alt Hacker News$165k won't get you far on salaried engineers. There's every chance that 1 engineer, assuming Anthropic employs them, is on $500k or more. Assuming average of $336k in that pool of 50 engineers, then for 11 days for 50 engineers you've spent $710k[0].
Salary info: https://www.levels.fyi/companies/anthropic/salaries/software...
[0]The maths I used (posting because I'm tired and prone to mistakes):
$336,000 / 260 (working days of the year) = ~$1,292.
$1,292 * 11 * 50 = ~$710,769
You don't need top engineers to port a program from one language to the other. Outsource it to India.
Of course, then you can also ask, could it have been done with a cheaper model. Probably yes. But then you wouldn't get free marketing.