This was a pre-LLM YC startup AssemblyMade which was basically this

I don't understand how that would not be a complete joke even if tokens were 2 orders of magnitude more expensive than they are.

Not affordable, unless the devs are in somewhere like Vietnam. And there's still no way they can build as fast. And still, at that price point, quality would be highly questionable. So yh this doesn't survive beyond the joke stage.

If you put that behind an API, you could sell the service much like the AI providers

Thats called Kickstarter

I wonder why that didn’t happen on kick starter. Product hunt was kind of this. It’s actually interesting. Why didn’t this ever happen?

It can work for students as a grant

how expensive do you think tokens are, and/or how cheap do you think a developer is?

Fable will actually finish the job.