Comment by PostOnce
20 days ago
It's amazing that it "works", but viability is another issue.
It cost $20,000 and it worked, but it's also totally possible to spend $20,000 and have Claude shit out a pile of nonsense. You won't know until you've finished spending the money whether it will fail or not. Anthropic doesn't sell a contract that says "We'll only bill you if it works" like you can get from a bunch of humans.
Do catastrophic bugs exist in that code? Who knows, it's 100,000 lines, it'll take a while to review.
On top of that, Anthropic is losing money on it.
All of those things combined, viability remains a serious question.
> You won't know until you've finished spending the money whether it will fail or not.
How do you conclude that? You start off with a bunch of tests and build these things incrementally, why would you spend 20k before realizing there’s a problem?
Because literally no real-world non-research project starts with "we have an extremely comprehensive test suite and specification complete down to the most finite detail" and then searches for a way to turn it into code.
Precisely. Figuring out what the specification is supposed to look like is often the hardest part.
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I’ve spent nearly 20 years working as a consultant writing software, I know that. How do you think humans solve that problem?
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> It cost $20,000
I'm curious - do you have ANY idea what it costs to have humans write 100,000 lines of code???
You should look it up. :)
> > It cost $20,000
> I'm curious - do you have ANY idea what it costs to have humans write 100,000 lines of code???
I'll bite - I can write you an unoptimised C compiler that emits assembly for $20k, and it won't be 100k lines of code (maybe 15k, the last time I did this?).
It won't take me a week, though.
I think this project is a good frame of reference and matches my experience - vibing with AI is sometimes more expensive than doing it myself, and always results in much more code than necessary.
Does it support x64, x8664, arm64 and riscv? (sorry, just trolling - we don't know the quality of backend other than x8664 which is supposed to be able to build bootable linux.)
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> I can write you an unoptimised C compiler that emits assembly for $20k
You may be willing to sell your work at that price, but that’s not the market rate, to put it very mildly. Even 10 times that would be seriously lowballing in the realm of contract work, regardless of whether it’s “optimised” or not (most software isn’t).
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That's irrelevant in this context, because it's not "get the humans to make a working product OR get the AI to make a working product"
The problem is you may pay $20K for gibberish, then try a second time, fail again, and then hire humans.
Coincidentally yes, I am aware, my last contract was building out a SCADA module the AI failed to develop at the company that contracted me.
I'm using that money to finance a new software company, and so far, AI hasn't been much help getting us off the ground.
Edit: oh yeah, and on top of paying Claude to fuck it up, you still have to also pay the salary of the guy arguing with Claude.
> The problem is you may pay $20K for gibberish, then try a second time, fail again, and then hire humans.
You can easily pay humans $20k a day and get gibberish in output. Heck, this happen all the times. This happens right now in multiple companies.
Yes sometime humans produce nice code. This happens from time to time...
You wouldn’t pay a human to write 100k LOC. Or at least you shouldn’t. You’d pay a human to write a working useful compiler that isn’t riddled with copyright issues.
If you didn’t care about copying code, usefulness, or correctness you could probably get a human to whip you up a C compiler for a lot less than $20k.
Are you trolling me? Companies (made of humans) write 100,000 LOC all the time.
And it's really expensive, despite your suspicions.
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> you could probably get a human to whip you up a C compiler for a lot less than $20k
I fork Clang or GCC and rename it. I'll take only $10k.
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If my devs are writing that much code they're doing something wrong. Lines of code is an anti metric. That used to be commonly accepted knowledge.
It really depends on the human and the code it outputs.
I can get my 2y old child to output 100k LoC, but it won't be very good.
Your 2yr old can't build a C compiler in Rust that builds Linux.
Sorry mate, I think you're tripping.
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Well, if these humans can cheat by taking whatever needed degree of liberty in copycat attitude to fit in the budget, I guess that a simple `git clone https://gcc.gnu.org/git/gcc.git SomeLocalDir` is as close to $0 as one can hope to either reach. And it would end up being far more functional and reliable. But I get that big-corp overlords and their wanna-match-KPI minions will prefer an "clean-roomed" code base.
