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Writing code is cheap now

simonwillison.net

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Re: Writing code is cheap now

#391

Post by davnicwil »

There's a lot of misconception about the intrinsic economic value of 'writing code' in these conversations.

In software, all the economic value is in the information encoded in the code. The instructions on precisely what to do to deliver said value. Typically, painstakingly discovered over months or years of iteration. Which is exactly why people pay for it when you've done it well, because they cannot and will not rediscover all that for themselves.

Writing code, per se, is ultimately nothing more than mapping that information. How well that's done is a separate question from whether the information is good in the first place, but the information being good is always the dominant and deciding factor in whether the software has value.

So obviously there is a lot of value in the mapping - that is writing the code - being done well and, all else being equal, faster. But putting that cart before the horse and saying that speeding this up (to the extent this is even true - a very deep and separate question) has some driving impact on the economics of software I think is really not the right way to look at it.

You don't get better information by being able to map the information more quickly. The quality of the information is entirely independent of the mapping, and if the information is the thing with the economic value, you see that the mapping being faster does not really change the equation much.

A clarifying example from a parallel universe might be the kind of amusing take about consultancy that's been seen a lot - that because generative AI can produce things like slides, consultancies will be disrupted. This is an amusingly naive take precisely because it's so clear that the slides in and of themselves have no value separate from the thing clients are actually paying for: the thinking behind the content in the slides. Having the ability to produce slides faster gets you nothing without the thinking. So it is in software too.

Re: Writing code is cheap now

#392

Post by simonw »

davnicwil wrote: post #391

There's a lot of misconception about the intrinsic economic value of 'writing code' in these conversations. In software, all the economic value is in the information encoded in the code. The instructions on precisely what to do to deliver said value. Typically, painstakingly discovered over months or years of iteration. Which is exactly why people pay for it when you've done it well, because they cannot and will not…

> You don't get better information by being able to map the information more quickly.

This ties quite neatly into the concept of "cognitive debt" that's doing the rounds at the moment: https://simonwillison.net/tags/cognitive-debt/

Cognitive debt accumulates when you move so fast on the implementation that your mental model of what the software does and how it works falls behind.

Re: Writing code is cheap now

#393

Post by sillyboi »

I’d like to add an obvious point that is often overlooked.

LLMs take on a huge portion of the work related to handling context, navigating documentation, and structuring thoughts. Today, it’s incredibly easy to start and develop almost any project. In the past, it was just as easy to get overwhelmed by the idea of needing a two-year course in Python (or any other field) and end up doing nothing.

In that sense, LLMs help people overcome the initial barrier, a strong emotional hurdle, and make it much easier to engage in the process from the very beginning.

Re: Writing code is cheap now

#394

Post by gchamonlive »

lp4v4n wrote: post #349
gchamonlive wrote: post #335

Earlier 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?

Because cheap and quality code is only part of the story. The code needs to solve the right problem and that is a domain only a human can operate, at least for now. Back then when I was inexperienced I couldn't write good code, but I could sit with the company's CTO while he explained the domain, the challenges and the goal of the project. I could talk with domain experts and understand what the common solutions to the problems were. These are things that for an LLM to do would require untold amounts of context or a specialized model that understands the domain.

But the thing is, there are many unknowns. We humans are very capable of adapting as we go. LLMs have a fixed data they were trained on and prompt engineering can only get you so far.

I think anyone asking this with the intention of actually replacing humans with LLMs don't really understand neither humans nor LLMs. They are just talking money.

Re: Writing code is cheap now

#395

Post by AyanamiKaine »

fragmede wrote: post #350
lp4v4n wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I don't know if you've heard, but there have been a large number of layoffs in the tech sector recently. Whether they're actually related to AI as executives claim, and not section 174 of the US IRS tax code in the BBB, is known only to them, but if your argument hinges on people having not been fired when there have been layoffs, you may need a different one.

I think a major contributor to the layoffs is companies hiring to much people around covid[1]. I cant find good stats for the years 2019-2026 besides looking at now and the past directly. There are some data for the ukranin side djinni[1][2] and for US IT job postings[3].

I dont think AI is the reason for the layoffs. Its just easier to say "because of AI we are firing" than to say "because we overhired and its actually our fault".

[1]https://djinni.substack.com/p/2021-in-review [2]https://blog.djinni.co/post/q1-analytics-en [3]https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE

Re: Writing code is cheap now

#396

Post by gchamonlive »

ryaniscool wrote: post #348
gchamonlive wrote: post #335

Earlier 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…

> 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. It's cheaper but not cheap If you're building a variation of a CRUD web app, or aggregating data from some data source(s) into a chart or table, you're right. It's like magic. I n…

> It's cheaper but not cheap

It's quite cheap if you consider developer time. But it's only as cheap as you can effectively drive the model, otherwise you are just wasting tokens on garbage code.

> LLM becomes a helpful tool but requires a ton of guidance

I think this is always going to be the case. You are driving the agent like you drive a bike, it'll get you there but you need to be mindful of the clueless kid crossing your path.

For some projects I had good results just letting the agent loose. For others I'd have to make the tasks more specific and granular before offloading to the LLM. I see nothing wrong with it.

Re: Writing code is cheap now

#397

Post by zeroonetwothree »

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 made a SO clone in 1 week at a previous job (ok not 100% feature complete obviously but good enough to start using). This is by myself with no AI of course (10 years ago).

With Claude Code today I could do it maybe 2x faster? Maybe not that much even though, a lot of time is spent not on purely mechanically typing out characters so it’s not a huge savings necessarily.

Re: Writing code is cheap now

#398

Post by mojoe »

davnicwil wrote: post #391

There's a lot of misconception about the intrinsic economic value of 'writing code' in these conversations. In software, all the economic value is in the information encoded in the code. The instructions on precisely what to do to deliver said value. Typically, painstakingly discovered over months or years of iteration. Which is exactly why people pay for it when you've done it well, because they cannot and will not…

nicely said. I've been thinking a lot about how the bottleneck in the limit is getting your intent into the machine. Over time as AI improves it'll get better and better at extracting your intent just from situational context, but this only helps if you're willing to abdicate more and more judgement to the machine.

Eventually you may get to the point where the machine has all the context about the scenario and all the knowledge about how you think, and so will always perfectly be aligned with your intent, but when that day comes the thing will have far surpassed your decision-making capability and you won't be in the loop anymore anyway.

Re: Writing code is cheap now

#399

Post by skydhash »

Majromax wrote: post #357
kakacik wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Have we not learned anything about technical debt and how it bites back hard? I think LLMs are changing the nature of technical debt in weird ways, with trends that are hard to predict. I've found LLMs surprisingly useful in 'research mode', taking an old and badly-documented codebase and answering questions like "where does this variable come from, and what are its ultimate consumers?" Its answers won't be as natu…

> taking an old and badly-documented codebase and answering questions like "where does this variable come from, and what are its ultimate consumers?"

Why do you even need an LLM for this? Code is formal notation, it’s not magic. Unless the code is obfuscated, even bad code is pretty clean on what they’re doing and how various symbols are created and used. What is not clear is “why” and the answer is often a business or a technical decision.

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