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Writing code is cheap now
151–160 of 522 posts
Re: Writing code is cheap now
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The new skill is mastering the craft of directing cheap inputs toward valuable outcomes. Strongly agree with this. It took me awhile to realize that "agentic engineering" wasn't about writing software it was about being able to very quickly iterate on bespoke tools for solving a very specific problem you have. However, as soon as you start unblocking yourself from the real problem you want to solve, the agentic eng…
It's funny that so many people are using AI and still hasn't really shown up in productivity numbers or product quality yet. I'm going to be really confused if this is still the case at the end of the year. A whole year of access to these latest agentic models has to produce visible economic changes or something is wrong.
My intuition from talking to people across different parts of the industry, is that adoption at bigger companies is really limited or slow, or totally banned. Additionally some developers are not seeing it help their specific roles all that much anyway. This is hard to level with success other people are having, but software is a super broad discipline which I think explains a lot of the mixed success stories.
It seems to depend a lot on the industry and niche you're in, working at an agency I get experience across many different projects and industries and sometimes you are just at the edge of AIs training and it can get very unhelpful. Noting many if not most companies are working on proprietary code in donain specific problems, that isn't all that surprising either.
Re: Writing code is cheap now
#153The 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.
> LLMs make the typing cheap, but they don’t make the reasoning cheap.
LLMs lower the cost of copy/pasting code around, or troubleshooting issues using standard error messages.
Instead of going through Stack Overflow to find how to use a framework to do some specific thing, you prompt a model. You don't even need to know a thing about the language you are using to leverage a feedback loop.
LLMs lower the cost of a multitude of drudge work in developing software, such as having to read the docs to learn how a framework should be used to achieve a goal. You still need to know what you are doing, but you don't need to reinvent the wheel.
Re: Writing code is cheap now
#154I'm going to shill my own writing here [1] but I think it addresses this post in a different way. Because we can now write code so much faster and quicker, everything downstream from that is just not ready for it. Right now we might have to slow down, but medium and long term we need to figure out how to build systems in a way that it can keep up with this increased influx of code. > The challenge is to develop new p…
> If we want to keep shipping at this speed
Do we? Spewing features like explosive diarrhea is not something I want.
Re: Writing code is cheap now
#155I'm going to shill my own writing here [1] but I think it addresses this post in a different way. Because we can now write code so much faster and quicker, everything downstream from that is just not ready for it. Right now we might have to slow down, but medium and long term we need to figure out how to build systems in a way that it can keep up with this increased influx of code. > The challenge is to develop new p…
I was having this conversation at work, where if the promise of AI coding becomes true and we see it in delivery speed, we would need to significantly increase the throughput of all other aspects of the business.
Re: Writing code is cheap now
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you mean to say, "code you don't understand is a liability, not an asset" But please correct me if I'm wrong.
No I said what I meant. Code is a liability, though to your point, code you don't understand is an even bigger liability. Even if I understand all my code, when I go to make changes, if it's 100k lines of code vs 2k lines of code, it's going to take more time and be more error prone. Even if I understand all my code, the intern I hired last week won't and I'll have to teach it to them. Even if I understand all my cod…
I've worked at so many places in my career that "not understanding code" is not an excuse. It is a skill to be able to read and follow code and get up to speed quickly, even on shit codebases. But "AI" generated code makes that so much more difficult, and the "AI" isn't going to walk you through it, and neither will your new coworkers. We aren't in a race to the bottom with "AI", we're in a speedrun to the bottom, and I don't think it's going to end up going too well for whatever developers are left in a few years.
Re: Writing code is cheap now
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of the most interesting aspects is when LLMs are cheap and small enough so that apps can ship with a builtin one so that it can adjust code for each user based on input/usage patterns.
The clear intent is to stop allowing regular people to be able to compute...anything. Instead, you'll be given a screen that only connects to $LLM_SERVER and the only interface will be voice/text in which you ask it to do things. It then does those things non-deterministically, and slower than they would be done right now. But at least you won't have control over how it works!
Weather or not the intent is as nefarious as you suggest, that type of UI is going to be a boon for a lot of people. Most people on the planet are incredibly computer illiterate.
Re: Writing code is cheap now
#158The 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.
For most non-hobby project, the cost of code was in breaking a working system (whether by a bona fide bug, or a change in some unspecified implicit assumption). That made changes to code incredibly expensive - often much more than the original implementation.
It sounds harsh, but over the lifetime of a project, 10-lines/person/day is often a high estimate of the number of lines produced. It’s not because humans type so slow - it is because after a while, it’s all about changing previously written lines in ways that don’t break things.
LLMs are much better at that than humans, if the constraints and tests are reasonably well specified.
Re: Writing code is cheap now
#159> 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…
Spaghetti code was always a thing though
Re: Writing code is cheap now
#160The interesting thing nobody's talking about here is that cheap code generation actually makes throwaway prototypes viable. Before, you'd agonize over architecture because rewriting was expensive. Now you can build three different approaches in a day and pick the one that works. The real cost was never the code itself. It was the decision-making around what to build. That hasn't gotten cheaper at all.
This feels to me like peak sfba mentality on par with "move fast and break things". Outside of trying to create a unicorn, is this really how people create things? It seems to me that in order to obtain the ability to build things that other people like, you need to go through the process of creating things they won't. Like a painter needs to paint a bunch of crappy paintings to learn how to create a good painting. I…
This is how successful things are created. By iterating on less successful things until they become successful.
The cost of iterating (with software) dropped by a few orders of magnitude in the last few months.