Author(s): Felix Kebaya

Originally published on Towards AI.

I Replaced a $6,500/Month Developer with Claude Code (Opus 4.8) and Codex (GPT 5.5)

A client came to me last month with a problem. They were paying a junior developer $6,500/month for feature work on their web app. Turnaround was slow, communication was painful, and bugs kept shipping to production.

After taking over, the author charged $60/hour and delivered more output in the first week using two AI coding agents (Claude Code and Codex). The article then breaks down the project: a partially built SaaS team expense tracker needing analytics, filtering, CSV export, an admin panel, responsive fixes, and bug fixes—completed in 4 days (22 billing hours) instead of the previous developer’s 3–4 week estimate. It walks through the workflow day by day (spec writing, Claude Code building the foundation, Codex UI refinement, bug fixes, mobile adjustments, testing, and deployment), provides the Supabase schema and an example Claude/Codex prompt structure, and explains the “math” behind the outcome by comparing the $1,320 invoice to the prior $6,500/month cost range. Finally, it argues that the real advantage isn’t humans typing more code, but reallocating time toward specification, orchestration, review, QA, and deployment—suggesting that developers who learn to direct AI agents will be more valuable rather than threatened, while also noting that legacy complexity and coordination still require humans.

Read the full blog for free on Medium.

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Published via Towards AI