[dead]
Writing code is cheap now
371–380 of 522 posts
Re: Writing code is cheap now
#372Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 an…
So code was apparently cheap, but in fact it was expensive because it was low quality. Now with LLMs, code is cheap and it also has quality, therefore "quality code can be had in the cheap". Do you really believe this is the case? Why don't companies fire all their developers if they can have an algorithm that can output cheap and quality code?
> Why don't companies fire all their developers if they can have an algorithm that can output cheap and quality code?
Because it takes an experienced developer to get the machine to output cheap and quality code well enough to be useful.
That developer is just a whole lot more valuable now, because they can do more work at a higher quality.
Re: Writing code is cheap now
#373you'd think this guy would get tired of writing about AI all day
Grifters gonna grift.
Re: Writing code is cheap now
#374Not sure if “code has always been expensive” is the right framing. Typing out a few hundred lines of code was never the real bottleneck. What was expensive was everything around it: making it correct, making it maintainable (often underestimated), coordinating across teams and supporting it long term. You can also overshoot: Testing every possible path, validating across every platform, or routing every change throug…
> The long-term effect is less clear. If we generate more code, faster, does that reduce cost or just increase the surface area we need to maintain, test, secure, and reason about later?
My take is that the focus is mostly oriented towards code, but in my experience everything around code got cheaper too. In my particular case, I do coding, I do DevOps, I do second level support, I do data analysis. Every single task I have to do is now seriously augmented by AI.
In my last performance review, my manager was actually surprised when I told him that I am now more a manager of my own work than actually doing the work.
This also means my productivity is now probably around 2.5x what it was a couple of years ago.
Re: Writing code is cheap now
#375Not sure if “code has always been expensive” is the right framing. Typing out a few hundred lines of code was never the real bottleneck. What was expensive was everything around it: making it correct, making it maintainable (often underestimated), coordinating across teams and supporting it long term. You can also overshoot: Testing every possible path, validating across every platform, or routing every change throug…
code was expensive, is and will be expensive. the real cost is hidden. takes a mature eye to see a codebase that works and is not a dumpster fire.
correctness (doing what its supposed to, nothing else), maintainability (accommodating unknown future changes), cost ( deployment, refactoring, integrations) and performance (making the right tradeoffs) are not obvious, don't come naturally till you burn your fingers and differentiate a good from a horrible end result.
Re: Writing code is cheap now
#376The key is what we consider good code. Simon’s list is excellent, but I’d push back on this point:
> it does only what’s needed, in a way that both humans and machines can understand now and maintain in the future
We need to start thinking about what good code is for agents, not just for humans.
For a lot of the code I’m writing I’m not even “vibe coding” anymore. I’m having an agent vibe code for me, managing a bunch of other agents that do the actual coding. I don’t really want to look at the code, just as I wouldn’t want to look at the output of a C compiler the way my dad did in the late ’80s.
Over the last few decades we’ve evolved a taste for what good code looks like. I don’t think that taste is fully transferable to the machines that are going to take over the actual writing and maintaining of the code. We probably want to optimize for them.
Re: Writing code is cheap now
#377Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the cost and work remains the same. What has change is efficiency. Previously people had to manually program byte after byte. Then came C and streamlined it, allowing faster development. With python I can write a simple debugging UI server with a few lines. There are frameworks that allow me to complete certain tasks in hours. You do not need to program everything from scratch. The more code, the faster every…
C, Python, and frameworks don't generate all-new code for every task: you're taking advantage of stuff that's thoroughly tested. That simple debugging UI server is probably using some well-tested libraries, which you can reasonably trust to be bug-free (and which can be updated later to fix any bugs, without breaking your code that relies on them). With AI-generated code, this isn't the case.
Depends on what you think with AI-generated code. Do you mean vibe-coded? If yes, then I agree, but there are also other scenarios of AI-generated code.
I use regularly AI in my hobby projects, it provides me feedback, proposed other libraries to use, or other solutions. It generates some classes for which I write tests. I also need to understand the code it generates. If I don't I don't use it. It does speed up my process of creation of code.
If other people also are accelerated lets say 30% then, everything is sped up, cheaper. I think many people use it AI like that. It is just a tool, like a hammer, with which you can harm yourself if you do not know how to use it.
Re: Writing code is cheap now
#378Not sure if “code has always been expensive” is the right framing. Typing out a few hundred lines of code was never the real bottleneck. What was expensive was everything around it: making it correct, making it maintainable (often underestimated), coordinating across teams and supporting it long term. You can also overshoot: Testing every possible path, validating across every platform, or routing every change throug…
Honestly, if I would just get what the end user “really wants” (they often don’t even know) that would save a huge percentage of the overall cost, and that’s not code that’s human nature.
Re: Writing code is cheap now
#379The 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.
Agree, and I'd add: the feedback loop between decision and consequence got dramatically shorter. You can test an architectural hypothesis in hours instead of weeks. That part is genuinely powerful. But faster feedback also means bad decisions propagate faster. The skill isn't generating three implementations in parallel -- it's knowing which one won't page you at 3am. That judgment comes from having been paged at 3am…
> The skill isn't generating three implementations in parallel -- it's knowing which one won't page you at 3am.
100% this.
Re: Writing code is cheap now
#380Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the code is being used by a small group of people who are willing to figure out and share workarounds for those bugs - internal staff, for example.
Aren’t you also paying internal staff for their time. Waisting their time is waisting your money.
I've been in these situations before. If there's a known bug in an internal tool that would take the development team a day to investigate and fix - aka $10,000s - it's often smarter to send around an email saying "don't click the Froople button more than once, and if you do tell Benjamin and he'll fix it in the database for you".
Of course LLMs change that equation now because the fix might take a few minutes instead.