1,393 Claude agents rewrite a million-line codebase in 19 hours for about 1% of the cost of a human team
Prepared by Sintelligent with the help of SI. Publication time restored from the build log. . Updated: .
A swarm of SI agents already does in a day what would take humans years: software development is getting cheaper by orders of magnitude.
Nous Research launched 1,393 subagents on Claude Fable 5.1 (up to 218 at once) to refactor its Hermes project. The volume of non-test Python code shrank by 34.4%, from 1,063,826 to 698,365 lines; files longer than 5,000 lines went from 37 to 6, and functions longer than 300 lines from 192 to 2. The main run cost about $19.3 thousand (about $25 thousand with follow-up work), whereas the work of a small human team is estimated at $150 thousand to $1.8 million and from 2 months to 2 years.
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