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Not sure if “code has always been expensive” is the right framing. Typing out a few hundred lines of code was never the real bottleneck. What was expensive was

Not sure if “code has always been expensive” is the right framing. Typing out a few hundred lines of code was never the real bottleneck. What was expensive was everything around it: making it correct, making it maintainable (often underestimated), coordinating across teams and supporting it long term. You can also overshoot: Testing every possible path, validating across every platform, or routing every change through layers of organizational approval can multiply costs quickly. At some point, process (not code) becomes the dominant expense. What LLMs clearly reduce is the short-term cost of producing working code. That part is dramatically cheaper. The long-term effect is less clear. If we generate more code, faster, does that reduce cost or just increase the surface area we need to maintain, test, secure, and reason about later? Historically, most of software’s cost has lived in maintenance and coordination, not in keystrokes. It will take real longitudinal data to see whether LLMs meaningfully change that, or just shift where the cost shows up.

ericol 7mo ago
> The long-term effect is less clear. If we generate more code, faster, does that reduce cost or just increase the surface area we need to maintain, test, secure, and reason about later? My take is that the focus is mostly oriented towards code, but in my experience everything around code got cheaper too. In my particular case, I do coding, I do DevOps, I do second level support, I do data analysis. Every single task I have to do is now seriously augmented by AI. In my last performance review, my manager was actually surprised when I told him that I am now more a manager of my own work than actually doing the work. This also means my productivity is now probably around 2.5x what it was a couple of years ago.
- randito 7mo ago
  > In my last performance review, my manager was actually surprised when I told him that I am now more a manager of my own work than actually doing the work. I think this is very telling. Unless you have a good manager who is paying attention, a lot of them are clueless and just see the hype of 10x ing your developers and don't care about the nuance of (as they say) all the surrounding bits to writing code. And unfortunately, they just repeat this to the people above them, who also read the hype and just see $$ of reducing headcount. (sorry, venting a little)
  - ericol 7mo ago
    He definitely was paying attention. He had to pause for a second there, arrested by the realization, and was one of the reasons I got an "Exceeds expectations" in one of my KRAs.
    - thefaux 7mo ago
      It is interesting though that he evidently didn't notice this 2.5X productivity increase until you pointed it out to him.
      - AlexeyBelov 7mo ago
        Surely the manager will now raise his salary by a huge amount! Maybe even 2.5x
        artur_makly 7mo ago
        Surely
        literalAardvark 7mo ago
        His own, a bonus for managing managers
- kldg 7mo ago
  This has been my experience, too. In dealing with hardware, I'm particularly pleased with how vision models are shaping up; it's able to identify what I've photographed, put it in a simple text list, and link me to appropriate datasheets. yday, it even figured out how I wanted to reverse engineer a remote display board for a just-released inverter and correctly identified which pin of which unfamiliar Chinese chip was spitting out the serial data I was interested in; all I actually asked for was chip IDs with a quick vague note on what I was doing. It doesn't help me solder faster, but it gets me to soldering faster. A bit OT, but I would love to see some different methods of calculating economic productivity. After looking into how BLS calculates software productivity, I quit giving weight to the number altogether and it left me feeling a bit blue; they apply a deflator in part by considering the value of features (which they claim to be able to estimate by comparing feature sets and prices in a select basket of items of a category, applying coefficients based on differences); it'll likely never actually capture what's going on in AI unless Adobe decides to add a hundred new buttons "because it's so quick and easy to do." Their methodology requires ignoring FOSS (except for certain corporate own-account cases), too; if everyone switched from Microsoft365 to LibreOffice, US productivity as measured by BLS would crash. BLS lays methodology out in a FAQ page on "Hedonic Quality Adjustment"[1], which covers hardware instead of software, but software becomes more reliant on these "what does the consumer pay" guesses at value (what is the value of S-Video input on your TV? significantly more than supporting picture-in-picture, at least in 2020). [1] https://www.bls.gov/cpi/quality-adjustment/questions-and-answers.htm https://www.bls.gov/cpi/quality-adjustment/questions-and-ans...
gofreddygo 7mo ago
code was expensive, is and will be expensive. the real cost is hidden. takes a mature eye to see a codebase that works and is not a dumpster fire. correctness (doing what its supposed to, nothing else), maintainability (accommodating unknown future changes), cost ( deployment, refactoring, integrations) and performance (making the right tradeoffs) are not obvious, don't come naturally till you burn your fingers and differentiate a good from a horrible end result.
duxup 7mo ago
Honestly, if I would just get what the end user “really wants” (they often don’t even know) that would save a huge percentage of the overall cost, and that’s not code that’s human nature.
- ako 7mo ago
  That is also getting cheaper, you can now quickly present him with a few working prototypes so he can quickly make up his mind what best suites him. Another problem is that most users want different things, that's why you get these big bloated software suites. With LLMs it now also becomes more achievable to build custom software per user.
  - duxup 7mo ago
    I find it is more a rubber hits the road thing where they have to use it to really understand.
simonw 7mo ago
"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 https://tools.simonwillison.net/sloccount) and it gave me a 2000s-era cost estimate of $6,461. I wouldn't take that number with anything less than a giant fist of salt, but there you have it.
- dingnuts 7mo ago
  [dead]
- trgn 7mo ago
  people became millionaires writing html 30 years ago. there's been these shifts in the past.
  - gitlinuxgreat 7mo ago
    People became billionaires from domain names in the dot com era.
    - trgn 7mo ago
      haha! do you know details, what domains?
      - simonw 7mo ago
        Mark Cuban sold broadcast.com to Yahoo for $5.7bn It was a bit more than a domain name - they had 330 employees and $13.5 million in revenue for a quarter - but that acquisition was definitely peak dot-com boom.
        trgn 7mo ago
        thanks! i would love another bubble. i feel like tech has been in a corner for going on ten years now (covid spike was so brief). it's so concentrated in ai it sucks up everything.
hluska 7mo ago
I don’t understand why you would agree with the entire article yet frame it as disagreement.
NoNameHaveI 7mo ago
2 things to think about here: 1. Coding is just one phase of the software development life cycle (SDLC). We still have to gather requirements, design, test, release, and most importantly maintain. I was taught, albeit years ago, that code spends most of its life in maintenance and that is the phase where the most money is spent. 2. Keep in mind Amdahl's law. The limit of software cost as coding cost approaches zero is the cost of the other phases of the SDLC. Apologies to Amdahl for the cheap, dirty bastardization.

