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by nbf_199518 hours ago |

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by baq16 hours ago|

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Much less than what it’d costs for a team of rust engineers.

This is both amazing and scary; has been for a while now.

by BearOso15 hours ago|

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It costs several times what it would cost a small team of engineers, even assuming you gave the engineers more time to do it. I'm guessing (wildly) this was around 0.5M USD in compute time. You do get the result quicker, though.

by dwohnitmok10 hours ago|

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> I'm guessing (wildly) this was around 0.5M USD in compute time.

That seems like an especially wild guess. If you take e.g. Opus 4.7 prices, and make the assumption that you are consuming roughly $30 for every million tokens of output (this comes from just summing the $25 per million tokens of output and $5 per million tokens of input and assuming that caching basically makes all that work out), and assume an output rate of 80 tokens per second (which seems like a high estimate based on online searching), it would take you about 2411 days of non-stop Opus 4.7 usage to hit 500k in API spend.

The only way you could possibly run that amount of usage in 6 days is if you were running ~400 instances in parallel. From personal experience, that seems crazy high for this project.

I think you are off by at least an order of magnitude (potentially even 2 depending on how the person is managing agents, but I could see something like dozens of agents 24/7, so I'm way less confident in 2, but I think it's still more likely to be closer to 10-20k in API spend).

by alice-i-cecile14 hours ago|

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Half a million is pretty damn cheap for a full rewrite into Rust of a million line of code codebase.

by fg13711 hours ago|

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But usually companies are much more careful before even spending that half a million. (And most companies don't have that money sitting around.) They would do small PoCs, do comprehensive benchmarks and evaluations of those PoCs, and decide whether to actually go ahead, and, more importantly, stick to it.

Being able to afford half a million doesn't mean you do it on a whim, or just throw all of that away if things don't go well.

But what do I know. I am nothing compared to our AI overlords like Anthropic.

by hamandcheese1 hours ago|

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> They would do small PoCs, do comprehensive benchmarks and evaluations of those PoCs, and decide whether to actually go ahead

Perfect, $1mil in salaries to spare the company $500k in spend :)

by Supermancho15 hours ago|

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10k lines ~$250 in OpenAI API calls (no plan)

45 million lines would get to ~$1.125 mil for the linux kernel.

950k lines for Bun would get to $23,750

use whatever math you like ofc.

Does an Anthropic/employee pay that, no. Even if it's at a loss in terms of company revenue, it's worth burning the private capital for all kinds of other reasons.