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​Cost of a Job​

Monday’s analysis cost about 27 cents to produce.

This little screenshot is of Claude Code, the product I use now to write the analysis of datasets like estimating the value of a venture firm.

I didn’t expect to find this feature initially as useful as I do now.

But it makes me feel great because of how inexpensive it is to be productive. 27 cents for a statistical analysis of a small dataset is a bargain considering the battery of statistical tests the AI applied.

Over the weekend, I created my first Android app, not knowing a single line of Kotlin, the language in which Android is written. It cost me a little less than $5 to build a single-purpose app that listens to my voice, extracts one or a series of tasks, and then sends them to Asana.

It’s a feature I don’t expect any task manager to build. I didn’t search the App Store, but perhaps such an app exists already. But I prefer mine because it’s built to my specification & took less than a few minutes.

I find myself wondering what if I created a product requirements document to replicate the feature set of a CRM the way Klarna did? How much would that cost?

I feel empowered. I can build little bits of software passively for a few dollars. The same as Cappuccino at Blue Bottle & it takes just about as long.

Claude Code re-anchors what I expect to pay for software and the delivery time of that software, perhaps unrealistically. If it’s just a few minutes to build an Android app, how long could a fully functioning software product take to build? It might not be accurate to linearly extrapolate simple apps, build time to complex enterprise apps. But it makes me wonder.

Imagine applying this strategy across half to three quarters of a white-collar workforce & using another AI to label each action an employee takes with AI and aggregating that across an organization. The depth of understanding of both jobs completed and their cost and ultimately their ROI would be unparalleled.

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