news.ycombinator.com• 2d ago• 1 min read
I estimate reading code costs 2.1x more than writing itI hate reading agent-generated code and it's not a good use of my time, and I wanted a staistic to quantify by how much.My current estimate is $0.243 for a human to review one changed line and $0.114 in model spend for an agent to produce one benchmark-accepted changed line. That makes human review about 2.1 times as expensive under these assumptions.The agent calculation uses one public GPT-5.5 OpenHands run from May 2026. Its token categories, final patches, per-task costs, and evaluation outcomes come from the same 500 attempts. I then reprice those measured tokens at GPT-5.6 Sol's current rates.Human review: $0.24 per changed lineA SmartBear/Cisco study analyzed more than 2,500 reviews covering 3.2 million lines of code. It found that defect detection deteriorated as inspection rates rose through the 300-500 LOC/hour range. I used 400 LOC/hour as a midpoint.The US Bureau of Labor Statistics reports a median software-developer wage of $65.38/hour for May 2025. BLS employer-compensat