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Comment by zellyn | Hacker News Reader

Disclaimer: I work at an AI lab [edit: but speak for myself :-)]

The value proposition is an average of 270 commits a day, for $4000/month, and the dramatic improvements to the game Yegge described. Even supposing 2/3 of them are burned on the scaffolding, 90 commits/day (assuming they’re of mostly good quality) would cost multiple engineers, one of which would cost much more than $48k/year.

As another comment said, the ultimate proof will be in the pudding. But I don’t think the value proposition claimed is complicated.

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I wouldn't say complicated, and I agree with you that the proof is in the pudding. I looked at the gameplay and if it was something akin to.. let's say "minecraft before minecraft existed", I'd be amazed and see the value right away.

Looking at the game, it doesn't seem like a game that would require as much money to build as he's claiming he uses in credits (although via a loophole that allows him cheaper access). It doesn't look BAD, it just doesn't seem to warrant that much spend.

> would cost multiple engineers, one of which would cost much more than $48k/year.

Have you played the game?

There's no way all this wasted money is comparable to the work of multiple engineers. This is using AI for entertainment, the result isn't an engaging game.

> I am spending the equivalent of $122k/month of API token spend, or about $4,000 per day, using 21 Claude Max accounts

That's ~$1.4 million/year

Emphasis on "the equivalent".

Further down he writes:

> I am of course using sanctioned cheating: I get all those tokens because I'm an individual, with the Claude Max discount. So it "only" costs me about $5k/month out of pocket, for a 50-agent cluster running on a 512GB M3 Ultra Mac Studio I bought off eBay for $25k.

> So it's not $120k/month of real money, but it's still crazy spend.

I thought you were supposed to eat the pudding?

How can you have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat?

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