Role benchmark
Estimate per-engineer token consumption across coding assistants, agents and RAG workflows.
Software engineers are the heaviest individual AI users in the enterprise. Between in-IDE copilots, background agents and codebase RAG, modern engineering teams generate 50M–150M tokens per engineer per year.
Daily interactions
50–60
Tokens / interaction
3,000–7,000
Annual tokens / person
50M – 150M
Recommended seniority default
manager
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Embedded in core workflows. Mixed adoption.
AI-assisted tasks
3 / 3Annual estimate
$15.2K
Total token OpEx for 50 employees · Claude Sonnet 4
Top AI workloads for this role
- AI code generation cost calculator — $30 – $250 per engineer / month.
- AI code review cost calculator — $0.05 – $0.50 per PR.
- AI agent cost calculator — $0.10 – $3.00 per task.
Frequently asked questions
›How many AI tokens does an engineer use per day?
An active engineer using Copilot, Cursor or similar generates 150K–400K tokens per working day, dominated by code context fed into the model.
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