Well, it's expensive compared to other models. But it's often much cheaper than human labor.
E.g. if need a self-contained script to do some data processing, for example, Opus can often do that in one shot. 500 line Python script would cost around $1, and as long as it's not tricky it just works - you don't need back-and-forth.
I don't think it's possible to employ any human to make 500 line Python script for $1 (unless it's a free intern or a student), let alone do it in one minute.
Of course, if you use LLM interactively, for many small tasks, Opus might be too expensive, and you probably want a faster model anyway. Really depends on how you use it.
(You can do quite a lot in file-at-once mode. E.g. Gemini 2.5 Flash could write 35 KB of code of a full ML experiment in Python - self-contained with data loading, model setup training, evaluation, all in one file, pretty much on the first try.)
E.g. if need a self-contained script to do some data processing, for example, Opus can often do that in one shot. 500 line Python script would cost around $1, and as long as it's not tricky it just works - you don't need back-and-forth.
I don't think it's possible to employ any human to make 500 line Python script for $1 (unless it's a free intern or a student), let alone do it in one minute.
Of course, if you use LLM interactively, for many small tasks, Opus might be too expensive, and you probably want a faster model anyway. Really depends on how you use it.
(You can do quite a lot in file-at-once mode. E.g. Gemini 2.5 Flash could write 35 KB of code of a full ML experiment in Python - self-contained with data loading, model setup training, evaluation, all in one file, pretty much on the first try.)