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Code Recycle

Compute avoided

Regenerating software that already exists costs GPU time, and GPU time costs electricity. When someone buys a verified engine here instead of having an agent rebuild it, that electricity is not spent. This page is the arithmetic.

No measured purchases yet.

2 purchases are excluded: those listings have no measured rebuild estimate, and an unmeasured listing contributes nothing rather than a guessed average.

How this is calculated

1

Tokens. Each measured listing carries an estimate of what rebuilding it costs: attempts until correct × tokens per attempt. These are published per listing and were corrected upward 8× in August 2026 after measurement showed the originals were lower than a single research agent’s usage.

2

Energy. Tokens × 0.000160.0006 Wh per token. Source: Energy use of AI inference, efficiency pathways, and test-time scaling, Joule, April 2026 — median 0.31 Wh per query, interquartile range 0.16–0.60 Wh, normalising to roughly 3×10−4 Wh per token.

3

Kettle boils. Divided by 0.125 kWh, roughly one electric kettle boil. Kilowatt-hours mean nothing to most people; a kettle does.

The assumption you should argue with

Every figure here assumes a buyer would otherwise have had an agent rebuild the same thing. That is a hypothesis about behaviour, not an observation. If you would have used a free library instead, or not built it at all, the compute avoided is smaller — possibly zero.

The assumption is strongest for bespoke engines with no free equivalent, and weakest for commodity utilities. We state it rather than bury it, because a number whose assumption is hidden is not checkable, and a claim that cannot be checked should not be believed.

What this is not

This is electricity, compared against one named alternative. It is nota carbon figure, not an offset, not a claim of net environmental benefit, and not a suggestion that buying software here is good for the planet. Cheaper compute can increase total compute rather than reduce it — that argument is real and unsettled, and no counter on this page resolves it.

If reuse also happens to be lighter on the grid, that is a by-product worth measuring honestly. It is not the reason to buy anything.

Per listing

ListingTokenskWhKettle boils
event-scout-app5,280,0000.843.176.825.3
byok-assistant-app2,560,0000.411.543.312.3
assistant-standard-kit1,960,0000.311.182.59.4
instrument-design-system1,440,0000.230.861.86.9
event-identity-resolver1,056,0000.170.631.45.1
video-timeline-engine1,000,0000.160.601.34.8
resumable-sync-engine960,0000.150.581.24.6
voice-push-to-talk-kit800,0000.130.481.03.8
all-in-price-comparison576,0000.090.350.72.8
voice-provider-layer576,0000.090.350.72.8
webhook-fulfillment-kit576,0000.090.350.72.8
price-timing-engine512,0000.080.310.72.5
amos-ui-agent-timeline336,0000.050.200.41.6
money-shorthand-parser216,0000.030.130.31.0

Every number on this page is an estimate presented as a range. Found an error in the arithmetic? That is a bug report, and we would rather have it than not.