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Writing code is cheap now

simonwillison.net

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Re: Writing code is cheap now

#331

Post by gitprolinux »

agentultra wrote: post #328

Each line of code is a liability. I think it’s funny that we’re all measuring lines of code now and smiling. It was/is expensive because engineers are trying to manage the liability exposure of their employers. Agents give us a fire hose of tech debt that anyone can point at production. I don’t think the tool itself is bad. But I do think people need to reconsider claims like this and be more careful about building s…

Writing code is expensive. Maintaining code is expensive. Whatever way, it ain't cheap.

Re: Writing code is cheap now

#332

Post by softwaredoug »

AyanamiKaine wrote: post #327

> 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. Wasn't writing code always cheap? I see this more like a strawmen argument. What is clean code? Tested code? Should each execution path of a function be tested with each possibl…

> Wasn't writing code always cheap?

No.

If you’re a startup that wanted to ship your product, you were stuck hiring developers and waiting 6 months. I’m old enough to remember th “6-8 weeks” it was supposed to take to build the first version of Stackoverflow (hint it was more like several months).

Creating a v1 of a product / feature is now cheap. When you’re a mature product and need to make complicated / iterative decisions - that’s not cheap and requires expertise to make good decisions.

Re: Writing code is cheap now

#333

Post by whoisthemachine »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #87
tadfisher wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

> compute shall keep getting cheaper as it's always been since 60 years or something

past success is not a strong indicator for future success.

Re: Writing code is cheap now

#334

Post by Ronsenshi »

ej88 wrote: post #69
Ronsenshi wrote: post #12

I'm very curious to see how this will affect the job market. All the recent CS grads, all the coding bootcamp graduates - where would they end up in? And then there's medium/senior engineers that would have to switch how they work to oversee the hordes of AI agents that all the hype evangelists are pushing on the industry. Not an employee market, that's for sure.

the top % of talent is still extremely hard to get, perhaps moreso saw an article recently where every sector is seeing a reduction in IT/devs except for tech and ai companies if your company is in a sector where eng is a cost-center and the product is not directly tied to your engineers / your company is pushing for efficiency it's an employer's market

I don't think it makes sense to consider top % of the talent - relative to the total amount of engineers I imagine it would be minuscule.

It's the rest who will have to deal with shrinking number of positions, higher competition and possibly decrease in compensation due to said competition.

Re: Writing code is cheap now

#335

Post by gchamonlive »

AyanamiKaine wrote: post #327

> 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. Wasn't writing code always cheap? I see this more like a strawmen argument. What is clean code? Tested code? Should each execution path of a function be tested with each possibl…

I think code was always expensive. If it seemed cheap, the cost was hidden somewhere else.

When I started coding professionally, I joined a team of only interns in a startup, hacking together a SaaS platform that had relative financial success. While we were very cheap, being paid below minimum wage, we had outages, data corruption, db wipes, server terminations, unresolved conflicts making their way to production and killing features, tons of tech debt and even more makeshift code we weren't aware of...

So yeah, while writing code was cheap, the result had a latent cost that would only show itself on occasion.

So code was always expensive, the challenge was to be aware of how expensive sooner rather than later.

The thing with coding agents is that it seems now that you can eat your cake and have it too. We are all still adapting, but results indicate that given the right prompts and processes harnessing LLMs quality code can be had in the cheap.

Re: Writing code is cheap now

#336

Post by jraph »

softwaredoug wrote: post #332
AyanamiKaine wrote: post #327

> 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. Wasn't writing code always cheap? I see this more like a strawmen argument. What is clean code? Tested code? Should each execution path of a function be tested with each possibl…

> Wasn't writing code always cheap? No. If you’re a startup that wanted to ship your product, you were stuck hiring developers and waiting 6 months. I’m old enough to remember th “6-8 weeks” it was supposed to take to build the first version of Stackoverflow (hint it was more like several months). Creating a v1 of a product / feature is now cheap. When you’re a mature product and need to make complicated / iterative…

> I’m old enough to remember th “6-8 weeks” it was supposed to take to build the first version of Stackoverflow (hint it was more like several months).

And they had to do this without help from Stack Overflow! :-)

Re: Writing code is cheap now

#338

Post by dasil003 »

inejge wrote: post #202
simonw wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. Which is nuance that will get overlooked or waved away by upper management who see the cost of hiring developers, know that developers "write code", and can compare the developer salary with a Claude/Codex/whatever subscrip…

Sure, but clueless leadership is not a new thing. While big companies with structural moats can shamble along with a surprising amount of dysfunction (which is why they tolerate so many muppets in middle management), even they rely on some baseline of system integrity that will erode pretty quickly if they let go of the people who know how things work.

Don’t get me wrong, I think SWE headcounts will reduce over time, but the mechanism will be teams that know how to leverage AI effectively will dominate ones who don’t. This takes more market cycles though, and it’s even hard to nail down the specifics of these skills with the speed agentic coding tools are currently evolving. My advice is make yourself part of the second group, and worry less about bad management decisions that are inevitable.

Re: Writing code is cheap now

#339

Post by Rover222 »

I'm consistently shocked at how much cope about AI is still in hacker news threads. Clinging to the idea that human taste and skill in writing code is still no match for AI.

Yes we still need humans in the code loop, but that window is tiny (relative to the lines of code written) and getting smaller quickly.

A new feature with 1000 lines of code can now be written in 2 minutes, and often work just as desired. Yes, almost always something can be refactored, etc, but it works, and it's good.

Denying that code is now MUCH cheaper than it was pre-AI is... head in the sand stuff, I think?

Re: Writing code is cheap now

#340

Post by kranner »

kakacik wrote: post #296
ap99 wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Code has a generation cost and a maintenance cost. If you just look at generation then sure it's super cheap now. If you look at maintenance, it's still expensive. You can of course use AI to maintain code, but the more of it there the more unwieldy it gets to maintain it even with the best models and harnesses.

I 'love' that folks are seemingly inching slowly towards more acceptance of crappy llm code. Because it costs marginally less to produce to production if you just pass some smoke tests? Have we not learned anything about technical debt and how it bites back hard? Its not even seniority question, rather just sane rational approach to our craft unless one wants to jump companies every few months like a toxic useless ap…

The inching-towards-acceptance of crappy processes is quite influencer-driven as well, with said influencers if not directly incentivised by LLM providers, then at least indirectly incentivised by the popularity of outrageous exhortations.

There's definitely a chunk of the developer population that's not going to trade the high-craft aspects of the process for output-goes-brrr. A Faustian bargain if ever I saw one. If some are satisfied by what comes down to vibe-testing and vibe-testing, I guess we wish them well from afar.

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