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Writing code is cheap now

simonwillison.net

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Re: Writing code is cheap now

#101

Post by falcor84 »

fmbb wrote: post #95
simonw wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenClaw went from first commit in late November to Super Bowl commercial (it's meant to be the tech behind that AI.com vaporware thing) in February. (Whether you think OpenClaw is good software is kind of beside the point.)

It’s very much not beside the point. Productivity is measured in how much value you get out from the hours your workers put in.

But that only gets you to a philosophical argument about what "value" is. Many would argue that being able to get your thing into a Super Bowl commercial is extremely valuable. I definitely have never built anything that did.

It's very much imperfect, but the only consistently agreed upon and useful definition of "value" we have in the West is monetary value, and in that sense, we have at least a few major examples of AI generating value rapidly.

Re: Writing code is cheap now

#102

Post by falcor84 »

coldtea wrote: post #41
the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #15

I'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 p…

> 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. Why? Why do we need to "write code so much faster and quicker" to the point we saturate systems downstream? I understand that we can, but just because we can, does'nt mean we should.

> to the point we saturate systems downstream

But that's point of TFA, no? Now that writing code is no longer the bottleneck, the upstream and downstream processes have become the new bottlenecks, and we need to figure out how to widen them.

As I see it, the end goal for all of this is generating software at the speed of thought, or at least at the speed of speech. I want the digital butler to whom I could just say - "I'm not happy with the way things happened to day, please change it so that from here on, it'll be like x" - and it'll just respond with "As you wish", and I'll have confidence that it knows me well enough and is capable enough to have actually implemented the best possible interpretation of what I asked for, and that the few miscommunications that do occur would be easy to fix.

We're obviously not close that yet, but why shouldn't we build towards it?

Re: Writing code is cheap now

#103

Post by malfist »

danesparza wrote: post #63
malfist wrote: post #21

Code is cheap is the same as saying "Buying on credit is easy". Code is a liability, not an asset.

I think you mean to say, "code you don't understand is a liability, not an asset" But please correct me if I'm wrong.

No I said what I meant. Code is a liability, though to your point, code you don't understand is an even bigger liability.

Even if I understand all my code, when I go to make changes, if it's 100k lines of code vs 2k lines of code, it's going to take more time and be more error prone.

Even if I understand all my code, the intern I hired last week won't and I'll have to teach it to them.

Even if I understand all my code, I don't remember everything all the time and I can forget about an edge case handed in thousands of lines of code.

Even if I understand all my code, I don't understand my co-workers code, and they don't understand mine.

Even if I understand all my code, I might not want to work for this company the rest of my life.

Re: Writing code is cheap now

#104

Post by daxfohl »

daxfohl wrote: post #98

It's like the allegory of the retired consultant's $5000 invoice (hitting the thing with a hammer: $5, knowing where to hit it: $4995). Yeah, coding is cheaper now, but knowing what to code has always been the more expensive piece. I think AI will be able to help there eventually, but it's not as far along on that vector yet.

Possibly even more important than knowing where to hit it (what to code), is knowing where not to hit it (what not to code). Hitting the thing in the wrong place can lead to catastrophe. Making a code change you don't need can blow up production or paint your architecture into a corner.

AIs so far seem to prefer addition by addition, not addition by subtraction or addition by saying "are you sure?".

This doesn't mean that "code is cheap" is bad. Rather, it means that soon our primary role will be to guide AIs to produce a high proportion of "code that was cheap", while being able to quickly distinguish, prevent, and reject "cheap code".

Re: Writing code is cheap now

#105

Post by falcor84 »

i-e-b wrote: post #96

Writing code has always been cheap. Deciding what the logic should be, and being able to change course was the hard bit.

But that's the thing - changing course is suddenly no longer hard. We've already reached a state where I can have AI generate a decent set of tests from an existing codebase (or better yet, I'd already have them ahead of time), and to then do a massive refactoring or even a full rewrite while I get a good night's sleep. There is nothing "has always been" about this.

Re: Writing code is cheap now

#107

Post by falcor84 »

0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #18

If 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.

It's already happening, particularly with "Ladybird Browser adopts Rust" [0] being at the top of HN today. It's now feasible to quickly iterate on a system's design with a dynamic language like Python, and then, once you're happy with the design, have AI rewrite it into something like Rust or Zig. I can even foresee a future where we intentionally maintain two parallel implementations, with machine-defined translation between them, such that we're able to do massive changes on the higher level implementation in minutes, and then once we finish iterating, have it run overnight to reimplement (or rewrite) it in the performant language. A bit like the difference between a unoptimized debugging version of a project, and the highly optimized one, but on steroids.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47120899

Re: Writing code is cheap now

#108

Post by layer8 »

falcor84 wrote: post #102
coldtea wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Why? Why do we need to "write code so much faster and quicker" to the point we saturate systems downstream? I understand that we can, but just because we can, does'nt mean we should.

> to the point we saturate systems downstream But that's point of TFA, no? Now that writing code is no longer the bottleneck, the upstream and downstream processes have become the new bottlenecks, and we need to figure out how to widen them. As I see it, the end goal for all of this is generating software at the speed of thought, or at least at the speed of speech. I want the digital butler to whom I could just say -…

> Now that writing code is no longer the bottleneck

I think it’s contestable that writing the code was ever the main bottleneck.

> As I see it, the end goal for all of this is generating software at the speed of thought, or at least at the speed of speech.

The question is what distinguishes that from having AGI, and if the answer is “nothing”, then that will change the whole game entirely again.

Re: Writing code is cheap now

#109

Post by dw_arthur »

crystal_revenge wrote: post #91
DrJid wrote: post #17

Code 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…

> The new skill is mastering the craft of directing cheap inputs toward valuable outcomes. Strongly agree with this. It took me awhile to realize that "agentic engineering" wasn't about writing software it was about being able to very quickly iterate on bespoke tools for solving a very specific problem you have. However, as soon as you start unblocking yourself from the real problem you want to solve, the agentic eng…

It's funny that so many people are using AI and still hasn't really shown up in productivity numbers or product quality yet. I'm going to be really confused if this is still the case at the end of the year. A whole year of access to these latest agentic models has to produce visible economic changes or something is wrong.

Re: Writing code is cheap now

#110

Post by coldtea »

simonw wrote: post #75
coldtea wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We were already rushing and churning products and code of inferior quality before AI (let's e.g. consider the sorry state of macOS and Windows in the past decade). Using AI to ship more and more code faster, instead of to make code more mature, will make this worse.

I want to use AI to ship more and more code faster and better . If AI means our product quality goes down we should figure out better ways to use it.

I'm betting on it meaning the product quality going down - and technical debt increasing, which will be dealt with more AI in a downward spiral. Meanwhile college CS majors wont ever bother learning the basics (as AI will handle their coursework, and even their hobby work). Then future AI will train on previous AI output, with the degredation that brings...
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