I think the unfortunate takeaway from this story is that rewriting a codebase of that size for under $200k using AI makes this endeavor suddenly feasible in a way that it previously wouldn’t have been. Some organizations have reason enough to spend a year rewriting with multiple engineers, but have no interest in a year-long feature freeze. But a 2-week feature freeze? The current money is starting to make sense and more orgs are going to start biting.
But also, that number is a lie. They haven’t published any releases from that rewrite, it’s still considered experimental, and they’ve spent weeks continuing to iterate upon it and certainly driving that number way higher. But they declared it done via blogpost to get that price-point and timeline in the headlines. Yet it still isn’t shippable, and they’re still burning cash and time on it
I think the unfortunate takeaway from this story is that rewriting a codebase of that size for under $200k using AI makes this endeavor suddenly feasible in a way that it previously wouldn’t have been. Some organizations have reason enough to spend a year rewriting with multiple engineers, but have no interest in a year-long feature freeze. But a 2-week feature freeze? The current money is starting to make sense and more orgs are going to start biting.
But also, that number is a lie. They haven’t published any releases from that rewrite, it’s still considered experimental, and they’ve spent weeks continuing to iterate upon it and certainly driving that number way higher. But they declared it done via blogpost to get that price-point and timeline in the headlines. Yet it still isn’t shippable, and they’re still burning cash and time on it
That’s good to know. I wasn’t aware of that