I assume proper coders use these AI tools for very specific coding needs, providing short requests and a few dozen lines of code back and forth. But to paraphrase Blaise Pascal, "I don't know how to write a short request, so I wrote long ones instead". Apologies...
My process is to feed ChatGPT4 via the Chatai web page my requests, using plain english, and showing it my (probably) small python program I'm writing (well, actually it's not so much me writing it as me directing it). It then provides those long-winded answers that, despite my imploring it not to, result in my browser tab eventually grinding to a halt and requiring killing/recreating. But it does at least give me the code I asked for.
So yesterday I tried aider, and paid $20 for the API token approach. Which was great, except that after about 6 hours, I'd used up the entire $20. I don't care about the $20, I'm not stingy, but I had expected it to last a lot longer going by other's experiences I've read about in here.
But perhaps that's normal and $20/day, or $600/month, isn't a lot if youre getting paid to write code. But I'm doing it as a retired guy hobby, so this approach really isn't practical.
While I can undoubtedly find ways to shorten responses etc, I think in general the high consumption of tokens is due to my non-programmer's approach of giving it my entire code (all 8 python files of 100 lines), and conversationally developing features and fixing bugs in a generalist manner.
Am I right in my guesss?