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Writing code is cheap now

simonwillison.net

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Re: Writing code is cheap now

#161

Post by beagle3 »

malfist wrote: post #21

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

Code you can’t just throw away is a liability because you have to keep supporting it / servicing it. Claude Code and friends also change that part of the cost equation:

You might not get gcc/llvm level optimization from a newly built compiler - but if you had a home-built one, which took $15,000/month engineer to support (for years!) you can now get a new one for $20,000 every 3 months, for a 50% cost saving, each time changing your requirements (which you couldn’t do before).

Code used to be a liability, like a car or an apartment for the average person. Now it’s a liability, like a car or apartment for Bill Gates.

Re: Writing code is cheap now

#162

Post by unfunco »

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…

Computer programming is cheap. Software engineering is expensive.

Re: Writing code is cheap now

#163

Post by beagle3 »

torginus wrote: post #78

I think there's a good parallel with AI images - generating pictures has gotten ridiculously easy and simple, yet producing art that is meaningful or wanted by anyone has gotten only mildly easier. Despire the explosion of AI art, the amount of meaningful art in the world is increased only by a tiny amount.

But the amount of pleasing useful art has gone up x1000; If I had a blog, I would now have access to art that would be a perfect fit for my words, whereas 5 years ago, I would have to do with a my own (talent-lacking) doodles.

Would some people prefer no art/illustration to AI generated art? Sure. But even more would prefer no art to my doodles.

Re: Writing code is cheap now

#164

Post by cryptonector »

> Here's what I mean by "good code":

> [...]

> - It’s simple and minimal - it does only what’s needed, in a way that both humans and machines can understand now and maintain in the future.

But do the humans need to actually understand the code? A "yes" means the bottleneck is understanding (code review, code inspection). A "no" means you can go faster, but at some risk.

Re: Writing code is cheap now

#165

Post by akiselev »

simonw wrote: post #144
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 agen…

Totally agreed. I’ve been reverse engineering Altium’s file format to enable agents to vibe-engineer electronics and though I’m on my third from scratch rewrite in as many weeks, each iteration improves significantly in quality as the previous version helps me to explore the problem space and instruct the agent on how to do red/green development [1]. Each iteration is tens of thousands of lines of code which would have been impossible to write so fast before so it’s been quite a change in perspective, treating so much code as throw away experimentation.

I’m using a combination of 100s of megabytes of Ghidra decompiled delphi DLLs and millions of lines of decompiled C# code to do this reverse engineering. I can’t imagine even trying such a large project for LLMs so while a good implementation is still taking a lot of time, it’s definitely a lot cheaper than before.

[1] I saw your red/green TDD article/book chapter and I don’t think you go far enough. Since we have agents, you can generalize red/green development to a lot of things that would be impractical to implement in tests. For example I have agents analyze binary diffs of the file format to figure out where my implementation is incorrect without being bogged down by irrelevant details like the order or encoding of parameters. This guides the agent loop instead of tests.

Re: Writing code is cheap now

#166

Post by beagle3 »

Oras wrote: post #29

> It’s simple and minimal This. All LLM code I saw so far was lots of abstraction to the point that it’s hard to maintain. It is testable for sure, but the complications cost is so high. Something else that is not addressed in the article is working within enterprise env where new technologies are adopted in much slower paces compared to startups. LLMs come with strange and complicated patterns to solve these problem…

Because it has been trained on Java class spaghetti.

When it’s trained on enough APL/K code, you’ll get minimal abstraction.

Re: Writing code is cheap now

#167

Post by Quothling »

cryptonector wrote: post #164

> Here's what I mean by "good code": > [...] > - It’s simple and minimal - it does only what’s needed, in a way that both humans and machines can understand now and maintain in the future. But do the humans need to actually understand the code? A "yes" means the bottleneck is understanding (code review, code inspection). A "no" means you can go faster, but at some risk.

> But do the humans need to actually understand the code? A "yes" means the bottleneck is understanding (code review, code inspection). A "no" means you can go faster, but at some risk.

I always thought of things like code reviews as semi pseudo-science in most cases. I've sat through meetings where developers obviously understand the code that they are reviewing, but where they didn't understand anything about the system as a whole. If your perfect function pulls on 800 external dependencies that you trust. Trust because it's too much of a hazzle to go through them. I'd argue that in this situation you don't understand your code at all. I don't think it matters and I certainly don't think I'm better than anyone else in this regard. I only know how things work when it matters.

If anything, I think AI will increase human understanding without the need to write computer unfriendly code like "Clean Code", "DRY" and so on.

Re: Writing code is cheap now

#168

Post by wlruys »

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…

Definitely the market incentives for "good code" have never been worse, but I'm wouldn't be so sure the cost of migrating decent pieces of generated code to good code is worse than writing good code from whole cloth.

Re: Writing code is cheap now

#169

Post by danny_codes »

agentifysh wrote: post #84

I 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 ab…

Exactly. I feel like the latest models are basically a couple MCP servers away from just doing the whole thing. You just say, here’s what I want the system to do, and it’ll just do everything. No knowledge required. You need only know how to ask.

Re: Writing code is cheap now

#170

Post by strogonoff »

wlruys wrote: post #168
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…

Definitely the market incentives for "good code" have never been worse, but I'm wouldn't be so sure the cost of migrating decent pieces of generated code to good code is worse than writing good code from whole cloth.

I find that implementing a sound solution from scratch is generally lower effort than taking something that already exists and making it sound.

The former: 1) understand the problem, 2) solve the problem.

The latter: 1) understand the problem, 2) solve the problem, 3) understand how somebody or something else understood & solved the problem, 4) diff those two, 5) plan a transition from that solution to this solution, 6) implement that transition (ideally without unplanned downtime and/or catastrophic loss of data).

This is also why I’m not a fan of code reviews. Code review is basically steps 1–4 from the second approach, plus having to verbally explain the diff, every time.

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