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Comment by eek2121 | Hacker News Reader

Also: a large amount of folks seem to think Claude code is losing a ton of money. I have no idea where the final numbers land, however, if the $20,000 figure is accurate and based on some of the estimates I've seen, they could've hired 8 senior level developers at a quarter million a year for the same amount of money spent internally.

Granted, marketing sucks up far too much money for any startup, and again, we don't know the actual numbers in play, however, this is something to keep in mind. (The very same marketing that likely also wrote the blog post, FWIW).

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this doesn't add up. the 20k is in API costs. people talk about CC losing money because it's way more efficient than the API. I.e. the same work with efficient use of CC might have cost ~$5k.

but regardless, hiring is difficult and high-end talent is limited. If the costs were anywhere close to equivalent, the agents are a no-brainer

CC hits their APIs, And internally I'm sure Anthropic tracks those calls, which is what they seem to be referencing here. What exactly did Anthropic do in this test to have "inefficient use of CC" vs your proposed "efficient use of CC"?

Or do you mean that if an external user replicated this experience they might get billed less than $20k due to CC being sold at lower rates than per-API-call metered billing?

> hiring is difficult and high-end talent is limited.

Not only that, but firing talent is also a pain. You can't "hire" 10 devs for 2 weeks, and fire them afterwards. At least you can't keep doing that, people talk and no one would apply.

Even if the dollar cost for product created was the same, the flexibility of being able to spin a team up and down with an API call is a major advantage. That AI can write working code at all is still amazing to me.

This thing was done in 2 weeks. In the orgs I've worked in, you'd be lucky to get HR approval to create a job posting within 2 weeks.

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