Code is cheap. Show me the talk
1–10 of 237 posts
Re: Code is cheap. Show me the talk
#2In January 2026, prototype code is cheap. Shitty production code is cheap. If that's all you need—which is sometimes the case—then go for it.
But actually good code, with a consistent global model for what is going on, still won't come from Opus 4.5 or a Markdown plan. It still comes from a human fighting entropy.
Getting eyes on the code still matters, whether it's plain old AI slop, or fancy new Opus 4.5 "premium slop." Opus is quite smart, and it does its best.
But I've tried seriously using a number of high-profile, vibe-coded projects in the last few weeks. And good grief what unbelievable piles of shit most of them are. I spend 5% of the time using the vibe-coded tool, and 95% of the time trying to uncorrupt my data. I spend plenty of time having Opus try to look at the source to figure out what went wrong in 200,000 lines of vibe-coded Go. And even Opus is like, "This never worked! It's broken! You see, there's a race condition in the daemonization code that causes the daemon to auto-kill itself!"
And at that point, I stop caring. If someone can't be bothered to even read the code Opus generates, I can't be bothered to debug their awful software.
Re: Code is cheap. Show me the talk
#3AI was never the problem we have been having a downgrade in software in general AI just amplifies how badly you can build software. The real problem is people who just dont care about the craft just pushing out human slop, whether it be because the business goes “we can come back to that dont worry” or what have you. At least with AI me coming back to something is right here and right now, not never or when it causes a production grade issue.
Re: Code is cheap. Show me the talk
#4The original phrase "talk is cheap" is generally used to mean "it's easy to say a whole lot of shit and that talk often has no real value." So this cleaver headline is telling me the code has even less value than the talk. That alone betrays a level of ignorance I would expect from the author's work. I go to read the article and it confirmed my suspicion.
Re: Code is cheap. Show me the talk
#5I see a lot of the same (well thought out) pushback on here whenever these kinds of blind hype articles pop up.
But my biggest objection to this "engineering is over" take is one that I don't see much. Maybe this is just my Big Tech glasses, but I feel like for a large, mature product, if you break down the time and effort required to bring a change to production, the actual writing of code is like... ten, maybe twenty percent of it?
Sure, you can bring "agents" to bear on other parts of the process to some degree or another. But their value to the design and specification process, or to live experiment, analysis, and iteration, is just dramatically less than in the coding process (which is already overstated). And that's without even getting into communication and coordination across the company, which is typically the real limiting factor, and in which heavy LLM usage almost exclusively makes things worse.
Takes like this seem to just have a completely different understanding of what "software development" even means than I do, and I'm not sure how to reconcile it.
To be clear, I think these tools absolutely have a place, and I use them where appropriate and often get value out of them. They're part of the field for good, no question. But this take that it's a replacement for engineering, rather than an engineering power tool, consistently feels like it's coming from a perspective that has never worked on supporting a real product with real users.
Re: Code is cheap. Show me the talk
#6The original phrase "talk is cheap" is generally used to mean "it's easy to say a whole lot of shit and that talk often has no real value." So this cleaver headline is telling me the code has even less value than the talk. That alone betrays a level of ignorance I would expect from the author's work. I go to read the article and it confirmed my suspicion.
It's directly an inversion of https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/437173-talk-is-cheap-show-m...
Re: Code is cheap. Show me the talk
#7I see a lot of the same (well thought out) pushback on here whenever these kinds of blind hype articles pop up. But my biggest objection to this "engineering is over" take is one that I don't see much. Maybe this is just my Big Tech glasses, but I feel like for a large, mature product, if you break down the time and effort required to bring a change to production, the actual writing of code is like... ten, maybe twen…
Yeah in a lot of ways, my assertion is that @
“Code is cheap” actually means the opposite of what everyone thinks it does. Software Engineer is even more about the practices we’ve been developing over the past 20 or so years, not less
Like Linus’ observation still stands. Show me that the code you provided does exactly what you think it should. It’s easy to prompt a few lines into an LLM, it’s another thing to know exactly the way to safely and effectively change low level code.
Liz Fong-Jones told a story on LinkedIn about this at HoneyComb, she got called out for dropping a bad set of PR’s in a repo, because she didn’t really think about the way the change was presented.
Re: Code is cheap. Show me the talk
#8I see a lot of the same (well thought out) pushback on here whenever these kinds of blind hype articles pop up. But my biggest objection to this "engineering is over" take is one that I don't see much. Maybe this is just my Big Tech glasses, but I feel like for a large, mature product, if you break down the time and effort required to bring a change to production, the actual writing of code is like... ten, maybe twen…
> Takes like this seem to just have a completely different understanding of what "software development" even means than I do, and I'm not sure how to reconcile it.
You're absolutely right about coding being less than 20% of the overall effort. In my experience, 10% is closer to the median. This will get reconciled as companies apply LLMs and track the ROI. Over a single year the argument can be made that "We're still learning how to leverage it." Over multiple years the 100x increase in productivity claims will be busted.
We're still on the upslope of Gartner's hype cycle. I'm curious to see how rapidly we descend into the Trough of Disillusionment.
Re: Code is cheap. Show me the talk
#9I see a lot of the same (well thought out) pushback on here whenever these kinds of blind hype articles pop up. But my biggest objection to this "engineering is over" take is one that I don't see much. Maybe this is just my Big Tech glasses, but I feel like for a large, mature product, if you break down the time and effort required to bring a change to production, the actual writing of code is like... ten, maybe twen…
They're also great for writing design docs, which is another significant time sink for SWEs.
Re: Code is cheap. Show me the talk
#10The original phrase "talk is cheap" is generally used to mean "it's easy to say a whole lot of shit and that talk often has no real value." So this cleaver headline is telling me the code has even less value than the talk. That alone betrays a level of ignorance I would expect from the author's work. I go to read the article and it confirmed my suspicion.
Did you get very far in? They're referring to a pretty specific contextual usage of the phrase (Linus, back in 2000), not the adage as a whole.