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Writing code is cheap now

simonwillison.net

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Re: Writing code is cheap now

#401

Post by Stromgren »

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…

I very much appreciate this take. I will say though that I’ve had experience myself where using coding agents lead me to what I’d consider (in your terminology) a better mapping between information and code. Not because the agent was able to do things better than myself, but because, as my project grew and I got wiser on how to best map the information, it was incredibly fast for me to change the code in the right direction and do refactorings that I otherwise might not have gotten around to.

Re: Writing code is cheap now

#402

Post by dingnuts »

simonw wrote: post #382
nikolasdimi wrote: post #362

Not 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…

"What was expensive was everything around it" - when I say that code has always been expensive that's part of what I'm factoring in. But even typing that first few hundred lines used to have a much more significant cost attached. I just pasted 256 lines of JavaScript into the 2000s-era SLOCount tool (classic Perl, I have a WebAssembly hosted version here https://tools.simonwillison.net/sloccount ) and it gave me a 20…

[dead]

Re: Writing code is cheap now

#403

Post by randito »

ericol wrote: post #374
nikolasdimi wrote: post #362

Not 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…

> 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.

I think this is very telling. Unless you have a good manager who is paying attention, a lot of them are clueless and just see the hype of 10x ing your developers and don't care about the nuance of (as they say) all the surrounding bits to writing code. And unfortunately, they just repeat this to the people above them, who also read the hype and just see $$ of reducing headcount. (sorry, venting a little)

Re: Writing code is cheap now

#404

Post by ericol »

randito wrote: post #403
ericol wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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. I think this is very telling. Unless you have a good manager who is paying attention, a lot of them are clueless and just see the hype of 10x ing your developers and don't care about the nuance of (as they say) all the surrounding bits to writing code. And unfort…

He definitely was paying attention.

He had to pause for a second there, arrested by the realization, and was one of the reasons I got an "Exceeds expectations" in one of my KRAs.

Re: Writing code is cheap now

#406

Post by eesmith »

simonw wrote: post #330
eesmith wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fea…

Yeah I'm going to ditch those examples and find better ones. I was hoping to illustrate the idea as simply as possible but they're not up to scratch.

I think the problem-to-solve is a good one. The Google Markdown spec is very clear, with plenty of examples, and I think the problem is well-defined.

I've seen entirely too many examples of how to use TDD which give under-specified toy problems, where the solution is annoyingly incomplete for something more realistic.

And I've seen TDD projects which didn't follow the spec, but instead implemented the developers' misconceptions about the spec.

That's exactly what we see here with Markdown, where there's a spec, along with a lot of non-conformant examples in the training set by people who didn't read the spec but instead based it on their experiences in using Markdown.

The code generated by ChatGPT is almost correct. Seeing the process of how to get from that to a valid and well-tested solution would make for a good demonstration of the full process.

I'll again add that showing how to integrate something like branch coverage or hypothesis testing for automatic test suite generation would be really useful.

Re: Writing code is cheap now

#407

Post by hansmayer »

simonw wrote: post #390
hansmayer wrote: post #386

> "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." Well, yes and no. While producing two screens worth of high quality code, a.k.a. software engineering was always expensive, "coding" as such, as in producing Nth React SPA or…

> I think most of us would be fine if the LLMs could actually just type out the code for us after we engineered it in our heads and explained it to the LLM in English language. Alas, they do produce some sort of code, but not always, or often enough not in a way we desribed it. That's exactly what they do for me - especially since the November model releases (GPT-5.1, Opus 4.5). > Where is the superintelligence we we…

> That's exactly what they do for me - especially since the November model releases (GPT-5.1, Opus 4.5).

I mean it's inherently impossible, given the statistical nature of LLMs, so I am not sure are you claiming this out of ignorance or other interests, but again, what you claim is impossible due to the very nature of LLMs.

Re: Writing code is cheap now

#408

Post by dns_snek »

simonw wrote: post #380
skydhash wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 instea…

> development team a day to investigate and fix - aka $10,000s

What about the non-fictional 99.999999999% of the world that doesn't make $1000/hour?

Re: Writing code is cheap now

#409

Post by trgn »

simonw wrote: post #382
nikolasdimi wrote: post #362

Not 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…

"What was expensive was everything around it" - when I say that code has always been expensive that's part of what I'm factoring in. But even typing that first few hundred lines used to have a much more significant cost attached. I just pasted 256 lines of JavaScript into the 2000s-era SLOCount tool (classic Perl, I have a WebAssembly hosted version here https://tools.simonwillison.net/sloccount ) and it gave me a 20…

people became millionaires writing html 30 years ago. there's been these shifts in the past.
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