Gartner forecast June 24, 2026: AI coding costs will overtake average developer salary by 2028 due to rising LLM token consumption and shift to consumption-based pricing.
Senior Principal Analyst Nitish Tyagi: bills jumping from 100 to 5,000 per developer per month; extreme cases up to $20,000. Token costs do not vary by geography — in India already equivalent to 4–6 year engineer salary.
Recommendations: task classification (developer-led, developer-with-agent, agent-led), intelligent model routing, context engineering, token thresholds, sprint retrospective reviews. 23% of tech leaders spend 500/dev/month on tokens; 6% pay over $2,000.