[lancekrogers]

Fair point, COCOMO doesn’t tell you what a buyer will pay, it estimates what it would have cost a conventional team to build the same thing.

I’m using it strictly as a proxy for engineering effort, not market price. The takeaway isn’t “I made $7.8 M,” it’s “AI let one engineer produce work that historically required $7 – 8 M of salary-and-overhead to create.”

If you know a better public, third-party metric for comparing human vs. AI development effort, I’m all ears. The goal is to quantify the leverage, not to claim someone will write me an eight-figure check for the code tomorrow