Electricity use of AI coding agents (opens in new tab)

<p><strong><a href="https://www.simonpcouch.com/blog/2026-01-20-cc-impact/">Electricity use of AI coding agents</a></strong></p> Previous work estimating the energy and water cost of LLMs has generally focused on the cost per prompt using a consumer-level system such as ChatGPT.</p> <p>Simon P. Couch notes that coding agents such as Claude Code use <em>way</em> more tokens in response to tasks, often burning through many thousands of tokens of many tool calls.</p> <p>As a heavy Claude C...