It's surprisingly easy to hit $200 worth of tokens even at ~$1/M token though. No matter how many times I do the math the coding plans are the better value.

I don't think it surprisingly easy at all unless you are running multiple background tasks overnight, I think Gemini will eventually be the default agentic coding agent in the future when it comes to price and efficiency because its backed by sound money.

I don't use the Claude Code harness, grep instead of using a combination of vector search is super expensive and not sure how their read file implementation is. I built my own harness for example that restrict reads and writes in a token efficient manner. Building your own harness will always be the cheapest option in the long run.

My own harness, minimalistic GUI gets the job done nothing too fancy https://slidebits.com/isogen