{"slug": "i-tracked-2-86-billion-ai-coding-tokens-here-s-what-a-commit-actually-costs", "title": "I tracked 2.86 billion AI coding tokens. Here's what a commit actually costs.", "summary": "A developer built Centrail, a CLI tool that reads local usage from AI coding agents and ties each token and dollar to the Git commit it produced, then syncs the results to a team dashboard. Pointed at the developer's own AI-assisted work, it tracked 2.86 billion tokens and $4,099 in AI spend across 944 commits, yielding a cost of $4.34 per shipped commit. The tool also estimates the energy, water and CO2 behind each token using a public methodology.", "body_md": "Every team I talk to is paying for Claude Code, Copilot, Codex or all three. Almost none of them can answer a simple question: **what did that AI spend actually ship?**\n\nThe provider invoice tells you how many tokens you bought. It doesn't tell you which commits those tokens turned into. So I built a tool that does, and pointed it at my own work first.\n\nHere's everything Centrail has tracked on my own AI-assisted development so far:\n\n| Metric | Total | \n|---|---|\n| Tokens | 2.86 billion | \n| AI spend | $4,099 | \n| Commits | 944 | \n| Cost per commit | **$4.34** | \n\n\"We spend $X a month on AI\" is a budget line. \"$4.34 per shipped commit\" is a unit cost you can actually manage. Once you have it, you can ask better questions:\n\nCentrail runs where the work happens, on your machine, not at the invoice level. The CLI reads local usage from your AI coding agents and ties each token and dollar to the Git commit it produced. That syncs to a dashboard, so the whole team or organization stays up to date on real AI metrics automatically. Nobody has to update a spreadsheet.\n\nIt also estimates the energy, water and CO2 behind every token, with a public methodology, because AI's footprint is a cost too.\n\nWhat does a commit cost on your team? If you don't know, I'd love to hear how you're thinking about AI spend in the comments.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-tracked-2-86-billion-ai-coding-tokens-here-s-what-a-commit-actually-costs", "canonical_source": "https://dev.to/centrail/i-tracked-286-billion-ai-coding-tokens-heres-what-a-commit-actually-costs-3745", "published_at": "2026-09-24 17:46:04+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-09-24 17:59:14.109793+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-tools", "developer-tools", "mlops", "ai-infrastructure"], "entities": ["Centrail", "Claude Code", "GitHub Copilot", "Codex", "Git"], "also_reported_by": [], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-tracked-2-86-billion-ai-coding-tokens-here-s-what-a-commit-actually-costs", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-tracked-2-86-billion-ai-coding-tokens-here-s-what-a-commit-actually-costs.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-tracked-2-86-billion-ai-coding-tokens-here-s-what-a-commit-actually-costs.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-tracked-2-86-billion-ai-coding-tokens-here-s-what-a-commit-actually-costs.jsonld"}}