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Writing code is cheap now

simonwillison.net

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Re: Writing code is cheap now

#431

Post by simonw »

zahlman wrote: post #430
simonw wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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". How much will Benjamin's time responding to those calls cost in the long run?

Hopefully none, because your staff will read the email and not click the button more than once.

Or one of them will do it, Benjamin will glare at them and they'll learn not to do it again and warn their coworkers about it.

Or... Benjamin will spend a ton of time on this and use that to successfully argue for the bug to get fixed.

(Or your organization is dysfunctional and ends up wasting a ton of money on time that could have been saved if the development team had fixed the bug.)

Re: Writing code is cheap now

#432

Post by ako »

duxup wrote: post #378
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…

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.

That is also getting cheaper, you can now quickly present him with a few working prototypes so he can quickly make up his mind what best suites him.

Another problem is that most users want different things, that's why you get these big bloated software suites. With LLMs it now also becomes more achievable to build custom software per user.

Re: Writing code is cheap now

#433

Post by LtWorf »

theshrike79 wrote: post #226
LtWorf wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if the constraints and tests are reasonably well specified. if they are, then why would a human be so slow? You're not comparing the same situation.

Because humans need to type with a keyboard, then click around with a mouse. In that time the LLM has made a change, ran tests, committed, pushed, checked that the CI build failed, looked at the CI logs, fixed the issue and the PR is now passing.

In what world is an LLM generating text faster than you can type?

They are certainly slower than me at text generation.

Re: Writing code is cheap now

#434

Post by duxup »

ako wrote: post #432
duxup wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That is also getting cheaper, you can now quickly present him with a few working prototypes so he can quickly make up his mind what best suites him. Another problem is that most users want different things, that's why you get these big bloated software suites. With LLMs it now also becomes more achievable to build custom software per user.

I find it is more a rubber hits the road thing where they have to use it to really understand.

Re: Writing code is cheap now

#435

Post by simonw »

LtWorf wrote: post #433
theshrike79 wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because humans need to type with a keyboard, then click around with a mouse. In that time the LLM has made a change, ran tests, committed, pushed, checked that the CI build failed, looked at the CI logs, fixed the issue and the PR is now passing.

In what world is an LLM generating text faster than you can type? They are certainly slower than me at text generation.

Wow you must be fast at typing!

Can you beat this one? https://chatjimmy.ai/

(It is to be fair running a pretty trash model, a quantized Llama 3.1 8B from ~18 months ago)

Re: Writing code is cheap now

#436

Post by simonw »

bsenftner wrote: post #366
simonw wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you read the whole thing or just the headline? What did you think of my list of characteristics of "good code"?

I re-read to make sure I was not reacting off the cuff. Your list of good code practices is obvious what we want, but that is not going to happen with the way you describe working with AIs. You don't seem to be aware of cognitive load; when you say: "any time our instinct says "don't build that, it's not worth the time" fire off a prompt anyway, in an asynchronous agent session where the worst that can happen is you…

I've written quite a bit about cognitive debt and load recently https://simonwillison.net/tags/cognitive-debt/. It's a very real issue - working with these tools is exhausting if you don't figure out how to pace it, and I've not figured out how to pace it yet.

I'm currently expecting this will be a temporary thing, brought on by the significant new abilities of the November model releases.

Re: Writing code is cheap now

#437

Post by hansmayer »

simonw wrote: post #425
hansmayer wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It's impossible, and yet I experience it on a daily basis. YMMV. I've had a lot of practice at prompting.

> YMMV. I've had a lot of practice at prompting.

Ah, the old "you suck at prompting" angle again, isn't it? If you're going to shill this hard, at least come up with something new and original, this is sounding more than desperate.

Re: Writing code is cheap now

#438

Post by hansmayer »

lunar_mycroft wrote: post #416
hansmayer wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It's impossible for human developers too. Natural language descriptions of a program are either much more painful and time consuming to write than the code they describe, or contain some degree of ambiguity which the thing translating the description into code has to resolve (and the probability of the resolution the entity writing the description would have chosen and the one entity translating it into code chose ma…

I agree - the whole BS of "Hottest new programming language is English" is complete nonsense. There is something about writing the code directly from your mind that skips over the "language circuits" and makes it much more precise. Perhaps as humans with education we obtain an ability to think in programming language itself I suppose? It's probably similar to what happens in the mind of a composer or painter. This is why the natural language will never be the interface the big "AI" companies are making it to be.

Re: Writing code is cheap now

#439

Post by skydhash »

renegat0x0 wrote: post #212
tabs_or_spaces wrote: post #130

> 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. > ... > Writing good code remains significantly more expensive I think this is a bad argument. Code was expensive because you were trying to write the expensive good code in the…

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…

> 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.

I think you got your history wrong. People didn’t program bit by bit. They programmed on paper (flowcharts, pseudo-code, diagrams,…), then encoded that afterwards. There was a lot of programming languages before C like Lisp and APL (which are high-level, btw). Why would they waste precious computer time, when you could plan out procedures on a notepad or a whiteboard.

Re: Writing code is cheap now

#440

Post by simonw »

hansmayer wrote: post #437
simonw wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's impossible, and yet I experience it on a daily basis. YMMV. I've had a lot of practice at prompting.

> YMMV. I've had a lot of practice at prompting. Ah, the old "you suck at prompting" angle again, isn't it? If you're going to shill this hard, at least come up with something new and original, this is sounding more than desperate.

Most people suck at playing the piano. Most people suck at prompting coding agents. If you practice either of those things you'll get better at them.

I really don't understand the "stop telling me I'm holding it wrong" argument. You probably are holding it wrong!

Is this born out of some weird belief that "AI" is meant to be science fiction technology that you don't ever need to learn how to use?

That would help explain why conversations like this are full of people who claim to get great results and other people who say every time they've tried it the results have been terrible.

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