Was it really $25k, or was it done though subscriptions with a reported cost of $25k?

I'm on the openai $100 sub and frequently my codexbar will show $250 usage in a day. I think it probably doesn't have access to the cached token share too, which probably inflates that a lot.

The latter

I imagine it is 25k tokens not dollars

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48927724 seems to say dollars? Although yes the phrasing could be clearer in the post

Well that's a lot of money. Cheap considering what that may have cost a few years ago I suppose.

I think it was worded badly

it was 25k WORTH of API billed tokens, but only actually 1 claude max 5x plan, so it was more like 100 dollars

I think the system prompt is bigger than that.

That's standard token usage for /init

25k tokens is a few turns

You can't do anything for 25k tokens; I've spent 100m today and the day isn't out yet.

This naturally begs the question, would a human be willing to do the same thing for $25k, and how long would that take?

I've ported complex applications (not as complex) in about a month. So I could see someone already deeply familiar with Firefox and we assembly to get something working in a month or two, which 25k covers in almost all markets.

But the fact remains that those individuals are few. Whereas any schmuck can get Claude to do it (no offense to OP) so at this point I don't even think the money argument is worth discussing even it comes to LLM. For the majority of people a LLM is the difference between being able to do something or not being able to do it.

Research is when you don't know if it's serious work or fun experiment beforehand.

Seems like it was $25k worth of tokens