Without saying that I think LLMs are alive, I do think it matters. I have personally been cruel to an LLM in ways that would make me ashamed if I suddenly understand that it had feelings.
It all depends on the model and how much you use it of course. We're running Opus 4.6 and on a light day it spends a dollar or two. This is just a few simple operations like "create a ticket for ..." and it's regular heartbeat checks. The heaviest day I see is $110 and on that day we were basically talking to it and having it implement features all day long.
It's all about how full the context is, right? For a task that can be completed in 20% of the context it doesn't matter, but you don't want to fill your context with exploration before you do the hard part.
I have actually found something close to the opposite. I work on a large codebase and I often use the LLM to generate artifacts before performing the task (for complex tasks). I use a prompt to say "go explore this area if the code and write about it". It documents concepts and has pointers to specific code. Then a fresh session can use that without reading the stuff that doesn't matter. It uses more tokens overall, but includes important details that can get totally missed when you just let it go.
I think that's partly the point. This is the tool that everyone wanted but couldn't quite describe. Not saying he's a genius, but he was the first to will it into existence.
I think the rationale is that with the right tools you can move much faster, and not burn everything to the ground, than just rawdogging Claude. If you haven't bothered setting up extra tools you may still be faster / better than old you, but not better than the you that could be. I'm not preaching, that's just the idea.
> That is not software engineering or development, it's brogrammer trash.
Yes, but it's working. I'm still reading the code and calling out specific issues to Claude, but it's less and less.
I think it also presumes that the skills of today won't be helpful in making you better, faster, stronger at knowing what to learn tomorrow. Skateboarding ain't snowboarding but I guarantee the experience helps.