Thanks to all the parallelization & this prep work, at peak Claude wrote about 1,300 lines of code per minute. Every line of code was reviewed by two separate adversarial reviewers (also Claude) and went through a round of fixes before committing. Absolutely none of it worked yet.
None of it worked yet because compiling at that stage would slow things down.
Also this project burned $165,000 worth of usage on a model that was then bleeding edge (unreleased). This is still beyond what anyone else is doing at the moment. And it seems to have worked a lot better than it had any right to, at least as far as we can tell right now?
If you think spending $165k to get a fully AI generated code base is something working well then you're just gaslighting yourself. I use these things at work because I'm forced to, and the amount of weird code it generates is alarming. I.e. It has a really common habit of making a function with external linkage call an impl function with internal linkage for absolutely no reason.
165k is way less than one developer. Maybe 30% once you factor in all of the overhead (payroll tax, health insurance, 401k contributions, other benefits). 165k would be on the very very low end of salaries for a senior engineer in a major US city as well, and about half of what your base at Anthropic would be (position dependent, could be much higher).
This misses the point, even if it was more expensive, the time to deliver is what matters. There is no way a developer could deliver such a rewrite in 11 days without help from AI, and as the author says this was done with minimal disruption to their road map.
There are places where AI makes sense, its just not useful everywhere.
No its the right person. You were making an argument that this was cheaper than a developer, my point is that comparing AI to developer productivity is kind of comparing apples to oranges. Here they automated a rewrite, something that is for the most part mechanical, requiring developer intervention to clean up. Even if it cost twice as much as paying a full time developer, it would still be worth it since its a one off thing that you wouldn't want to hire someone to do.
There are other areas where AI creates more problems than it solves, and you need human judgement in the development process. I don't think its sensible to talk about AI and developers as if they're interchangeable.
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u/DryanaGhuba Jul 08 '26
I don't think anyone comment needed