A developer just used AI to completely rewrite a massive software project with 120 files for only $3. The AI handled 400 different programming tasks without any human help, showing how cheap and powerful coding AI has become.
This isn’t just about saving money. It’s about AI doing the boring, repetitive parts of programming that developers hate. The new AI models cost 80 times less than previous versions while working faster on routine tasks.
The Good and the Hilarious
The developer used two new AI models called DeepSeek and Hunyuan that cost just 18 cents per million words of code. They completed 360 easy programming steps in under an hour. But here’s the funny part – the AI confidently created a bug that could crash the entire system, like a overconfident intern making a spectacular mistake.
For the tricky 10% of programming work, the developer still needed the expensive AI (Claude Opus) which costs $15 per million tokens. Those 40 difficult tasks took almost as long as the 360 easy ones.
Tencent, the Chinese company behind one of these AI models, claims 99.99% success rates on routine programming tasks. If true, this could change how software gets built.
What’s Next
Expect more developers to use cheap AI for boring coding work while keeping humans and expensive AI for the complex stuff. Programming jobs aren’t disappearing, but they’re definitely changing. The mundane parts are getting automated first.
