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Code Is Cheap Now, and That Changes Everything

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Re: Code Is Cheap Now, and That Changes Everything

#41

Post by bushido »

datadrivenangel wrote: post #39
bushido wrote: post #33

Interestingly, they landed on a conclusion which I have often argued against these days [0]. Code is absolutely cheap, and previously, it was the most important resource that we guarded. Entire job descriptions and functions were built to guard the engineer's time. Product owners, product managers, customer success, etc., all shielded the engineers who produced code because that was the scarcest resource. With that s…

I partially disagree for two reasons: 1. Code is absolutely cheap, but good, correct, non-vulnerable code is much cheaper than it was a few years ago but is still not free, especially in a large application. 2. Requirements management is less important when the cost of software is lower because iteration is cheaper, but bad customer communication can absolutely result in negatively useful software, and there is a ski…

That's partly the harness for me. I do believe product managers are still important, but they're important in deciding what gets shipped, not what gets built.

Engineers are still important. They're important in building the harness to ensure that anything which is being built/shipped is of sufficient quality.

In my opinion, testing/QA/etc is now the core product.

But the best code that you'll get is literally connecting to the pain point the customer was saying to the agentic workflow that is building your product.

Bad customer communication in my experience is the result of every person who handled the convo pre-engineers posturing the message trying to make sure the next person is motivated to get it to the next gatekeeper.

This is all very biased based on my own workflow though.

Re: Code Is Cheap Now, and That Changes Everything

#43

Post by fxtentacle »

Code is not cheap. It's just heavily subsidised with VC money. But that won't last forever.

Uber Eats also used to be dirt cheap. Surprise! it's not anymore.

And even if you just pay API prices for Opus - as opposed to using a subsidized subscription - you can easily reach the point where the tokens for AI-generated code become comparable in price to just paying a junior dev salary for a manual implementation. AI is great for greenfield projects, where there is little to no existing context. But on real codebases, people memorize large parts of it. That allows them to navigate files with 100k+ tokens in them. (Wherease the Opus API will charge you $2.5 for each time the model runs through 100k thinking tokens reviewing your file.)

But what AI can imitate pretty well is the result of having a clueless middle-manager review your code. So my prediction would be that the AI "revolution" will slim out management layers before it'll reach actual developers.

Re: Code Is Cheap Now, and That Changes Everything

#44

Post by kjksf »

didgetmaster wrote: post #35

An important element that Willison left out of his definition of 'good code' is efficient! Software has an amazing multiplier effect. It can be copied to millions of machines and run billions of times each day. Code that wastes resources (time, memory, disk space, electricity, etc.) can become incredibly expensive to run, even if it was vibe coded in a day for a few dollars. Has anyone taken a serious look at all the…

AI is assisting you. It'll write efficient code if you guide it to write efficient code. You're not a hapless victim of ai written code.

To give you a concrete examples. Recently pretext library made waves. I looked at the code and noticed that isCJK could possibly faster.

So I spent 30 minutes TELLING claude to write a benchmark and implement several different, hopefully faster, versions. Some claude came up with by itself and some were based on my guidance.

You can see the result here: https://github.com/chenglou/pretext/issues/2

The original isCJK, also written by AI (I assume), was fast. It wasn't obviously slow like lots of human JavaScript code I see.

Claude did implement a faster version.

Could I do the same thing (write multiple implementations and benchmark them) without Claude? Yes.

Would I do it? Probably not. It would take significantly longer than 30 min. and I don't have that much time to spend on isCJK.

Would I achieve as good result? Probably no. The big win came from replacing for .. of with regular for loop. Something that didn't occur to me but Claude did it because I instructed it to "come up with ideas to speed it up". I'm an expert in writing fast code but I don't know everything and I all good ideas. AI knows everything, you just need to poke it the right way.

Re: Code Is Cheap Now, and That Changes Everything

#45

Post by kranner »

kjksf wrote: post #38
kranner wrote: post #12

Towards the end this article contradicts itself so severely I don't think a human wrote this. But this isn’t really about AI enthusiasm or AI scepticism. It’s about industrialisation. It has happened over and over in every sector, and the pattern is always the same: the people who industrialise outcompete those who don’t. You can buy handmade pottery from Etsy, or you can buy it mass-produced from a store. Each propo…

Do you disagree with his analogy? Hand made pottery cannot compete on price with industrially made pottery and therefore majority of pottery is made industrially. 100% human written code cannot compete on price with AI assisted code and therefore majority of code will be written with assistance of AI. The aside about etsy handmade pottery is that because they can't compete with industrially made pottery on price so t…

If the argument was about cost per unit output, bringing in Etsy didn't make sense at all, especially when they explicitly mention it was about valuing different things.

