5 ms·

> 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

> 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. Wasn't writing code always cheap? I see this more like a strawmen argument. What is clean code? Tested code? Should each execution path of a function be tested with each possible input? I think writing tests is important but you can over do it. Testing code for every possible platform takes of course much time and money. Another cost factor for code is organization overhead, if adding a new feature needs to go through each layer of the organization signing it off before a user can actually see it. Its of course more costly than the alternative of just pushing to production with all its faults. There is a big difference of short term cost and long term ones. I think LLMs reduce the short time cost immensely but may increase the long term costs. It will take some real long studies to really show the impact.

softwaredoug 8mo ago
> Wasn't writing code always cheap? No. If you’re a startup that wanted to ship your product, you were stuck hiring developers and waiting 6 months. I’m old enough to remember th “6-8 weeks” it was supposed to take to build the first version of Stackoverflow (hint it was more like several months). Creating a v1 of a product / feature is now cheap. When you’re a mature product and need to make complicated / iterative decisions - that’s not cheap and requires expertise to make good decisions.
- jraph 8mo ago
  > I’m old enough to remember th “6-8 weeks” it was supposed to take to build the first version of Stackoverflow (hint it was more like several months). And they had to do this without help from Stack Overflow! :-)
- throwaway27448 8mo ago
  Startups, famous for writing clean, quality code.
  - solumunus 8mo ago
    Not sure what relevancy that has to what you're responding to.
    - deleted 8mo ago
      [deleted]
  - softwaredoug 8mo ago
    More like developers - infamous for not writing the shit code needed to test PMF :)
- zeroonetwothree 8mo ago
  I made a SO clone in 1 week at a previous job (ok not 100% feature complete obviously but good enough to start using). This is by myself with no AI of course (10 years ago). With Claude Code today I could do it maybe 2x faster? Maybe not that much even though, a lot of time is spent not on purely mechanically typing out characters so it’s not a huge savings necessarily.
gchamonlive 8mo ago
I think code was always expensive. If it seemed cheap, the cost was hidden somewhere else. When I started coding professionally, I joined a team of only interns in a startup, hacking together a SaaS platform that had relative financial success. While we were very cheap, being paid below minimum wage, we had outages, data corruption, db wipes, server terminations, unresolved conflicts making their way to production and killing features, tons of tech debt and even more makeshift code we weren't aware of... So yeah, while writing code was cheap, the result had a latent cost that would only show itself on occasion. So code was always expensive, the challenge was to be aware of how expensive sooner rather than later. The thing with coding agents is that it seems now that you can eat your cake and have it too. We are all still adapting, but results indicate that given the right prompts and processes harnessing LLMs quality code can be had in the cheap.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- ryaniscool 8mo ago
  > The thing with coding agents is that it seems now that you can eat your cake and have it too. We are all still adapting, but results indicate that given the right prompts and processes harnessing LLMs quality code can be had in the cheap. It's cheaper but not cheap If you're building a variation of a CRUD web app, or aggregating data from some data source(s) into a chart or table, you're right. It's like magic. I never thought this type of work was particularly hard or expensive though. I'm using frontier models and I've found if you're working on something that hasn't been done by 100,000 developers before you and published to stackoverflow and/or open source, the LLM becomes a helpful tool but requires a ton of guidance. Even the tests LLMs will write seem biased to pass rather than stress its code and find bugs.
  - gchamonlive 8mo ago
    > It's cheaper but not cheap It's quite cheap if you consider developer time. But it's only as cheap as you can effectively drive the model, otherwise you are just wasting tokens on garbage code. > LLM becomes a helpful tool but requires a ton of guidance I think this is always going to be the case. You are driving the agent like you drive a bike, it'll get you there but you need to be mindful of the clueless kid crossing your path. For some projects I had good results just letting the agent loose. For others I'd have to make the tasks more specific and granular before offloading to the LLM. I see nothing wrong with it.

softwaredoug 8mo ago

> Wasn't writing code always cheap? No. If you’re a startup that wanted to ship your product, you were stuck hiring developers and waiting 6 months. I’m old enough to remember th “6-8 weeks” it was supposed to take to build the first version of Stackoverflow (hint it was more like several months). Creating a v1 of a product / feature is now cheap. When you’re a mature product and need to make complicated / iterative decisions - that’s not cheap and requires expertise to make good decisions.

jraph 8mo ago
> I’m old enough to remember th “6-8 weeks” it was supposed to take to build the first version of Stackoverflow (hint it was more like several months). And they had to do this without help from Stack Overflow! :-)
throwaway27448 8mo ago
Startups, famous for writing clean, quality code.
- solumunus 8mo ago
  Not sure what relevancy that has to what you're responding to.
  - deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
- softwaredoug 8mo ago
  More like developers - infamous for not writing the shit code needed to test PMF :)
zeroonetwothree 8mo ago
I made a SO clone in 1 week at a previous job (ok not 100% feature complete obviously but good enough to start using). This is by myself with no AI of course (10 years ago). With Claude Code today I could do it maybe 2x faster? Maybe not that much even though, a lot of time is spent not on purely mechanically typing out characters so it’s not a huge savings necessarily.

gchamonlive 8mo ago

I think code was always expensive. If it seemed cheap, the cost was hidden somewhere else. When I started coding professionally, I joined a team of only interns in a startup, hacking together a SaaS platform that had relative financial success. While we were very cheap, being paid below minimum wage, we had outages, data corruption, db wipes, server terminations, unresolved conflicts making their way to production and killing features, tons of tech debt and even more makeshift code we weren't aware of... So yeah, while writing code was cheap, the result had a latent cost that would only show itself on occasion. So code was always expensive, the challenge was to be aware of how expensive sooner rather than later. The thing with coding agents is that it seems now that you can eat your cake and have it too. We are all still adapting, but results indicate that given the right prompts and processes harnessing LLMs quality code can be had in the cheap.

deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
ryaniscool 8mo ago
> The thing with coding agents is that it seems now that you can eat your cake and have it too. We are all still adapting, but results indicate that given the right prompts and processes harnessing LLMs quality code can be had in the cheap. It's cheaper but not cheap If you're building a variation of a CRUD web app, or aggregating data from some data source(s) into a chart or table, you're right. It's like magic. I never thought this type of work was particularly hard or expensive though. I'm using frontier models and I've found if you're working on something that hasn't been done by 100,000 developers before you and published to stackoverflow and/or open source, the LLM becomes a helpful tool but requires a ton of guidance. Even the tests LLMs will write seem biased to pass rather than stress its code and find bugs.
- gchamonlive 8mo ago
  > It's cheaper but not cheap It's quite cheap if you consider developer time. But it's only as cheap as you can effectively drive the model, otherwise you are just wasting tokens on garbage code. > LLM becomes a helpful tool but requires a ton of guidance I think this is always going to be the case. You are driving the agent like you drive a bike, it'll get you there but you need to be mindful of the clueless kid crossing your path. For some projects I had good results just letting the agent loose. For others I'd have to make the tasks more specific and granular before offloading to the LLM. I see nothing wrong with it.