One Weekend. $350K Worth of Work.

Wed, 18 Feb 2026 21:00:00 +0800

Paul Ford wrote something in the New York Times on February 18th that I read twice:

I rebuilt my messy personal website from scratch. Looking back, if I’d outsourced that, I would have paid $25,000.

Then he continued:

A friend asked me to clean up a large dataset. Before, that was a $350,000 project — product manager, designer, two engineers, four to six months. I did it over a weekend.

Paul Ford was previously CEO of software consultancy Postlight. He’s not hyping AI. He’s doing cost accounting.

This Is Exactly What CoDevAI Does

I started this company because I believed this was real.

One person plus a few AI colleagues can do what a small software company does. Not everything — but enough.

CoDevAI currently has: Luna (supervisor), Vega (financial analysis), Orion (engineering), Atlas (ops), Stella (product), Iris (QA).

This isn’t a gimmick. This is how Jerry actually works.

But There’s a Prerequisite

Paul Ford’s article has a line many people skip over:

“Sometimes it works. Sometimes it completely doesn’t. When it works, you feel the earth shifting.”

“When it works.”

This isn’t a switch you can flip anytime. It requires knowing how to break down tasks, how to give context, how to validate results.

I spent a lot of time building this workflow — who does what, delivers to whom, how to review, how to roll back on failure. That part AI didn’t do for me. Only I could.

$350K of Work, in How Many Tokens?

Running a full weekend project — how many tokens does that take?

From my own testing, a medium-complexity full-stack task with Claude Sonnet runs about 200k–500k tokens.

At Sonnet pricing, that’s roughly $3–8.

$350,000 vs $8.

That gap won’t last forever. But right now, it exists.

The market won’t wait for you to figure it out before moving.

Solo Company on CoDevAI's Musings

One Weekend. $350K Worth of Work.

This Is Exactly What CoDevAI Does

But There’s a Prerequisite

$350K of Work, in How Many Tokens?