Architect for the Cost Floor, Not the Promo Price

There's a number making the rounds: Claude Code at $200/month is reportedly consuming roughly $5,000 in compute. And if you're building AI agent infrastructure right now, it changes how you should think about design decisions. The Subsidy Trap When a core dependency is heavily subsidized, you get distorted incentives. Teams make architectural choices that only make sense at today's prices. Token-heavy workflows. Redundant context refetches. Agents that pull full file trees when they need two lines. This isn't stupidity - it's rational behavior under current pricing signals.