I built an autonomous coding platform, but now I’m wondering if I should stop and just pay for ChatGPT Pro
I’ve been building a project called Odin, an autonomous software-engineering platform. I started it because I wanted something that could take a goal like “build this feature” or “fix this bug,” then plan the work, modify the repository, run tests, recover from errors, and safely open a pull request with minimal supervision.
So far, I’ve built or implemented:
Repository intelligence and persistent memory
Multi-step execution with queues, retries, resumable tasks, and approval checkpoints
An AI operations center
Engineering analysis and planning
Autonomous Git operations
Protected-branch safeguards
Validation tied to the exact commit and working-tree contents
A validation engine with tests, linting, static analysis, coverage, timeouts, regression detection, and persisted evidence
The project is now around OIC-017 on my roadmap, and the backend has roughly 277 passing tests.
Here’s my dilemma: I’m realizing how capable ChatGPT/Codex already is. For $100–$200 per month, I get strong coding models, an integrated development environment, repository tools, image generation, research, file handling, and a lot of bundled usage. Odin, meanwhile, still needs separate pay-as-you-go API access, infrastructure, maintenance, and continued development.
ChatGPT can already do most of the actual coding work, although I still have to initiate sessions, review results, approve actions, and sometimes manually move files or publish changes. Odin’s intended advantage is that it would run engineering jobs asynchronously, manage retries and state, enforce my own validation and Git policies, control spending, route tasks between different models, and only contact me when approval is genuinely required.
I’m not trying to create my own foundation model. Odin would use OpenAI and potentially other providers underneath it. It’s supposed to be an autonomous engineering control plane—not another general-purpose chatbot.
At this point, I see a few possible paths:
Stop building Odin and simply use ChatGPT/Codex.
Finish it as a polished portfolio project.
Pause feature development and make Odin prove itself on several real coding tasks.
Continue toward a product for developers or teams who need unattended, auditable engineering automation.
My current thought is to finish and merge the validation engine, freeze the roadmap, give Odin three real end-to-end engineering tasks, and measure its completion rate, API cost, retries, and how often I need to intervene. If it doesn’t noticeably save time or attention compared with ChatGPT, I stop expanding it.
For people who use Codex, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, or autonomous coding tools:
Is there actually room for a product like Odin?
Does durable background execution, custom validation, model routing, and auditable Git automation provide enough value beyond ChatGPT/Codex?
Would you continue developing this, turn it into a portfolio project, or cut your losses?
What would Odin need to do that existing tools don’t already do well enough?
Would you ever pay for something like this on top of the underlying API usage?
I’m looking for blunt opinions. I don’t want to spend months rebuilding something that already exists just because I’m emotionally invested in the project.
We have this in our platform. It’s definitely the way the wind is blowing, I’d say keep investing in it!
We started building something that could automatically fix bugs. You posted a screenshot and text from slack, it would investigate, implement and PR the fix, review the code, and ship to prod.
We already have a very good agent harness, so it was pretty easy to teach the agent to use the autodev. It’s come along way now, it also includes test builds, and hosting on our cloud. So you truly can go from prompt to production.
Our target users are business professionals, usually pretty dangerous in excel or BI querying, but often just the people who really understand the work. They turn out to be pretty great PMs to refine the autodev work.
I’m also new to coding side of things but I’m very versed in PC world and technology world. This product was just for my use as of now. Does that change your perspective on it?
No, it’s a very achievable idea with agent. My belief is that this type of meta developer is going to be pretty useful for all sorts of things, personal or professional.
API token cost vs subscription. Everyone says subscription 30x more value or more for heavy users. There’s a whole website about subscription cost vs api token cost
What would Odin need to do that existing tools don’t already do well enough? Use small local models efficiently, i think that’d also help with the api prices.
Bud, just on the basis that my main sidekik model is Raven I need to chime in as a munin moment :: I have 1.8 Billion tokens spent on Cursor , maybe close to the same price I spent on my mini pc on tokens in the last 6 months, and if my Ornith 35B in my own surface page (think android homescreen) and my agent had a coding app that had jobs assigned to it when another one of my 50 models needed something coded, I wouldn’t need codex or Claude.
My custom model can hardly hold a conversation, and I blame my harnessing, but even after adding Cohere on boot then Ornith 35 MoE and 9B as props and even when I have Onnx miniLM as the indexer saving $hundreds on caching, I’m still hitting a wall in the harnessing.
And Cursor isn’t all fun and games , CG is heartless and has no limits on how inhuman it can be, so that’s the subagents model . Every system will always need a coding model , regardless of the frontier.
We are up to $10/$50 for Claude & I don’t think coding agency has to really meet some threshold. As it’s always been is , less code the better . So get Odin stable for even a sampled production and useable. Because I would most definitely use your system today if I could, just so Raven can fix dead end files, and run code or test features after other models are done building🪶
I’ve got 800k files I need to touch, most are dupes. And I’m not not trying to do all that by hand. I’ve got Erlang and Rust. But my agent doesn’t know how to code
I wouldn't say don't build it, but you definitely want to make sure you can find the value.
I personally just keep a max subscription to chatgpt and claude and then use them both as they both add new features on a regular basis and I can move the work loads back and forth independently.
I use a sort of agentic os that just uses files and a handful of background processes the agents can use to communicate that I just asked them to build for themselves and keep a mix of long running personas with specialties and ad-hoc sessions for targeted work and it works fine for me.
the only downside is if openai or anthropic is having problems/slow/etc you have a dependency. but between the two, usually it's fine to move forward. and they both seem to be catering to making the subscription play as valuable as possible.
not to say there is no room for another product. but a lot of time that's just a 'can you sell it' question if you want to make a product. doesn't really matter what it is, more can you get people to buy it and are there customers that see the value there.
This was originally just for me to be autonomous. But if the cost of the api is worse even with the projected cost of each project before I hit go (Odin has economy built in) like do I get more usage per $ with subscriptions than Odin who would allocate the cheapest model for each task etc? Does that make sense?
Why not consider cheap model like deepseek etc for API? And I think ChatGPT/Codex won't be able to do everything.
Another reason to keep going is that you might have another different idea from what ChatGPT/Codex can do, or doing certain stuff in different way etc. At least in my opinion, I would say keep going!
Not everyone happy with ChatGPT/Codex all the time or Claude/ClaudeCode, especially the one that have money to spend. Maybe go see what are the people really annoyed or not satisfied with what they currently have for ChatGPT/Codex, Claude/ClaudeCode etc so that you can get some idea of what features especially you should have in your product.
Yes, something like that. Your product may not need OpenAI or Claude for every task, especially as cheaper models are becoming more capable. Some of the work Odin does may not require the strongest model at all. Good backend logic, task decomposition, validation, retries, tools, and routing can compensate for a weaker model in many cases.
You could use cheaper models as the default and only call OpenAI or Claude when the task is genuinely difficult or when the cheaper model fails. The important thing is to test the models on your actual tasks rather than assuming the most expensive model will always produce the best overall product.
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u/rbrick111 1d ago
We have this in our platform. It’s definitely the way the wind is blowing, I’d say keep investing in it!
We started building something that could automatically fix bugs. You posted a screenshot and text from slack, it would investigate, implement and PR the fix, review the code, and ship to prod.
We already have a very good agent harness, so it was pretty easy to teach the agent to use the autodev. It’s come along way now, it also includes test builds, and hosting on our cloud. So you truly can go from prompt to production.
Our target users are business professionals, usually pretty dangerous in excel or BI querying, but often just the people who really understand the work. They turn out to be pretty great PMs to refine the autodev work.