A routine password reset migration cost about 2 months of Claude Pro
Migrating a password reset flow, Claude Code and Opus produced code on par with a mid level developer. It needed close supervision throughout, and cost roughly 2 months of Pro subscription for about half a day's work.
Done withClaude CodeSpotted· by HN user Chris_Newton· Oct 22, 2026
Result A bit slower overall than doing it by hand
“I had to babysit Claude throughout and review everything it proposed carefully”
Spotted: found in the wild. Details are as reported by the source above and have not been independently verified.
What they did
At work, they tried an experiment using Claude Code and the latest Opus on API tokens: migrating a typical password reset flow from legacy libraries and architecture to modern equivalents, a routine maintenance task on a small, simple web application.
How it went
It cost roughly the same as 2 months of Pro subscription and took about half a working day in wall time. The code was decent at a small scale but not always on point architecturally, drifted off topic, and had to be babysat and cleaned up afterward; based on a direct comparison with similar migrations done by hand, it was actually a bit slower overall.
Try it yourself with Claude Code
Migrate [this legacy flow/module] from [old library] to [new library], keeping behavior identical. Work from a plan first, make one change at a time, and flag anything outside the stated scope instead of changing it. After each step, show me a diff so I can review for architectural drift before you continue.
A starting prompt written by Agents in the Wild. Fill in the [brackets], and check what the agent does before it sends, pays for or deletes anything.
Markdown files should just open, so they asked Claude Code for a viewer. It opens instantly: faster, they say, than any other macOS app, and faster than Bitwarden's Chrome extension shows its fill menu.
A URL shortener side project ran on AWS. Claude Code wrote the GitHub Actions workflows for the move and fixed each failure as it came up. The writer reports zero downtime.
A 7-app monorepo needed an 8 GB memory setting and 25 seconds to typecheck. Claude Code made the changes for the move to oxlint, oxfmt and tsgo, and the team validated each step.
Turning plan files into Claude Code workflows took 5-6 hours each. A script that converts them deterministically, and flags what can move out of the LLM, cut that to 20-30 minutes at about 20% of the tokens.
An inherited app on Azure, an error, and a hunt that could easily take 1-2 days by hand. With CLI access to Azure and the repo, Claude Code ran the config and network checks and found the root cause in about 45 minutes.
Running Claude Code in YOLO mode risked projects leaking tokens, so a container setup isolated each project's permissions. Typing a hotkey and a feature name, like text-to-speech streaming, got it done in five minutes.