My ROI so far is time savings and exponential increase in my personal production capacity. After I release Guild, I'm going to either productize it or focus on a few old startup ideas that were too time/capital intensive for me to bring to market without raising money, but now will only take me a few months to bring to market working part time
I’m using it strictly as a proxy for engineering effort, not market price. The takeaway isn’t “I made $7.8 M,” it’s “AI let one engineer produce work that historically required $7 – 8 M of salary-and-overhead to create.”
If you know a better public, third-party metric for comparing human vs. AI development effort, I’m all ears. The goal is to quantify the leverage, not to claim someone will write me an eight-figure check for the code tomorrow
lancekrogers•7mo ago
I wanted a repeatable way to quantify the productivity jump I’m getting from Claude Code (and to compare it with other AI tools I’m testing). The line-counter scc prints COCOMO “organic” estimates by default; at first the dollar figures looked crazy, so I benchmarked them against a few past codebases where I know the head-count, timeline, and budget. They were surprisingly close, so I’m using COCOMO here as a rough yard-stick—not as a claim that LOC directly equals business value.
If nothing else, it gives engineers a concrete number to show when asking a boss to cover an AI subscription, or founders a way to justify “impossible” timelines to investors.
TLDR: Claude Code let me ship 219k high quality LOC in 7 weeks across eight projects, while juggling multiple distinct projects in parallel.