Last week Xiao Chen slammed his outsourcing quotes on my desk: 5,800 RMB

Xiao Chen has been running Xiaohongshu e-commerce for six months. He wanted a tool that auto-replies to comments. Two outsourcing shops quoted him 5,800 RMB and 7,500 RMB. I asked why he didn't just let AI do it. He gave me that skeptical look: AI can write code?

Honestly, I got stuck on this too. The first time I had AI write code, the output was full of errors. I stared at it for an hour before realizing the AI had dropped Chinese double quotes straight into the code, and the compiler refused to accept them. You'll probably hit this exact pothole — heads up.

What these two AIs are, and who's actually using them

I had him test two: Claude Sonnet 5.5 (from Anthropic) and GPT-6 Astra (from OpenAI). Both work like a chat — you talk to them in plain language, they write code and fix bugs for you.

My friend Ajie in Guangzhou has been running his mini-program business solo for two years. Last month he told me: work that used to take him a week now takes the AI two hours, then he tidies up — that's three extra days to take on another client.

This is called agentic coding — you give an instruction, the AI breaks it into steps, writes the code, runs tests. On coding and professional tasks, Claude Sonnet 5.5 beat GPT-6 Astra in several benchmarks. The kicker: per 1,000 tokens (the industry's word count), Claude costs only one-fifth of GPT-6.

What it costs to copy this setup today

Money: both let you sign up for free, so you can run for 0 RMB to start. For real use, Claude is $20/month (about 145 RMB), and GPT-6 also starts at $20/month.

Time: from signup to AI writing its first usable code block, I timed it at around 40 minutes.

Tech barrier: if you can chat on WeChat, you're good. It's just a dialog box — you type Chinese, it replies in Chinese. No English jargon needed.

First step: open claude.ai in your browser, click the "Sign Up" button in the top right (sign up with email), open the chat, and type: "Write me a webpage where I enter a customer's name and it auto-generates a thank-you card I can download as an image." See what it sends back — check if it actually works.

What I'd suggest, depending on your stage

If you're just starting and don't have clients yet: don't spend money yet. Write down your need in plain language, send it to Claude's free tier, and see what comes back. If it works, great. If not, you lost nothing.

If you already have 1-2 clients and you're swamped: open the $20/month Claude straight away, throw the repetitive work at it (docs, scripts, bug checks), and use the time you save to take on more clients.

If you're scaling and already have 1-5 people: get each team member an account, dump all the grunt work on AI, and free your humans for higher-paying projects — this is where you actually pull ahead of competitors.

This tool isn't for everyone. If your product is already running smoothly and you don't have tech work to do right now, skipping it is fine. Come back the next time you get stuck.