Cash Bounties for Cursor Bills
Nick Dobos proposes the metrics nobody asked for but everybody needs
Multiple AI coding competitions now exist with exactly these constraints. The no-manual-code hackathon format caught on.
Nick Dobos has two proposals that sound like satire but aren't.
One: cash bounties — at least $100k prize pool — for whoever has the highest Cursor bill, or the most PRs merged by Codex or Devin. Raw throughput as competition. Who can burn the most AI compute and actually ship.
Two: a hackathon in a clean repo where you cannot type code manually. Not one letter. Reviewing what the AI writes is fine, so it's not full vibe-and-pray. But the only way code enters the repo is through prompts.
The unsettling part is that these are both genuinely good ideas. We're at the point where "who spent the most on their AI coding tool" is a legitimate proxy for engineering output, and "no human code allowed" is a plausible constraint for a serious competition rather than a bit.
Organizations are going to need metrics for this soon and nobody has good ones yet. Highest Cursor bill is crude but at least it's honest about what's actually happening.
Counterpoints
Push back, extend the argument, or sharpen it. New counterpoints go through review before they show up here.
No approved counterpoints yet.