Put another way: “reading code costs the same as it always did” arguably more when you consider that the cost of reading goes down when the ability read goes up. in other words if you wrote the thing it is likely you can read it fast. but reading someone elses stuff is harder.
Writing code is cheap now
81–90 of 522 posts
Re: Writing code is cheap now
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
This burden of review will go down as FOSS maintainers involve AI more.
unlikely, FOSS is mostly driven by zero-cost maintenance but AI tools needs money to burn. So only few FOSS project will receive sponsored tools and some definitely reject to use by ideological reasons (for example it could be considered as poison pill from copyright perspective).
Re: Writing code is cheap now
#83Writing code has been cheap for a while now. Writing good software is still expensive. It's going to take everybody a while to figure that out (just like with outsourcing)
Yeah, it’s odd watching the outsourcing debate play out again. The results are gonna be the same.
Which is a shame, cause I think LLMs have a lot more use for software dev than writing code. And that’s really what’s going to shift the industry - not just the part willing to cut on quality.
Re: Writing code is cheap now
#84I see lot of comments downplaying the significance of this but other than very large and/or mission critical infrastructure roles, your "taste and experience" is going to become cheap just like code.
Currently there is this notion that white collar workers and artists still have which is that they bring "taste" too to the experience but eventually AI will come for those as well, may or may not be LLM, and not sure about timelines.
Even as we speak, when I read through HN comments, I always ask : "Did an AI write this" or did someone use AI to help write their response. This goes beyond HN but any photo or drawing or music I hear now I ask the same question but eventually nobody will care because we are climbing out of uncanny valley very quickly.
Re: Writing code is cheap now
#85[flagged]
Out of curiosity, are you the same person who's constantly creating brand new accounts to have a go at me or are there more than one of you?
Re: Writing code is cheap now
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed: The act of actually typing the code into an editor was never the hard or valuable part of software engineering. The value comes from being able to design applications that work well, with reasonable performance and security properties.
It wasn't the hard or valuable part of software engineering, but it was a very time-consuming part. That's what's interesting about this new era - the time-consuming-but-easy bit has suddenly stopped being time-consuming.
Agreed, often see cope from managers along the line of “writing the code was never the bottleneck”. Well, sure felt like it.
Re: Writing code is cheap now
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You completely ignored the post you're replying to. To recap, the author disagrees that writing code is cheap, because we've collectively invested trillions of dollars and redirected entire supply chains into automating code generation. The externalities will be paid for generations to come by all of humanity; it's just not reflected in your Claude subscription.
GP is not totally ignoring the post he replied to: we have models that are basically 6-months behind closed SOTA models and that we can run in the cloud and we fully know how much these costs to run.
The cat is out of the bag: compute shall keep getting cheaper as it's always been since 60 years or something.
It's always been maintenance that's been the killer and GP is totally right about that.
And if we look at a company like Cloudflare who basically didn't have any serious outage for five years then had five serious outages in six months since they drank the AI kool-aid, we kinda have a first data point on how amazing AI is from a maintenance point of view.
We all know we're generating more lines of underperforming, insecure, probably buggy, code than ever before.
We're in for a wild ride.
Re: Writing code is cheap now
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of the most interesting aspects is when LLMs are cheap and small enough so that apps can ship with a builtin one so that it can adjust code for each user based on input/usage patterns.
I've heard this referenced multiple times and I have yet to hear the value be clearly articulated. Are you saying that every user would eventually be using a different app? Wouldn't it eventually get to the point that negates the need for the app developer anyways since you would eventually be unable to offer any kind of support, or are we just talking design changing while the actual functionality stays the same? Ho…
> I've heard this referenced multiple times and I have yet to hear the value be clearly articulated.
Me too, and I see this as _incredibly_ wasteful.
Re: Writing code is cheap now
#89Code 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…
I think we’re falling into a trap of overestimating the value of incrementally directing it. The output is all coming from the same brain so what stops someone just getting lucky with a prompt and generation that one-shots the whole thing you spent time breaking down and thinking about. The code quality will be the same, and unless you’re directing it to the point where you may as well be coding the old way, the decision-making is the same too.
Re: Writing code is cheap now
#90Code is cheap is the same as saying "Buying on credit is easy". Code is a liability, not an asset.
I would normally agree, but I think the "code is a liability" quote assumes that humans are reading and modifying the code. If AI tools are also reading and modifying their own code, is that still true?
You have to be able to express the change you want in natural language. This is not always possible due to ambiguity.
Next to that, eventually you run into the same issue that we humans run into: no more context windows.
But we as software engineers have learned to abstract away components, to reduce the cognitive load when writing code. E.g., when you write file you don't deal with syscalls anymore.
This is different with AI. It doesn't abstract away things, which means you requesting a change might make the AI make a LOT of changes to the same pattern, but this can cause behavior to change in ways you haven't anticipated, haven't tested, or haven't seen yet.
And because it's so much code to review, it doesn't get the same scrutiny.