The Wall Street Journal ran a piece yesterday on JustPaid, a 9-person Mountain View startup. They used OpenClaw and Claude Code to stand up seven AI agents that write code, review it, and run QA around the clock. In one month: 10 major features shipped. Each one would have taken a human engineer a month or more. This story is getting passed around as proof that the autonomous engineering team is here. It is. But the detail everyone skips is the one that actually matters if you are trying to build this. The $4,000 Week When JustPaid's CTO first spun up Claude Code and OpenClaw together, the weekly bill came in at $4,000. That's $16,000 a month on tokens alone. After tuning — switching to a smaller model for appropriate tasks, tightening context windows, reducing unnecessary agent calls — they brought it to $10,000-$15,000 per month. That is still a real number. A mid-level San Francisco engineer costs roughly $15,000-$20,000 per month fully loaded. The math can work.…