It's pretty simple. There are things that I do because it's fun, like gamedev. I hand code that, and don't use LLM tools because I like learning and building. I do lots of utility stuff coding for my wife's business, most of that is stuff I could do in a few hours. It's worth $20 to not spend a few hours doing it. It's a cost benefit tradeoff. I won't learn much fixing WordPress themes or adding a feature to her web page, or setting up an automation for her, so I don't see the point of doing that.

Same thing for stuff at work. Oh, the tables/schema changed and my queries broke? I could dork around with spark and cypher for an hour, or I can tell claude to update the queries for the new schema. At the rate I am paid, spending on Claude tokens is generally a better use of my resources.

Building a net new solution? Coding tools take a back seat until I get the core logic right, then I let automation handle web page and UI scaffolding.

A lot of people spend $20 on a hobby for an hour of enjoyment a couple times a week. Not odd at all to do that for a few hours of coding if you find it fun. It could be a day pass at a bouldering gym or a yoga class or amortized running shoes/garmin/electrolytes.

Yeah we're all doing this from our Super Yachts that performs Marine Biology research in its spare time.

Is spending $20 considered "super rich"?

$20 is really cheap for the amount of work saved, considering you're in the US.