> This Rust rewrite would've taken a team of engineers with full-context on the codebase a year of work. With 1 engineer using Fable & closely monitoring Claude Code, we went from start to 100% of the test suite passing on all platforms in 11 days.
This is impressive from a technological standpoint, but it does gloss over the fact that it would have cost $165k in tokens were Bun not part of Anthropic.
The comparison here isn’t completely fair - it would take a small team a year to port it if they spent $0 extra on it.
I’d be interested to see a comparison between spending $165k in 11 days on Claude vs splitting that between 50 people over 11 days for a line-by-line rewrite of the Zig code. I suspect Claude might be faster and therefore cheaper, but maybe not by a lot.
They napkin math is fairly easy to do. One human works around 250 days per year, and if we assume Bay Area salaries we could assume ~300k/y conservatively for a fully loaded cost.
$1200 per day.
Your estimation is 50*11 days so $660,000. That’s 4x what Claude cost.
That’s assuming that you actually get those 50 people to work without blockers, stepping on each other, or other coordination issues. The coordination complexity alone is astounding.
I don’t like it necessarily, but Claude wins here, easily. It’s not close.
Sure, but can we not work out how to make humans more efficient for less money? There are obvious optimizations there that none of us would like to be part of.
Why assume the upper level salary here? Using senior level developers making astronomical salaries for what is a mechanical line-by-line port would be a poor financial decision.
What does the math look like with 25 devs making ~100k and doing it in 22 days? I’m sure you could find a reasonable combination which costs less. And if you’re already paying the devs the salary, it’s basically free (minus the opportunity cost of them not working on other things).
Nonsense. Junior salaries are on the order of $50k in the UK. There's no healthcare to pay, but employer taxes and overheads might be around 30%, so you're talking way under $100k.
> That’s assuming that you actually get those 50 people to work without blockers, stepping on each other, or other coordination issues. The coordination complexity alone is astounding.
This is a question of exceptional management, which needs to be present both in the Claude and human cases, and is scarce. Not everyone given the Claude tokens would be able to deliver the same result.
> I suspect Claude might be faster and therefore cheaper, but maybe not by a lot.
While Jarred used Mythos-class model, some open weights, if they were as capable (certainly, GLM 5.2 looks the part), would have been way, way cheaper than professionals.
Approx costs:
DeepSeek v4 Pro & Mimo v2.5 Pro $3,426 ($2,567 / $600 / $259)
Tencent HY3 $3,892 ($1,180 / $552 / $2,160)
GLM 5.2 $30,016 ($8,260 / $3,036 / $18,720)
Qwen 3.7 Max $37,925 ($14,750 / $5,175 / $18,000)
Claude Opus 4.8 & GPT 5.5 xhigh $82,750 ($29,500 / $17,250 / $36,000)
5.9 billion uncached input tokens, 690 million output tokens, 72 billion cached input token reads.
I did some more sizeable work with GLM 5.2 on Max reasoning (planning and implementing 8 features end to end) and it performed pretty well, but worse than Opus 4.8, with largely the same adversarial agent review loop.
The GLM Coding Plan seems to have lower token limits than the corresponding Anthropic Max subscriptions, but if you had to pay API rates for some LLM to do work somewhat reliably, it's a no brainer (unless you're swimming in money that you can give away and value your time more).
I feel like a core difference is that the AI implementor can get cheaper/faster (and indeed _uniformly_ better), whereas it would be very difficult for the same humans to do so.
Even if this is not the right answer today, it can at the very least serve as a herald of a possible future, no?
$165k won't get you far on salaried engineers. There's every chance that 1 engineer, assuming Anthropic employs them, is on $500k or more. Assuming average of $336k in that pool of 50 engineers, then for 11 days for 50 engineers you've spent $710k[0].
I agree you probably don't need top-dollar bay-area engineers for this, but hardcore outsourcing to a LCOL probably isnt going to work either due to novelty and generally being setup to do the more rote thing (generalizing a ton here obvi). This feels like something in the middle.
What a weird thing to say. The phrase “outsourcing to India” being used as shorthand for “you don’t need top engineers.” The nationality stereotypes are mean and degrading.
And at a macro level, often found to be accurate due to how the businesses in India operate. Poll the west's engineers: you'll find that engineering from India is not currently viewed very favorably, in general.
There are excellent engineers in India, but the system they operate in unfortunately doesn't allow them to shine.
That's fair, I shouldn't have commented that. I don't like the national stereotypes at all - I see "outsource to India" as being more about less expensive engineers than not needing "top engineers".
That said, I don't think "rewrite from one language to another" with inexpensive engineers is a pattern that works. Happy to be proven wrong.
Many of the large enterprises we work for did move software engineering work from HCOL locations in Europe or the US to India, often with disastrous results.
On Teams, channels related to AI are flooded with daily support requests from supposed engineers from India who clearly are not competent enough to set up GitHub Copilot or properly report issues they encounter during the setup.
And don't get me started on the shared libraries some teams located in India work on. If the library I need to use is full of obvious bugs where I wonder how any competent engineer could have shipped this to production, and then I see that the work has been moved to India, how am I supposed to feel about this?
This is impressive from a technological standpoint, but it does gloss over the fact that it would have cost $165k in tokens were Bun not part of Anthropic.
The comparison here isn’t completely fair - it would take a small team a year to port it if they spent $0 extra on it.
I’d be interested to see a comparison between spending $165k in 11 days on Claude vs splitting that between 50 people over 11 days for a line-by-line rewrite of the Zig code. I suspect Claude might be faster and therefore cheaper, but maybe not by a lot.