I don’t want a lot for Christmas, there is just one thing I need…

I’m not a materialistic person. I can’t think of the last time I’ve wanted to buy something really badly. I see my friends shelling out for fancy clothes, fancy gizmos, and fancy cars, and I sit in my high tower thinking myself more self-actualised than those phillistines for I, in all my stoic greatness, need only a laptop and a cosy room to be content.

Or so I thought, until I took a week long break from work and started a new side project, and discovered how fantastic Opus 4.5 was at adding rocket fuel to my dev velocity. I’d give it a high level requirement and it would get to work and make it happen.

Indeed, I was performing the much derided ritual of ‘vibe-coding’, where the majority of my time was spent thinking about the desired features, and the majority of keyboard-time was spent commanding Opus to do my bidding, or ask its input to help in my decision making. Occasionally I’d need to step in and course correct but so long as I had an iron grip over the data modelling, everything else just came seamlessly. There was no denying it anymore: coding agents have reached the stage of being some next level sci-fi shit.

It was magical how fast I could move. But like the stereotypical all-powerful magical female character who can kill every single baddie in one go but then passes out immediately afterwards, this magic came at a price. And that price, as an email from Cursor informed me, was about a hundred bucks a day.

OUCH.

I don’t know if I’m stupid and there’s some much better plan I could be on which isn’t so prohibitively expensive, but the bottom line is that I don’t want to stop. I fall back to a cheaper model like Sonnet 4.5 and it doesn’t take long before it starts making dumb decisions or forgetting things and I feel the all-to-familar frustration that’s been endemic to most coding agent interactions thusfar.

No, it must be Opus. But must it be so damn pricey?

So now I sit here with my laptop in a cosy room feeling deep yearning for something quite expensive and it dawns on me that I was never any better than those friends of mine who were already splurging; I simply hadn’t yet found my kryptonite.

100 bucks a day, for 365 days a year makes $36.5K in credits. That’s my christmas wish.