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Writing code is cheap now

simonwillison.net

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Re: Writing code is cheap now

#51

Post by fxtentacle »

hansonkd wrote: post #7

I like the idea of we will always need Pilots. We have autopilot and i'm sure if we tried could automate take off and landing of commercial flights. But we will keep pilots on planes long after they are needed.

The Airbus A320neo can already takeoff, ascend, cruise, descend, and land all by autopilot. It can even download your flight plan from the airline's servers.

But you still need the pilots because the system can only handle the happy path. As soon as there's any blockade or strong weather change, the autopilot will just turn off. And then you need the pilots.

I would say software engineering with AI is similar: The AI can handle CRUD just fine. But once things get messy, you need someone who can actually think.

Re: Writing code is cheap now

#52

Post by SignalStackDev »

the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #15

I'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…

The linked article is worth reading alongside this one.

The thing I'd add from running agents in actual production (not demos, but workflows executing unattended for weeks): the hard part isn't code volume or token cost. It's state continuity.

Agents hallucinate their own history. Past ~50-60 turns in a long-running loop, even with large context windows, they start underweighting earlier information and re-solving already-solved problems. File-based memory with explicit retrieval ends up being more reliable than in-context stuffing - less elegant but more predictable across longer runs.

Second hard part: failure isolation. If an agent workflow errors at step 7 of 12, you want to resume from step 6, not restart from zero. Most frameworks treat this as an afterthought. Checkpoint-and-resume with idempotent steps is dramatically more operationally stable.

Agree it's not just habits - the infrastructure mental model has to change too. You're not writing programs so much as engineering reliability scaffolding around code that gets regenerated anyway.

Re: Writing code is cheap now

#53

Post by octoclaw »

The 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.

Re: Writing code is cheap now

#54

Post by sethops1 »

ok123456 wrote: post #42
stackghost wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed: The act of actually typing the code into an editor was never the hard or valuable part of software engineering. The value comes from being able to design applications that work well, with reasonable performance and security properties.

Then why did most software fail to do that even before the advent of LLMs?

Because designing systems that work well is difficult. It takes years of experience to develop the muscle memory behind quality systems architecture. Writing the code is an implementation detail (albeit a large one).

Re: Writing code is cheap now

#55

Post by fxtentacle »

ok123456 wrote: post #42
stackghost wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed: The act of actually typing the code into an editor was never the hard or valuable part of software engineering. The value comes from being able to design applications that work well, with reasonable performance and security properties.

Then why did most software fail to do that even before the advent of LLMs?

Are we sure it's not failing anymore after the advent of LLMs?

Re: Writing code is cheap now

#56

Post by mentalgear »

Sometimes it feels what we are seeing is Code becoming just like any other "asset" in the globalised economy: cheap - but not quality; just like the priors of clothing (disintegrating after a few washes), consumer electronics (cheap materials), furniture (Instagram-able but utterly impracticable), etc: all made for quick turn-overs to rake in more profit and generate more waste but none made to last long.

Re: Writing code is cheap now

#57

Post by coldtea »

the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #49
coldtea wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Why? Why do we need to "write code so much faster and quicker" to the point we saturate systems downstream? I understand that we can, but just because we can, does'nt mean we should.

If we want to continue to ship at that speed we will have to. I’m not sure if we should, but seemingly we are. And it causes a lot of problems right now downstream.

We were already rushing and churning products and code of inferior quality before AI (let's e.g. consider the sorry state of macOS and Windows in the past decade).

Using AI to ship more and more code faster, instead of to make code more mature, will make this worse.

Re: Writing code is cheap now

#58

Post by ej88 »

fmbb wrote: post #39
the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #15

I'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 don’t think we can expect all workers at all companies to just adopt a new way of working. That’s not how competition works. If agentic AI is a good idea and if it increases productivity we should expect to see some startup blowing everyone out of the water. I think we should be seeing it now if it makes you say ten times more productive. A lot of startups have had a year of agentic AI now to help them beat their c…

We're already seeing eye-watering, blistering growth from the new hot applied AI startups and labs

Imo the wave of top down 'AI mandates' from incumbent companies is a direct result of the competitive pressure, although it probably wont work as well as the execs think it will

that being said even Dario claims a 5-20% speedup from coding agents, 10x productivity only exists in microcosm prototypes, or if someone was so unskilled oneshotting a localhost web app is a 10x for them

Re: Writing code is cheap now

#59

Post by selridge »

some_random wrote: post #2

One of the biggest challenges right now in my opinion is disambiguating what processes _were_ necessary from those that are _still_ necessary and useful in light of exactly this.

Precisely, especially because habits have been bound up in the high (and difficult to measure!) cost of code. We got precious about it, really.
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