Building AI-Intensive Software with AI: Early Results and a Cautionary Tale on Measuring Development Cost
Empirical reports on the true cost of AI-intensive software development remain scarce, and the few that exist are easy to get wrong in ways that never surface in the final number. We report early results from an ongoing case study: a six-person student team built a full conversational onboarding assistant -- RAG-based code chat, guided tours, dependency graphs, technical-debt analysis -- over one academic term using pervasive AI assistance. We instrumented development with a three-layer cost model (real AI spend, self-reported human effort, human counterfactual) and initially reported a 19.4x cost ratio. A follow-up pass revealed two independent errors -- inferring per-token cost under a ...
| Authors | Victor Barros de Miranda Neves, Kiev Santos da Gama, Vinicius Cardoso Garcia |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.SE |
| Published | 13 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 13 August 2026 |
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