I wonder what was total token cost of the rewrite.

sroussey · 2026-08-20T15:50:45

I think around $300-400k, but that does not include the github issue/pr/ci stuff that runs continuously, which could double or triple it. Somewhere, the first two weeks were said to be about $200k.

rane · 2026-08-20T17:36:03

That total assumes API billing rates, which isn't what Anthropic pays for the inference. So I'm confused why people keep quoting that. It's not representative of what it'd cost for you either because you could use cheaper models.

nicce · 2026-08-20T23:15:02

> That total assumes API billing rates, which isn't what Anthropic pays for the inference. So I'm confused why people keep quoting that. It's not representative of what it'd cost for you either because you could use cheaper models.

It is, because this rewrite was marketing for Claude. So it reflects the price for what other companies might need to pay if they want to rewrite something else with similar size.

vdfs · 2026-08-20T18:36:13

Yeah, when you spend billions in infrastructure you get to save $300k occasionally

meetpateltech · 2026-08-20T15:55:07

From the Rewriting Bun in Rust blog post: 5.9B uncached input tokens, 690M output tokens, 72B cached reads, came out to ~$165k at API pricing.

tumdum_ · 2026-08-20T15:59:12

That was the initial work, but since then there was lots of work performed with LLMs.