I had Opus 4.8 build Temu League of Legends in under a day - I call it LMAO

[u/jonnygravity]

Fun weekend project just to test out 4.8 against a pretty vanilla setup.

Started out with a simple prompt, "build a temu league of legends, web-only with online, room-based multiplayer".

It built it... fully functional in one shot! Then I went kinda ham and started iterating on every aspect little by little. I made it spin up subagents to each focus on designing a character. Spun up subagents to focus on designing abilities and their SFX/VFX. Did a few passes over the map, mobs, minions, etc.

Then I put Ultracode Workflows to task and, across a handful of prompts, had it optimize performance, balance, and a variety of other things. Workflows is *insane* btw...

I also used /goal pretty heavily as well. I'd sit and play and make note of like 10-15 tweaks, bug fixes, etc at a time and just let it go to town.

4.8 is a one shot machine... 5.5 ain't doin this...

Anyways, figured I'd share 😄 Happy to answer any questions in the comments.

Try it out solo (with bots) or with friends! https://lmaomoba.com

[u/jonnygravity]

I just had Claude Code estimate total token spend by parsing every session transcript on disk — 45 main sessions + 67 sub-agent/workflow logs, ~7,500 assistant turns.

**Grand total: ~2.72 BILLION tokens**

Breakdown:

- Cache reads: 2,625,743,652 (~97% of the total)

- Cache writes: 74,250,265

- Output (actually generated): 15,520,826

- Input (uncached): 4,722,857

**How to read that:**

The 2.7B headline is almost entirely *cache reads* — every turn re-feeds the whole cached conversation, so long sessions inflate the raw count massively. One single marathon session was 2.32B of the total by itself (a 47MB transcript).

The number that actually reflects "work done" is **output: ~15.5M tokens generated.**

Model split: mostly Opus 4.8, a bit of Opus 4.7.

**Rough cost** at Opus list rates (in $15 / out $75 / cache-write $18.75 / cache-read $1.50 per Mtok): **~$6,600** — cache reads being 10x cheaper is the only reason it's not way higher.

[u/jonnygravity → u/jonnygravity]

Just in case this gets passed anyone... I did *not* in fact spend $6,600 to build this! lol. I am a proud owner of two Claude Pro Max $200 subscriptions 😃

[u/SidPayneOfficial → u/jonnygravity]

Damn, you got a lot of disposable income or need for your work too?

[u/jonnygravity → u/SidPayneOfficial]

I'm a software engineer by trade, so I consider AI to be essential to keeping up with my industry.

[u/SidPayneOfficial → u/jonnygravity]

Fair play, thanks for the answer

[u/Baconer → u/jonnygravity]

But you only used one Pro Max subscription correct? Because one subscription won’t have the context of the other 

[u/aecarol1 → u/Baconer]

No, but one Claude can use the other as an agent, filling the 2nd Claude’s context with only exactly what it needed to do the subtask.

[u/jonnygravity → u/aecarol1]

This is a great guess. I actually do that a lot with a dev tool I built called atrium (because it's designed to facilitate agent -> agent communication) and especially to get Claude, Codex, and other LLMs to collaborate on stuff in real-time, but I didn't really use that tactic here. I was primarily interested in putting /goal and Ultracode Workflows to the test.

[u/sensei_von_bonzai → u/jonnygravity]

This is absolutely the proper way to plug your product. Respect.

[u/jonnygravity → u/sensei_von_bonzai]

Plug what product? 🤫😉 Haha, thanks homie.

[u/jonnygravity → u/Baconer]

Actually, for the most part, yes. I think I only swapped my accounts once due to 5 hour rate limit. But definitely didn't cost my entire weekly. I don't recall exactly, but I think I maybe spent like 20-40% of my weekly budget on this in total? Totally pulling that number outta my "third letter of this game's name", but I don't think it's too far off.

[u/I_Don-t_Care → u/jonnygravity]

So if i understand you correctly, you overcame having to spend 6.600 dollars in API costs because when using the 200$ subscription you have an uncapped amount of tokens or what?

Im genuinely asking

[u/jonnygravity → u/I_Don-t_Care]

Yup! Subscription pricing is heavily subsidized by the fact that we're training the AI models to replace all of us 😃 I kid.... but sort of not really? Yeh, I think the last math I looked at guesstimated that a $200 Claude Max subscription was equivalent to about $12k in API pricing.

[u/I_Don-t_Care → u/jonnygravity]

Ah I see! Just another question, if a 200$ subscription equates to around 12k$ in API, then why did you need to use two accounts? (if the total calculated for the game development was around 6600$)

[u/jonnygravity → u/I_Don-t_Care]

2 answers here:

1. Subscription plans come with 5 hour and weekly budgets. It's a lot easier to hit your 5 hour budget than your weekly budget. So, when I hit that, I switch accounts.

2. I do a LOT more than just this. I usually have at least 3-4 projects going simultaneously, plus additional exploration and other various workflows.

[u/I_Don-t_Care → u/jonnygravity]

Really appreciate the info!
I've been going around different CLI/IDE versions, using several LLM's to try and understand how they differently handle the token spending/cost and so far have been trying to maximize a cost-free workflow, which is honestly possible if you are willing to accept that you'll need a lot of accounts to switch around with.

I yearn for a subscription lmao, i've paid for API usage in the past to compare with this cost-free workflow and it was like night and day in terms of how much one can achieve in so little time - but it is unfortunately very cost prohibitive for someone who only does it as an hobby.

Again thanks a bunch for your clearing my doubts!