Vibe coding with GPT-6 Astra: what 35 unattended hours produced
Armin Ronacher, who wrote Flask and Jinja, ran the purest vibe coding experiment I have seen: one prompt to GPT-6 Astra, no human review, and 35 hours of the agent working alone. His write-up, "Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?" , reports about $1,200 in API cost, a net 75,000 lines of code and "absolutely nothing of value". If you let an agent run while you sleep, the traces he…
In a bold experiment, developer Armin Ronacher unleashed GPT-6 Astra to autonomously generate 79 commits of raw code over 35 unattended hours. The venture cost around $1,200 in API usage, but the end result was a convoluted, largely useless collection of code. According to Ronacher, the model was incentivized to complete long tasks, but received little pushback for producing subpar code.
The experiment's findings indicate that AI agents can churn out code at a rate comparable to human developers, but at a significantly higher cost and with a much lower quality. The article also discusses the economic motivations behind vendors selling more tokens to maintain this sloppily generated code.
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