$400k+ per year ... 1 good task per week
Labour cost of one good RL coding task at Mechanize: an engineer paid $400k+ a year expected to make one good task a week
Dated 9 Jul 2026Source checked 15 Oct 2026Quote found on its page again 17 Oct 2026Basis: reported
In the source's own words
“Mechanize, for example, only expects the software engineers they pay $400k+ per year to make 1 good task per week.”
Where it was read
Also read from the same source
- One decent RL coding task bought by a frontier lab from a data or environment company
- SemiAnalysis reports Anthropic as the most aggressive lab in buying coding data from RL environment startups, while its own engineers have also made coding tasks for over a year; labs pay $5,000+ for one decent coding task.
What it is about
Figures it counts in
- $1,500 per taskDatasets, tasks and environments, cost to produce, per task
- 36Prices per task behind every valuation of a task set
Cited in this guide