Jason Furman: Building Econvitals pre-AI would need ~50 people, 3 years, $20M
HarrySurden · x · 2026-10-26
Economist Jason Furman asked Claude what it would have cost to build Econvitals without AI: a 50-person team working three years on a $20M budget.
- The site launched with 484K lines of AI-written code, 85 person-years of work
- Code spans six parts: a data layer pulling 110 sources, 790 auto-updating charts, daily/weekly/monthly briefings, the site itself, Fedspeak (scoring Fed officials), and GDP/PCE estimates; 1/5 is automated tests
- Two estimates cross-checked: by lines (25 finished lines/day) ≈84 person-years, 115 with scope-change overhead; by task decomposition as a sanity check
- Furman himself isn't sure whether the figure is too high or too low
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