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Writing code is cheap now

simonwillison.net

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Re: Writing code is cheap now

#141

Post by slopinthebag »

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.

Shouldn't you want to ship less code that does more? Since when was LoC the relevant benchmark for engineering?

Re: Writing code is cheap now

#143

Post by gormen »

The cost of code never lived in the typing — it lived in the intent, the constraints, and the reasoning that shaped it. LLMs make the typing cheap, but they don’t make the reasoning cheap. So the economics shift, but the bottleneck doesn’t disappear.

Re: Writing code is cheap now

#144

Post by simonw »

tabs_or_spaces wrote: post #130

> Code has always been expensive. Producing a few hundred lines of clean, tested code takes most software developers a full day or more. Many of our engineering habits, at both the macro and micro level, are built around this core constraint. > ... > Writing good code remains significantly more expensive I think this is a bad argument. Code was expensive because you were trying to write the expensive good code in the…

I was careful to say "Good code still has a cost" and "delivering good code remains significantly more expensive than [free]" rather than the more aesthetically pleasing "Good code is expensive.

I chose this words because I don't think good code is nearly as expensive with coding agents as it was without them.

You still have to actively work to get good code, but it takes so much less time when you have a coding agent who can do the fine-grained edits on your behalf.

I firmly believe that agentic engineering should produce better code. If you are moving faster but getting worse results it's worth stopping and examining if there are processes you could fix.

Re: Writing code is cheap now

#147

Post by analog31 »

slopinthebag wrote: post #142

LLM's have made code cheap in the same way McDonalds has made eating out at a restaurant cheap.

I wonder if they will make code fast in the way that McDonalds made food fast. For many business needs, knowing when a project will finish would be equally or even more valuable than knowing that it will contain more code or employ fewer programmers.

Re: Writing code is cheap now

#148

Post by ehnto »

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…

That's a great insight about iterating on bespoke tools. I have seen the most speed up when diving into new tools, or making new tools as AI can make the initial jump quite painless, and I can get straight to the problem solving. But I get barely any speedup using it on legacy projects in tools I know well. Often enough it slows me down so net benefit is nil or worse.

Another commentor said it makes the easy part easy, and the hard part harder, which I resonate with at the moment.

I am pretty excited by being able to jump deep into real problems without code being the biggest bottleneck. I love coding but I love solving problems more, and coding for fun is very different to coding for outcomes.

Re: Writing code is cheap now

#149

Post by bagacrap »

vntok wrote: post #47
nine_k wrote: post #6

This fact is opening the floodgates of low-end products, which are somehow better than nothing, but are embarrassing to use.

True, however as these products have been designed and coded by LLMs from the ground up in 2025+, they are generally using modern (typed even) languages, the latest version of third party libraries, usually have documentation of sorts... sometimes they even have test suites. As such, they can often be improved as easily as one can prompt, which is much faster and easier than before. Notably in the FOSS world where on…

I've tried very earnestly to use opus 4.5 to get rid of some backlog tasks that were too tedious to do manually. It turns out that they're still extremely tedious because I have to make every single non trivial decision for the model, unless I don't care one iota about the long term sustainability of the code base. And by long term, I mean more than a week. They're good for saving keystrokes or doing fuzzy searches for me. "Design"? No, that is an anthropomorphism.
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