Building AI-Intensive Software with AI: Early Results and a Cautionary Tale on Measuring Development Cost

Excerpt

arXiv:2608.13730v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Empirical reports on the true cost of AI-intensive software development remain scarce, and the few that exist are easy to get wrong in ways that never surface in the final number. We report early results from an ongoing case study: a six-person student team built a full conversational onboarding assistant -- RAG-based code chat, guided tours, dependency graphs, technical-debt analysis -- over one academic term using pervasive AI assistance. We in