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Writing code is cheap now
11–20 of 522 posts
Re: Writing code is cheap now
#12I'm very curious to see how this will affect the job market. All the recent CS grads, all the coding bootcamp graduates - where would they end up in? And then there's medium/senior engineers that would have to switch how they work to oversee the hordes of AI agents that all the hype evangelists are pushing on the industry.
Not an employee market, that's for sure.
Re: Writing code is cheap now
#13One of the biggest challenges right now in my opinion is disambiguating what processes _were_ necessary from those that are _still_ necessary and useful in light of exactly this.
Not necessary: stand up meetings.
Stand up is where I find out what code I’ll have to fix 6 months from now after my team member finishes ignoring all my advice. Useful to me.
Re: Writing code is cheap now
#14The rule of good fast cheap still applies the same as always, but business leaders consistently choose to ignore this reality and insist upon fast and cheap without acknowledging that it will come at the cost of good.
What's worse, is that these decisions are usually made on a short-term, quarterly basis. They never consider that slowing down today might save us time and money in the long-term. Better code means less bugs and faster bug-fixes. LLMs only exacerbate the business leader's worst tendencies.
Re: Writing code is cheap now
#15I'm going to shill my own writing here [1] but I think it addresses this post in a different way. Because we can now write code so much faster and quicker, everything downstream from that is just not ready for it. Right now we might have to slow down, but medium and long term we need to figure out how to build systems in a way that it can keep up with this increased influx of code.
> The challenge is to develop new personal and organizational habits that respond to the affordances and opportunities of agentic engineering.
I don't think it's the habits that need to change, it's everything. From how accountability works, to how code needs to be structured, to how languages should work. If we want to keep shipping at this speed, no stone can be left unturned.
[1]: https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/2/13/the-final-bottleneck/
Re: Writing code is cheap now
#16I don't agree that the code is cheap. It doesn't require a pipeline of people to be trained and that is huge, but it's not cheap. Tokens are expensive. We don't know what the actual cost is yet. We have startups, who aren't turning a profit, buying up all the capacity of the supply chain. There are so many impacts here that we don't have the data on.
Writing code is cheaper than ever. Maintaining it is exactly the same as ever and it scales with the LOC.
Code is still liability but it's undeniable that going from thought to running code is very cheap today.
Re: Writing code is cheap now
#17Code generation is cheap in the same way talk is cheap.
Every human can string words together, but there's a world of difference between words that raise $100M and words that get you slapped in the face.
The raw material was always cheap. The skill is turning it into something useful. Agentic engineering is just the latest version of that. The new skill is mastering the craft of directing cheap inputs toward valuable outcomes.
Re: Writing code is cheap now
#18If coding is so cheap, I hope people start vibing Rust. If the machine can do the work, please have it output in a performant language. I do not need more JS/Python utilities that require embarrassing amounts of RAM.
Re: Writing code is cheap now
#19I don't agree that the code is cheap. It doesn't require a pipeline of people to be trained and that is huge, but it's not cheap. Tokens are expensive. We don't know what the actual cost is yet. We have startups, who aren't turning a profit, buying up all the capacity of the supply chain. There are so many impacts here that we don't have the data on.
Writing code is cheaper than ever. Maintaining it is exactly the same as ever and it scales with the LOC. Code is still liability but it's undeniable that going from thought to running code is very cheap today.
Maintaining it is becoming more costly. The increasing burden of review on FOSS maintainers is one example. AWS going down because an agent decided to re-write a piece of critical infrastructure is another. We are rapidly creating new kinds of liability.
Re: Writing code is cheap now
#20I like the idea of we will always need Pilots. We have autopilot and i'm sure if we tried could automate take off and landing of commercial flights. But we will keep pilots on planes long after they are needed.
To fly a plane with 300+ passengers you still only need 2-3 pilots. That has remained consistent with the invention of autopilot. While we might still need a few human engineer experts, maybe we only need a few for small to medium sized companies? That may not eliminate the career for the top % but it effectively does for the vast majority of engineers.