burn-baby-burn: what the token-burning joke actually costs

burn-baby-burn is a joke. It's a small bash script that makes Claude Code or Codex burn a number of tokens you choose, on purpose, for nothing. The README is satire about AI usage leaderboards: "make the CEO see how productive you are." The tokens it burns are real, and so is the bill.

•What it does: sends the same throwaway prompt to Claude Code or Codex in a loop until it has used roughly the number of tokens you asked for. Each call gets one word back: "burned."

•What it costs: cents per run at normal sizes, a few dollars at the maximum it allows. It's still money spent on nothing, or usage pulled from your plan.

•How to stop it: press Ctrl+C. It kills the call in flight and prints what you've spent so far.