Code Is Cheap Now, and That Changes Everything

twosdai

Found this really well written. I really enjoyed reading it, and found myself agreeing with a lot of it. I wish the author wrote more about the day 2 problem cases with AI built applications. It somewhat matters what the programming language is, the architecture and design for debugging and reasoning verification when we want to alter the system specification. Basically as a Dev, or "Owner" of the application, we are responsible for the continuous changes and updates to the system. Which I've found hard to reason about in practice when speaking to other people, if I dont know the code explicitly.

dude250711

"That’s not a forecast. That’s the current state." Something about this sentence sequence looks vaguely familiar...

d0100

AI assisted development is the generalists dream Althought it still hasn't solved procrastinating the next plan prompt

dist-epoch

> Developers who learn to specify, verify, and iterate will thrive. This will last for about one year. From next year agents will be prompting themselves. Human developers will have approximately zero economic value.

tovej

I would question the framing that code is cheap now. That's not really meaningful. What is the cost most associated with software? Maintenance. Considering that, I would say a much more accurate statement is that sub-prime technical debt is now easy to take on. I'm surprised at the low quality of the grifting comments in this thread. I have a feeling that the vibe coding enjoyers used to at least make defensible statements. Now it's just pure hype. Seems like we're in the SBF being lauded for FTX part of the bubble.

otabdeveloper4

Shit code was always cheap, this is why "technical debt" exists as a concept.

kranner

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 proposition values different things. But if you’re running a business that depends on pottery, you’d better understand the economics. So which is it? Will an industrialised process always outcompete a pre-industrial process? Or do they not compete at all, because they value different things?

nicpottier

> 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.

voidUpdate

Code is cheap, as long as you ignore the knock-on effects on RAM prices, storage prices, environmental costs, the fact that people are still burning thousands of dollars on tokens...

croes

>Code Is Cheap Now And electricity comes from the outlet and milk from the supermarket. At the moment billons of dollars of investor money heavily subsidizes the AI services, let's wait for the price when those companies need to generate profit

juancn

Production grade code is still expensive for any non-trivial product. I think it may be getting even more expensive. It gets even harder when there's an expectation that your products implement some sort of AI. Not an LLM necessarily, but to succeed they need to feel easy and magical, the bar is higher, and that makes it expensive: more edge cases, harder to deploy, more expensive to run, and so on. Someone has to babysit the security and the runtimes, PMs still run around figuring out the competitive landscape and so on. AI just moved the pain points, for every part that's gotten easier, some other part got way harder mainly because we don't yet have the experience on how to effectively tackle the scale change of the challenges.

bushido

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 scarcity gone, we really need to be thinking about the entire structure differently. I'm definitely in the we still need people camp. The roles are wildly different, though. We can't continue doing the same job that we did with a slight twist. [0] https://dheer.co/gatekeeping-on-a-different-stage/

didgetmaster

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 code being spit out by AI with regards to how efficient it is?

ChrisArchitect

Related from Simon in February: Writing code is cheap now https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47125374

eqvinox

As a FOSS maintainer… code was already cheap before. Good code wasn't. And it still isn't… even if only because the cost includes review, but still often enough for the code itself too.

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.

cassianoleal

> AI is a nail gun. In the hands of someone unskilled, it’s dangerous. In the hands of a professional, it speeds them up enormously. And in the end, all anyone cares about is that a nail exists in that location. This is very interesting. In the world of AI coding, it's not enough to put the nail on the right spot, at the right angle and flush with the surface. You also need to ensure each nail will remain in that exact position as the system evolves. Agents have a tendency to touch parts of the system they didn't have to, and catching those problems can be evry tricky. Obvious caveat that as the system evolves, a prior nail may actually have to be removed. That's not the situation I'm talking about.