I Spent $78 Learning Why Bash Still Matters in the AI Age

A $78 cup of coffee might be the most expensive ever brewed, but that's what developer Mark Llobrera effectively paid when laziness and an AI tool collided during a recent programming task.

Llobrera tasked Gemini 2.5 Pro, an AI assistant, with processing hundreds of files across multiple directories. As he watched the loading spinner repeatedly appear for each operation, the bill climbed to $26 in just twenty minutes.

"Not great, but not untenable," he thought, until discovering the AI had skipped numerous files. A second attempt raised his bill to $78, with similarly disappointing results.

Then clarity struck. Why use expensive AI calls when a simple one-line Bash command could do the job?

Using a basic "find" command to collect all the data locally before processing it with AI, Llobrera completed the same task in just two minutes at a cost of 78 cents.

"I'd fallen into the trap of thinking that because I could use an AI tool for everything, I should," Llobrera reflected, discovering that understanding a tool's economic model matters as much as knowing its capabilities.