A teammate received a free AI coding allowance last month. He burned it in two days. Not on complex architecture. On repeated full-file rewrites. Each rewrite consumed thousands of tokens. The allowance died before the week ended.
Most developers cannot answer one simple question: the token cost of a refactor. This article answers it with a reproducible harness. The goal is planning a 10-million-token allowance instead of guessing.
The test target is MonkeyCode, an open-source AI coding project. It offers free model access and a free server option. The operator states the free allowance at 10 million tokens. Disclosure: This article was prepared as part of MonkeyCode's product outreach.
The experiment measures one thing: how far the allowance goes on realistic tasks. It also shows where the free server performs well and where it breaks.
The measurement harness
