Writing code is cheap now

This works but still lacks most context around previous tasks and it isn’t trivial to get it to take that into account.

I feel like this article is completely backwards in its premise. It is confusing labor intensity with cost. Software used to be an incredibly labor intensive industry with extremely low automation costs. The cost of running a computer and its associated development environment is so low that it is a rounding error. While you might pay a monthly subscription for an IDE, even that cost barely even registers and it only assists the developer's productivity by a double digit percentage at most.

Here is an illustrative example: Copy paste and traditional code generation features in IDEs (automatically generating getters, setters, hashCode, equals implementations and so on) only reduced the typing of boiler plate code with low cognitive load. This type of code was never very labor intensive to begin with, because it can be reduced down to the act of typing. These tools have made writing code cheap decades ago and you could have written a similar blog post about these tools, because the premise fundamentally misses the actual point.

The cost of writing code has never been an issue in this industry. Software developers don't spend their entire day writing code the same way car mechanics don't spend their day screwing bolts. If you send a car to a mechanic, the mechanic must first diagnose the issue. In some cases the preparatory work is all of the work.

> The cost of writing code has never been an issue in this industry.

What do you think of this part of Paul Ford's recent NYT essay?

> I was the chief executive of a software services firm, which made me a professional software cost estimator. When I rebooted my messy personal website a few weeks ago, I realized: I would have paid $25,000 for someone else to do this. When a friend asked me to convert a large, thorny data set, I downloaded it, cleaned it up and made it pretty and easy to explore. In the past I would have charged $350,000.

> That last price is full 2021 retail — it implies a product manager, a designer, two engineers (one senior) and four to six months of design, coding and testing. Plus maintenance. Bespoke software is joltingly expensive. Today, though, when the stars align and my prompts work out, I can do hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of work for fun (fun for me) over weekends and evenings, for the price of the Claude $200-a-month plan.

From https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/18/opinion/ai-software.html?...

Adding cast iron on airplane is cheap now.

My points though are

1) the development isn't actually using red/green TDD, and

2) the result doesn't show "really good results", including not following a very well-defined specification

so doesn't work as a concrete example of your description of what the second chapter is supposed to be about.

Perhaps you could show the process of refining it more, so it actually is spec compliant and tests all the implemented features?

What's the outcome difference between this approach vs. something which isn't TDD, likes test-after with full branch coverage or mutation testing? Those at least are more automatable than manual inspection, so a better fit to agentic coding, yes?

(Of course regular branch coverage doesn't test all the regexp branches, which makes regexp use tricky to test.)