That amount of output is comparable to what many professional engineers produce in a given day, and they are a lot more expensive.

Keep in mind this is the commenters first attempt. And I'm surprised he paid so much.

Using Aider and Sonnet I've on multiple occasions produced 100+ lines of code in 1-2 hours, for under $2. Most of that time is hunting down one bug it couldn't fix by itself (reflective of real world programming experience).

There were many other bugs, but I would just point out the failures I was seeing and it would fix it itself. For particularly difficult bugs it would at times even produce a full new script just to aid with debugging. I would run it and it would spit out diagnostics which I fed back into the chat.

The code was decent quality - better than what some of my colleagues write.

I could probably have it be even more productive if I didn't insist on reading the code it produced.

The lines of code isn’t the point. Op claimed they asked Claude to recreate Claude code and it was successful. This is obviously an extreme exaggeration. I think this is the crux of a lot of these posts. This code generator output a very basic utility. To some this is a revelation, but it leaves others wondering what all the fuss is about.

It seems to me people’s perspective on code gen has largely to do with their experience level of actually writing code.

It's a very narrow reading of his comment. What he meant to say was it quickly created a rudimentary version of an AI code editor.

Just as a coworker used it to develop an AI code review tool in a day. It's not fancy - no bells and whistles, but it's still impressive to do it in a day with almost no manual coding.

> In one day (and $20), I essentially had recreated claude-code.

Not sure it’s a narrow reading. This is my point, if it’s a basic or rudimentary version people should be explicit about that. Otherwise these posts read like hype and only lead to dissatisfaction and disappointment for others.

s/reading/interpretation/

Reading something literally is by definition the narrowest interpretation.

> Using Aider and Sonnet I've on multiple occasions produced 100+ lines of code in 1-2 hours, for under $2. Most of that time is hunting down one bug it couldn't fix by itself (reflective of real world programming experience).

Was this using technologies you aren't familiar with? If not, the output rate seems pretty low (very human-paced, just with an extra couple bucks spent.)

By 100+ I mean 100-300 lines. I think most people aren't churning out 100 lines of code per hour unless it involves boilerplate.

More importantly, the 100-300 lines was very low effort for me. That does have its downsides (skills atrophy).

Remember that input tokens are quadratic with the length of the conversation, since you re-upload the n previous messages to get the (n+1)-nth message. When Claude completes a task in 3-4 shots, that’s cents. When he goes down in a rabbit hole, however…

I'm aider there's a command to "reset" so it doesn't send any prior chat. Whenever I complete a mini feature I invoke the command. It helpfully shows the size of the current contact in tokens and the cost so I keep an eye on it.

Doesn't Code have a similar option?

It does — /clear. It also has /compact to summarize previous tasks to preserve some situational awareness while reducing context bulk.

2200 lines. Half of them unit tests I would probably have been too lazy to write myself even for a "more real" project. Yes, I consider $20 cheap for that, considering:

1. It’s a learning experience 2. Looking at the chat transcripts, many of those dollars are burned for stupid reasons (Claude often fails with the insertLines/replaceLines functions and break files due to miss-by-1 offset) that are probably fixable 3. Remember that Claude started from a really rudimentary base with few tools — the bootstrapping was especially inefficient

Next experiment will be on an existing codebase, but that’s probably for next weekend.