Handmade pottery can certainly be better quality than mass-produced pottery, just like handwritten code can be better quality than AI-assisted code. There is a spate of new MacOS apps that are clearly AI-written, with memory leaks, high CPU usage and UI that doesn't conform to MacOS conventions (in one instance I'm aware of, the interface has changed completely between updates). Of course users can tell the difference.

If you're going to spend a lot of time making sure the AI-generated code is perfect, does the industrialisation analogy still hold? There's a spectrum here from vibe-coded to agentic to Copilot-level assistance to no AI assistance (which may be a little silly) of course.

Re: Code Is Cheap Now, and That Changes Everything

#46

Post by kjksf »

xienze wrote: post #17
nicpottier wrote: post #13

> This isn’t a minor detail, it’s the core constraint that shaped virtually every habit and institution in our industry. I am so so tired of this turn of phrase in LLM created content. I guess I don't know for sure whether this article was LLM written but I suspect so. Or, scarier still we are changing our own writing to match this slop.

I find it amusing that software developers have no issue with having an LLM churn out slop code but have such a visceral reaction to slop articles.

I have no issue with with code generated by e.g. Claude because it's not "slop".

On average, it's probably better than the code I would write.

I say "on average" because AI doesn't make stupid mistakes, doesn't invert logical conditions. I know I do. Which I eventually fix, but it's better to not make them in the first place, hence "on average".

And in cases that AI doesn't generate code up to my quality standards, I re-prompt it until it does. Or fix it myself.

I'm not a hapless victim of AI. I'm a supervisor. I operate a machine that generates good code most of the time but not all of the time. I'm there to spot and correct the "not all of the time" cases.

Re: Code Is Cheap Now, and That Changes Everything

#47

Post by packetlost »

fxtentacle wrote: post #43

Code is not cheap. It's just heavily subsidised with VC money. But that won't last forever. Uber Eats also used to be dirt cheap. Surprise! it's not anymore. And even if you just pay API prices for Opus - as opposed to using a subsidized subscription - you can easily reach the point where the tokens for AI-generated code become comparable in price to just paying a junior dev salary for a manual implementation. AI is…

I doubt that all of the providers hosting open models on open platforms are losing money on serving inference. They have the benefit of not having to pay for training, but the models are open and aren't going away anytime soon.

Re: Code Is Cheap Now, and That Changes Everything

#48

Post by didgetmaster »

kjksf wrote: post #44
didgetmaster wrote: post #35

An important element that Willison left out of his definition of 'good code' is efficient! Software has an amazing multiplier effect. It can be copied to millions of machines and run billions of times each day. Code that wastes resources (time, memory, disk space, electricity, etc.) can become incredibly expensive to run, even if it was vibe coded in a day for a few dollars. Has anyone taken a serious look at all the…

AI is assisting you. It'll write efficient code if you guide it to write efficient code. You're not a hapless victim of ai written code. To give you a concrete examples. Recently pretext library made waves. I looked at the code and noticed that isCJK could possibly faster. So I spent 30 minutes TELLING claude to write a benchmark and implement several different, hopefully faster, versions. Some claude came up with by…

What worries me is that good, efficient code will no longer be widely shared like before. Everyone will just write their own inefficient version of a general purpose function or library because Claude or some other AI coder made it cheap and easy.

Re: Code Is Cheap Now, and That Changes Everything

#49

Post by cr125rider »

voidUpdate wrote: post #30
kjksf wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not first time in history that RAM prices spiked. And it'll be resolved the same way all others were. demand > supply => higher prices => incentive to produce more => produce more => supply > demand => lower prices The drastic drop in price of code is permament.

How long does it take to spin up enough completely new chip fabs to supply the demand?

Exactly. The problem with capitalism is how slow it is to respond to changes.

Re: Code Is Cheap Now, and That Changes Everything

#50

Post by csomar »

kjksf wrote: post #38
kranner wrote: post #12

Towards the end this article contradicts itself so severely I don't think a human wrote this. But this isn’t really about AI enthusiasm or AI scepticism. It’s about industrialisation. It has happened over and over in every sector, and the pattern is always the same: the people who industrialise outcompete those who don’t. You can buy handmade pottery from Etsy, or you can buy it mass-produced from a store. Each propo…

Do you disagree with his analogy? Hand made pottery cannot compete on price with industrially made pottery and therefore majority of pottery is made industrially. 100% human written code cannot compete on price with AI assisted code and therefore majority of code will be written with assistance of AI. The aside about etsy handmade pottery is that because they can't compete with industrially made pottery on price so t…

This is interesting because the cost of cloning code is zero. The human written code could be cheaper than the AI one because of the cost of distribution. The same does not apply for pottery because to create/distribute an extra bowl, you need >0 resources.

My point is (and the issue I have with the article) is that the quality of code (whatever that means) is not measured by the number of lines. Whether the code is generated by AI or humans, the market is not going to care. Same where it didn't care whether it was written by someone in Silicon Valley or in the middle of East Asia.

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