How To (Not) Spend $10k/wk on Coding Agents

Word on the street is that the cost of building software is going to zero. Zero? Sounds like a good deal! Over the last year, my co-founder and I have iteratively automated our coding loops. Each time better tools revealed a bottleneck, we’d address it. Agents would sometimes break things or propose slop, so we added more tests and guardrails. Our PRs piled up, so we automated the mechanical parts of review. When UX review became a bottleneck, we had agents attach demo videos to PRs. Nothing revolutionary – just stubborn hill-climbing on our dev loops. By April, Jenn had our agents humming. They were automatically and safely fixing lints, nitpicks, merge conflicts, outdated dependencies, and other maintenance chores. Our velocity kept increasing, and I started to file bugs and propose improvements that we previously wouldn’t have had time for. We could respond to user requests same-day. We were working hard, but moving fast. It was also generating a lot of Anthropic and Cursor and…