faster, sharper, better.
What I found was quieter. I hadn’t gotten smarter. I’d just stopped stopping. I never decided to — it arrived one and what if…? at a time.
Part of it was the ecstasy, the high of watching things come true. Part of it was the fear that if I stepped away, the wave would move on without me. Either way I kept going. It isn’t grit that keeps you up there past everyone else. It’s that you stop noticing you should come down.
I don’t have a neat ending for this. I’m still up here.
The next idea is already loading before this one finishes, and the one after that, and the feeling — the real, vertiginous feeling — is that there’s nothing I couldn’t try tonight if I just don’t stop.
So, to the moon?
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