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This is great - it's about time someone updated the discourse on LLM energy usage to reflect that coding agents use massively more prompts than occasional questions to ChatGPT Simon estimates that a day of coding agent usage comes out close to the energy needed to run a dishwasher

Simon P. Couch@simonpcouch.com

Whenever I read discourse on AI energy/water use that focuses on the "median query," I can't help but feel misled. Coding agents like Claude Code send hundreds of longer-than-median queries every session, and I run dozens of sessions a day. On my blog: www.simonpcouch.com/blog/2026-01...

Based on estimated costs per query for some of these companies to even break even, I have to admit I expected it to be several orders of magnitude larger. (I guess the costs are mostly in training and hardware?)

Training is expensive and they're all spending like crazy in a desperate race to build the best models on the basis that they think that will win them the market. Which I'm not entirely convinced is well-founded.

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There is no way that any of them are going to "win" the market unless the rest of them all collapse under the weight of their VC debts, because there's several times the amount of capital investment as seems plausibly likely to be eventual market for them.

Incidentally, I do know (from talking to people who provisioned machines for them) that the large models really are several orders of magnitude more expensive to run (and slower, especially in the case of generative ones) than older classifiers. I probably had guessed wrong how expensive those were.

You can imagine how grumpy people who are used to defending a 10ms SLO were when the new models had response times of around 10 *seconds*. (and used a ton of hardware for vastly smaller QPS)