My father said something is worth what you can get someone else to pay for it. And that's not any of your numbers.

Fair point, COCOMO doesn’t tell you what a buyer will pay, it estimates what it would have cost a conventional team to build the same thing.

I’m using it strictly as a proxy for engineering effort, not market price. The takeaway isn’t “I made $7.8 M,” it’s “AI let one engineer produce work that historically required $7 – 8 M of salary-and-overhead to create.”

If you know a better public, third-party metric for comparing human vs. AI development effort, I’m all ears. The goal is to quantify the leverage, not to claim someone will write me an eight-figure check for the code tomorrow

Just because old model cost x does not mean new model will cost x. Clearly you're comparing apples to oranges. Now the real question is what is the return on investment? How much did you make?

I compared against recent employers codebases and the cocomo estimations where surprisingly close to the actual team size, timeline and cost. It's obviously not a perfect estimation, but it seems like the best model for comparing tools and communicating their impact.

My ROI so far is time savings and exponential increase in my personal production capacity. After I release Guild, I'm going to either productize it or focus on a few old startup ideas that were too time/capital intensive for me to bring to market without raising money, but now will only take me a few months to bring to market working part time

Ah, speed of innovation is definitely something I’m looking forward to based on these new models. Looks like you’re well positioned to partake in the next great race. Good luck and enjoy the ride .

Why COCOMO?

I wanted a repeatable way to quantify the productivity jump I’m getting from Claude Code (and to compare it with other AI tools I’m testing). The line-counter scc prints COCOMO “organic” estimates by default; at first the dollar figures looked crazy, so I benchmarked them against a few past codebases where I know the head-count, timeline, and budget. They were surprisingly close, so I’m using COCOMO here as a rough yard-stick—not as a claim that LOC directly equals business value.

If nothing else, it gives engineers a concrete number to show when asking a boss to cover an AI subscription, or founders a way to justify “impossible” timelines to investors.

TLDR: Claude Code let me ship 219k high quality LOC in 7 weeks across eight projects, while juggling multiple distinct projects in parallel.