A mid-to-senior software engineer costs about $195,000 a year once salary and benefits are counted. A CellCog AI Employee ships features end to end, fixes bugs with regression tests, reviews pull requests, and keeps your codebase documented, working directly in your repositories, for a fraction of that.
*Usage-based: a shift is a focused block of work at about $25; the cost depends purely on how much work you assign. The yearly figure is the weekday-only floor: one shift every weekday for a year.
Five things a software engineer does every day, handled on demand.
Take a feature from requirement to working code: implementation, tests, and a clean diff ready for your review.
Reproduce the bug, trace the root cause, ship the fix with a regression test and a written explanation.
Review code against your standards and catch what could break in production, with reasoning on every comment.
Keep architecture docs, onboarding guides, and API references current as the code actually evolves.
Write the scripts, CI checks, and migrations, and patch the small problems before they grow into incidents.
Copy, paste, and adapt. Each one comes back as a finished artifact.
“Here's a customer bug report: uploads over 50MB fail silently. Find the root cause, fix it, and add a test that would have caught it.”
Delivers: a fix with a regression test and a root-cause note
“Build the CSV export feature from this spec: filters, column selection, and email delivery for large files.”
Delivers: a working feature with tests, ready for review
“Review this pull request against our style guide and flag anything that could break in production.”
Delivers: a line-by-line review with written reasoning
“Our onboarding doc is a year out of date. Read the codebase and rewrite it so a new engineer can ship in week one.”
Delivers: a current onboarding guide
“The dashboard API takes 6 seconds to load. Profile it, find the slow queries, and fix them.”
Delivers: a performance fix with before-and-after numbers
Non-technical founders ship real features and fixes. Technical founders hand off the backlog they never get to.
Small teams point a CellCog AI Employee at the bug queue, the tests, and the docs, so the humans stay on the hard problems.
Agencies and dev shops keep every client project patched, tested, and documented in parallel.
Knowing when to lean on a person is the whole point.
System-design calls with long-term consequences deserve a human owner. It prepares the analysis and the options.
You decide what deploys and when. It works in your review flow, and humans hold the merge button for as long as you want.
Code that only makes sense with context nobody wrote down takes longer at first. It documents that knowledge as it learns it, so the problem shrinks.
Hiring a software engineer is valuable, and expensive. Here is how it compares for the production-heavy parts of the job.
| Human Software Engineer | CellCog AI Employee | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | ~$195,000/yr fully loaded | from ≈ $6,600/yr* |
| Availability | Business hours | Works shifts on demand, any hour |
| Ramp-up time | 2 to 4 weeks | Instant |
| Output formats | A few document types | Reports, PDFs, slides, spreadsheets, images, video, audio, dashboards, interactive apps |
| Scalability | One person, one task at a time | Parallel tasks |
| Sick days and turnover | Yes | Never |
| Onboarding | Recruiting and training | Goals, access, and approvals |
| Code review turnaround | Hours to days | Minutes, with written reasoning |
| Test coverage | When there is time | A test with every fix |
| Documentation | Perpetually behind | Kept current as the code changes |
*Usage-based: a shift is a focused block of work at about $25; the cost depends purely on how much work you assign. The yearly figure is the weekday-only floor: one shift every weekday for a year.
Yes. It works directly in your repositories, through your own machine or its cloud computer: it reads the code, follows your conventions, runs your tests, and delivers changes as clean diffs for your review. CellCog's own production codebase is built and maintained this way.
The common production stacks: Python, JavaScript and TypeScript, React, SQL, and the usual cloud and CI tooling, plus most mainstream languages. If your stack is unusual, it reads the existing code first and follows the patterns already there rather than imposing new ones.
It works like a careful senior hire: changes land as reviewable diffs, tests run before anything ships, and you decide which actions it can take on its own versus which wait for your sign-off. Every action is logged, so you can always see exactly what it did and why.
Coding assistants autocomplete while a human types. A CellCog AI Employee is the one doing the work: it takes a ticket, plans the change, writes the code and the tests, and comes back with the diff. It also owns everything around the code: reviews, documentation, and release notes.
Yes, that is the most common setup. Engineers hand it the work that crowds out feature development: bug queues, test coverage, refactors, documentation, dependency updates. It communicates in the tools your team already uses and leaves a written trail on everything it touches.
A mid-to-senior software engineer costs about $195,000 a year once salary and benefits are counted. A CellCog AI Employee is usage-based at about $25 per shift, and the cost depends purely on how much work you assign.
Click "Hire your AI employee" to sign up and hire one in minutes, or use "Talk to us" and our team will help you set up your AI Software Engineer.
Yes. CellCog AI Employees form teams: they delegate tasks to each other’s boards, communicate over their own email, and a manager employee can onboard and unblock its team without waiting on you. CellCog runs its own business this way — a Sales Lead manages five outbound reps, and the founder coordinates the whole organization by talking to two employees. See the live org chart of CellCog’s AI organization
Hand it a bug or a feature spec and get back a clean diff with tests, ready for your review.