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Writing code is cheap now

simonwillison.net

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Re: Writing code is cheap now

#511

Post by chr15m »

gombosg wrote: post #488
chr15m wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a good point. Myself is the easiest person to fool. I knocked together a quick analysis of my commit graphs going back several years, if you're interested: https://mccormick.cx/gh/ My average leading up to 2023 was around 2k commits per year. 2023 I started using ChatGPT and I hit my highest commits so far that year at 2,600. 2024 I moved to a different country, which broke my productivity. I started using aid…

Love your approach and that you actually have "before vs. after" numbers to back it up! I personally also use AI in a similar way, strongly guiding it instead of vibe-coding. It reduces frustration because it surely "types" faster and better than me, including figuring out some syntax nuances. But often I jump in and do some parts by myself. Either "starting" something (creating a directory, file, method etc.) to let…

That makes a lot of sense. Staying hands on is key.

Re: Writing code is cheap now

#512

Post by deterministic »

I routinely generate about 90% of my code using custom code generators (not AI), so that portion is relatively inexpensive. The remaining 10%, however, is the business logic. That’s the part that takes time to understand and implement — and it’s ultimately what the customer cares about and pays for.

Re: Writing code is cheap now

#513

Post by deterministic »

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…

> When you drop your standards, then writing generated code is quick, easy and cheap

Nope not at all long term. That's the kind of code that leads to maintenance hell, very angry customers, and burned out developers.

Re: Writing code is cheap now

#514

Post by hansmayer »

simonw wrote: post #510
hansmayer wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Part of the argument I'm developing in my writing here is that LLMs should enable us to write better code, and if that's not happening we need to reevaluate and improve the way we are putting them to use. That chapter is still in my drafts. So you see, after so much hype and hard and soft promotion efforts ( I count your writing in the latter category), you'd think it should not be "us" figuring it out - should it…

> you'd think it should not be "us" figuring it out - should it not be the people who are shoving this crap down our throats? If they're "shoveling this crap down our throats" why should we expect them to help here? More to the point: a consistent pattern over the last four years has been that the AI labs don't know what their stuff can do yet. . They will openly admit that. They have clearly established that the bes…

> If they're "shoveling this crap down our throats" why should we expect them to help here?

No no no - they are not supposed "to help". They own this complete timeline of LLMs. Dario Amodei said several times over that the agents will be writing ALL CODE in 6 months. We are now at least one month into his latest instance of this promise. He also babbled a lot about "PhD" level intelligence, just like the other ghoul at that other company. THEY are the ones who promote the supposed superintelligence creeping up on us closer each day. Whatever benchmarks they always push out with new release. But we should cut them some slack, accept that we are stupid for not wanting to burn our brains in multihour sessions with LLMs and just try to figure it out? We should not accept explaining it away as merely some cheap "hype". These people are not some C-list celebrities. They are billionaire CEOs, running companies supposedly worth into high hundreds of billions of dollars, making huge market influencing statements. I expect those statements to be true. Because if they are not, and they are smart people and will know if they are pushing out untruths on purpose, well that's just criminal behaviour. Now tell me more about how "we" should figure it out.

> A hill I will happily die on is that LLM tools, including coding agents, are deceptively difficult to use. If you accepted that was true yourself, maybe you would be able to get better results out of them.

:) No mate, please drop that "getting good results" nonsense. I have been getting good results too if I babysit them, and for the record, have done a bit more with them than just various model use cases. The issue for me and a lot of other people, that with a lot of care and safeguarding and attention etc, yes you can even build something to deploy in production - and myself and my team have done so - however it is so that they are not worth all the babysitting and especially the immense mental fatigue that comes out of working with them in continuity over a longer time span. At the end of the day, for complex projects its actually faster if I shortcircuit my thinking machine to my code-writing executors and skip the natural language bollocks altogether (save for the original spec). Using LLMs is like putting additional friction in between my brain and my hands.

Re: Writing code is cheap now

#515

Post by fragmede »

lp4v4n wrote: post #354
fragmede wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if you've heard, but there have been a large number of layoffs in the tech sector recently. Whether they're actually related to AI as executives claim, and not section 174 of the US IRS tax code in the BBB, is known only to them, but if your argument hinges on people having not been fired when there have been layoffs, you may need a different one.

As you said, it's impossible to determine how many of the current layoffs are caused by AI, they probably also have a lot to do with the broader economic downturn. But you’re still missing the point, if companies truly have a black box that can produce cheap, high‑quality code as the GP put it, why don't they just fire 95% of their developers and keep only a small core of AI orchestrators?

Don't look now, but https://x.com/jack/status/2027129697092731343

Re: Writing code is cheap now

#516

Post by seanmcdirmid »

zahlman wrote: post #418
simonw wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

> when I say that code has always been expensive that's part of what I'm factoring in. Fair, but when an LLM writes code in response to a prompt I really don't get the sense that it's doing as much of that "everything around" part as you might expect.

No, that’s why you have a bunch of prompts make artifacts before the prompt that writes code, and prompts afterwards that run tests on code, etc…if you are just vibe coding code with one prompt, it’s not going to work out very well.

Re: Writing code is cheap now

#518

Post by dematz »

simonw wrote: post #379
saezbaldo wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree, and I'd add: the feedback loop between decision and consequence got dramatically shorter. You can test an architectural hypothesis in hours instead of weeks. That part is genuinely powerful. But faster feedback also means bad decisions propagate faster. The skill isn't generating three implementations in parallel -- it's knowing which one won't page you at 3am. That judgment comes from having been paged at 3am…

> The skill isn't generating three implementations in parallel -- it's knowing which one won't page you at 3am. 100% this.

Brother saezbaldo is llm

Re: Writing code is cheap now

#519

Post by rhubarbtree »

LtWorf wrote: post #181
rhubarbtree wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, often see cope from managers along the line of “writing the code was never the bottleneck”. Well, sure felt like it.

For most people who can type with more than 2 fingers, thinking what to type is slower than typing it.

Aha, and AI beats you at both.

Re: Writing code is cheap now

#520

Post by awepofiwaop »

simonw wrote: post #505
awepofiwaop wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure that making the computers easier to use for "most people" has had a net positive effect on society. If an ability requires effort and discipline to attain, perhaps fewer people would take it for granted and care more about its quality.

No, I hate that idea. Saying "only those who have earned it through effort and discipline should be allowed to do X" goes against how I want most of the world to work. Let's keep that kind of regulation to pursuits like flying helicopters, not using computers.

This is almost a willful misinterpretation of what I said. I didn't say it should be regulated or illegal. I just expressed a thought that perhaps we shouldn't reorient everything around making things easy for the laziest among us.
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