Sentry's David Cramer prices one factory task at $1.32

Cramer describes Junior, which he calls Sentry's open-source internal Slack agent, and says its name is on more commits than any other single contributor at the company. He walks through one request he says he made a few hours earlier: delete a kanban board experiment from Junior's own codebase, with no repository or other context supplied. He says Junior searched past conversations to fill in the context, did the work, and came back to Slack with a pull request. Cramer gave the code a quick glance, approved it, and let it merge automatically. He puts the total at $1.32 and five minutes of his time.

He is plain about the limits. He says the agent sometimes does well and sometimes produces garbage, that he approved without knowing whether every reference to the experiment was gone, and that CI would probably flush out any bugs. He calls this the state of the art for a company with real customers and liabilities, and adds: "Our system has memory - that doesn't make it self-improving."

This is one anecdote with one cost figure and no failure rate. The article showed 50 likes and 3,238 views under three hours after posting.

Why it matters: Cramer's account is a baseline for what a factory does today at a company with paying customers. A person states intent in chat, an agent finds the context and opens a pull request, a person approves, and CI is the check. The human review in his example was a glance, by his own description. A team copying the pattern should decide what CI has to prove before a glance is enough.