100k lines of clean, bug free, optimized, and vulnerability free code or 100k lines of outsourced slop? Two very different price points.
A compiler that can build linux.
That level of quality should be sufficient.
Do you know any low quality programmers that write C compilers in rust THAT CAN BUILD LINUX?
No you don't. They do not exist.
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> On top of that, Anthropic is losing money on it.
It seems they are *not* losing money on inference: https://bsky.app/profile/steveklabnik.com/post/3mdirf7tj5s2e
no, and that is widely known. the actual problem is that the margins are not sufficient at that scale to make up for the gargantuan training costs to train their SOTA model.
They are large enough to cover their previous training costs but not their next gen training costs.
i.e They made more money on 3.5 than 3.5 cost to train, but didn't make enough money on 3.5 to train 4.0.
Source on that?
Because inference revenue is outpacing training cost based on OpenAI’s report and intuition.
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That's for the API right? The subs are still a loss. I don't know which one of the two is larger.
That's a good point! Here claude opus wrote a C compiler. Outrageously cool.
Earlier today, I couldn't get opus to replace useEffect-triggered-redux-dispatch nonsense with react-query calls. I already had a very nice react-query wrapper with tons of examples. But it just couldn't make sense of the useEffect rube goldberg machine.
To be fair, it was a pretty horrible mess of useEffects. But just another data point.
Also I was hoping opus would finally be able to handle complex typescript generics, but alas...
it's 20,000 in 2026, with the price of tokens halving every year (at a given perf level), this will be around 1,000 dollars in 2030
Progress can be reviewed over time, and I'd think that'd take a lot of the risk out.
Also, heaven knows if the result in maintainable or easy to change.
> On top of that, Anthropic is losing money on it
This has got to be my favorite one of them all that keeps coming up in too many comments… You know who also was losing money in the beginning?! every successful company that ever existed! some like Uber were losing billions for a decade. and when was the last time you rode in a taxi? (I still do, my kid never will). not sure how old you are and if you remember “facebook will never be able to monetize on mobile…” - they all lose money, until they do not
Anyone remember the dotcom bust?
Oh yeah, I do. That whole internet thing was a total HOAX. I can't believe people bought into that.
Can you imagine if Amazon, EBay, PayPal, or Saleforce existed today?
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Remember that thing that caused it? That "Internet" thing? After those companies went bust it pretty much disappeared didn't it.
Completely detached from reality, brainwashed SV VC's who have made dumping the norm in their bubble.
I can guarantee you that 90% of successful businesses in the world made a profit their first year.
1 year seems aggressive. Successful restaurants have around the first year as the average break even timeline, with the vast majority between 6 and 18 months.
They are making a profit on each sale, but there are fixed costs to running a business.
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I’ll bite. Share your data?
Companies that were not profitable in their first year: Microsoft, Google, SpaceX, airBnB, Uber, Apple, FedEx, Amazon.
If the vast majority of companies are immediately profitable, why do we have VC and investment at all? Shouldn’t the founders just start making money right aeay?
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Are we forgetting that sometimes, they just go bankrupt?
name one with comparable number of users and revenue? not saying you are wrong but I would bet against the outcome
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I love how your comment is getting downvoted.
Like it's a surprise that startups burn through money. I get the feeling that people really have no idea what they're talking about in here anymore.
It's a shame.
then you are misunderstaing the downvoting. it's not that the fact that they are burning money. it's the fact that this cost today 20k but that is not the real cost if you factor the it is losing money on this price.
So Tomorrow when this "startup" will need to come out of their money burning phase, like every startup has to sooner or later, that cost will increase, because there is no other monetising avenue, at least not for anthropic that "wilL never use ads".
at 20k this "might" be a reasonable cost for "the project", at 200k it might not.
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