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Whenever I read discourse on AI energy/water use that focuses on the "median query," I can't help but feel misled. Coding agents like Claude Code send hundreds of longer-than-median queries every session, and I run dozens of sessions a day. On my blog: www.simonpcouch.com/blog/2026-01...

Thanks for sharing & it's super interesting to see from someone not at the 'median'! And not to discount what you found but it seems this might be more about the folks who use these tools frequently. And maybe that's worth exploring by itself since more people are using it like you (writing code)

The one that got me was when you said your "median session" was ~150x a "typical query" and then your "typical day" used equivalent of ~4500 "typical queries" Does that mean you have ~30 sessions per day? Let's say they take a conservative 5 minutes of wait per session— that's ~2.5hrs of waiting?

Yep, something like 30. The "2.5hrs of waiting" is where the 2-3 agents at a time comes in, multitasking between agents, but I also wonder whether subagents working in parallel within a session might also drive that "actual time spent waiting" down?

Cool, thanks! Yeah that'd make sense with 'parallel agents'. There is of course the time between waiting for a response on itself ('reasoning/thinking') It makes me think of its usage as 'how much total time & energy used in a day' versus the median or average session.