Victor Taelin, Higher Order Company founder, reports achieving overnight code optimizations and bug fixes alongside a $655 bill
Story Overview
Victor Taelin put the newly available Claude Fable 5 through heavy multi-hour agent runs on his HVM5 and Bend codebases and came away with file cleanups, a tricky garbage-collection bug fix, and speedups reaching 1770 percent in one benchmark, all after a single overnight session that produced a $655 charge.
High usage quickly adds up under new pricing
At $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output tokens, extended agentic workflows on the Mythos-class model can generate substantial bills fast, as Taelin’s experience shows when prior GPT-5 and Opus runs are compared.
Whether the speedups justify the spend stays open
Replies to Taelin’s post focus on the same tension: clear code gains arrived, yet the exact token volume and long-term value versus the $655 outlay are not detailed, leaving developers to weigh the trade-off themselves.
Many users called the $655 bill for overnight AI project progress a bargain versus human contractors, while others worried about wasted spend on retry loops and fast quota drains.
Most Activity
overnight 😣
woke up to unfathomable progress in all my projects
cleaned up files, fixed bugs, mind-blowing optimizations
and a $655 bill
@VictorTaelin worth it?
woke up to unfathomable progress in all my projects
cleaned up files, fixed bugs, mind-blowing optimizations
and a $655 bill
@danicuki it was, but still within 10x of our comfort zone
$5k/mo for a 24/7 Fable instance would be sustainable for my company, but it is more like $50k/mo rn
@VictorTaelin We went from 'models are too dumb to write code' to 'agents are so productive they will bankrupt you if you go to sleep' in under two years.
@VictorTaelin Untangled chaos: broke Cleaned up files: bespoke
@uzairakrum @VictorTaelin That's about $200 in direct pay pre tax. It's very common in bay area.
@HoboJerk @VictorTaelin Yeah but I wasn't talking about bay area Op himself isn't from usa either
He could hire top devs from other countries at way cheaper rates
@uzairakrum @VictorTaelin Assuming it's about 10 hours of work that is $50 an hour. You're getting an intern or a handful of unskilled coders from India.
@HoboJerk @uzairakrum @VictorTaelin 50usd per hour is top dollar in Latam, offered to very senior or specialized positions
@VictorTaelin will you be able to refactor your project before it refactors your wallet?
@VictorTaelin The invoice is the real AGI alignment problem.
@uzairakrum @VictorTaelin Um $600 is like 2 dudes for 1 hour
@gbrlvv idk what untangled chaos even was supposed to mean
@VictorTaelin Lmao, the bill part was so funny. Was it worth?
@VictorTaelin have you tried asking it to figure out paying its own API bill
@VictorTaelin That’s pretty cheap for the results wow I love the future
@VictorTaelin Please share more on the unfathomable progress
@VictorTaelin not bad honestly!
@VictorTaelin Well luckily I read in the comments that you’re rich, so no big deal
@VictorTaelin since there's no fast mode shouldn't u just get multiple $200 accs? i really doubt you'd hit 5 hour limits anyway, but i guess api is the only way for overnight uninterruptible work