this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2026
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"What did it cost?"
"The yearly energy consumption of a median household and $1,000"
Don't forget the water usage
It depends on the size / complexity of what they're trying to port, of course, but it's not at all unusual for a programmer to be the main income source for a median household and to take a year on a project. Or, be a member of a 5-10 programmer team that takes 2-4 years to develop a project. In a "butts in seats" office world like we mostly had before 2020, that was a LOT of commute miles driven to make that software, way more than $1000, and energy consumption for the households and the offices and their HR, accounting and other administrative overhead...
Counting energy consumption by a programmer's children as a cost of code generation? That's the most capitalist thing I've read in a month!
Not acknowledging the costs of a programmer's children is the ultimate late stage capitalism.
Yes but how many billable hours did they get for this 320-minute ordeal?
Spending $1000 on transportation costs commuting to and from work over a span of 2-4 years is completely different from burning through $1000 dollars of tokens in a single workday.
Especially if the boss now demands the same amount of output from you every day as the new normal.
And that's not to mention how the energy and water consumption happens on a much shorter timescale than the drawn out one you needed to cite to make it seem comparable.
Aggregate, because they're courting billions of potential users, the energy and water consumption of AI agents is concerning.
One project? For a continuous 320-minute (5.33-hour) project using Anthropic's Claude Fable, the estimated electricity consumption ranges from 203.2 Wh to 406.4 Wh, while the associated water consumption ranges between 0.39 Liters and 0.77 Liters. https://www.computing.co.uk/news/2026/ai/new-dashboard-estimates-energy-consumption-of-claude-gpt-and-gemini
It takes about 100-150ml of diesel fuel to generate 406 Wh of electricity, you'd be lucky to get an efficient commuter car to travel even 3 miles on that much fuel, and the driver will consume more than 0.77 liters of water during a day, especially if they take a shower.
The growth has been explosive, and the newly added datacenter capacity isn't being done well or sustainably in a lot of cases, but if you assume that OP's job could be done well with assistance from Fable if he put in 10x the effort, that's still likely to land on the net lower impact to the environment than if he commuted to an office for a week to do the same.
The real question, even before LLM "AI", is: is this a job worth doing? Right now, a lot of people are "playing" with AI doing things they never could attempt before. Some small fraction of that is useful - how small is the question, and how long before we slow down on the frivolous uses?
320 minutes of wall clock time on Fable tells you nothing, cost could be anywhere from $2 to $2000.
I'm not much of a gambling man myself, but you do you
My bet is the whole story is fabricated. It's very plausible, but lacking any real detail.
Jesus Christ.