ericol 7mo ago

> The long-term effect is less clear. If we generate more code, faster, does that reduce cost or just increase the surface area we need to maintain, test, secure, and reason about later? My take is that the focus is mostly oriented towards code, but in my experience everything around code got cheaper too. In my particular case, I do coding, I do DevOps, I do second level support, I do data analysis. Every single task I have to do is now seriously augmented by AI. In my last performance review, my manager was actually surprised when I told him that I am now more a manager of my own work than actually doing the work. This also means my productivity is now probably around 2.5x what it was a couple of years ago.

randito 7mo ago
> In my last performance review, my manager was actually surprised when I told him that I am now more a manager of my own work than actually doing the work. I think this is very telling. Unless you have a good manager who is paying attention, a lot of them are clueless and just see the hype of 10x ing your developers and don't care about the nuance of (as they say) all the surrounding bits to writing code. And unfortunately, they just repeat this to the people above them, who also read the hype and just see $$ of reducing headcount. (sorry, venting a little)
- ericol 7mo ago
  He definitely was paying attention. He had to pause for a second there, arrested by the realization, and was one of the reasons I got an "Exceeds expectations" in one of my KRAs.
  - thefaux 7mo ago
    It is interesting though that he evidently didn't notice this 2.5X productivity increase until you pointed it out to him.
    - AlexeyBelov 7mo ago
      Surely the manager will now raise his salary by a huge amount! Maybe even 2.5x
      - artur_makly 7mo ago
        Surely
      - literalAardvark 7mo ago
        His own, a bonus for managing managers
kldg 7mo ago
This has been my experience, too. In dealing with hardware, I'm particularly pleased with how vision models are shaping up; it's able to identify what I've photographed, put it in a simple text list, and link me to appropriate datasheets. yday, it even figured out how I wanted to reverse engineer a remote display board for a just-released inverter and correctly identified which pin of which unfamiliar Chinese chip was spitting out the serial data I was interested in; all I actually asked for was chip IDs with a quick vague note on what I was doing. It doesn't help me solder faster, but it gets me to soldering faster. A bit OT, but I would love to see some different methods of calculating economic productivity. After looking into how BLS calculates software productivity, I quit giving weight to the number altogether and it left me feeling a bit blue; they apply a deflator in part by considering the value of features (which they claim to be able to estimate by comparing feature sets and prices in a select basket of items of a category, applying coefficients based on differences); it'll likely never actually capture what's going on in AI unless Adobe decides to add a hundred new buttons "because it's so quick and easy to do." Their methodology requires ignoring FOSS (except for certain corporate own-account cases), too; if everyone switched from Microsoft365 to LibreOffice, US productivity as measured by BLS would crash. BLS lays methodology out in a FAQ page on "Hedonic Quality Adjustment"[1], which covers hardware instead of software, but software becomes more reliant on these "what does the consumer pay" guesses at value (what is the value of S-Video input on your TV? significantly more than supporting picture-in-picture, at least in 2020). [1] https://www.bls.gov/cpi/quality-adjustment/questions-and-answers.htm https://www.bls.gov/cpi/quality-adjustment/questions-and-ans...

gofreddygo 7mo ago

code was expensive, is and will be expensive. the real cost is hidden. takes a mature eye to see a codebase that works and is not a dumpster fire. correctness (doing what its supposed to, nothing else), maintainability (accommodating unknown future changes), cost ( deployment, refactoring, integrations) and performance (making the right tradeoffs) are not obvious, don't come naturally till you burn your fingers and differentiate a good from a horrible end result.

duxup 7mo ago

Honestly, if I would just get what the end user “really wants” (they often don’t even know) that would save a huge percentage of the overall cost, and that’s not code that’s human nature.

ako 7mo ago
That is also getting cheaper, you can now quickly present him with a few working prototypes so he can quickly make up his mind what best suites him. Another problem is that most users want different things, that's why you get these big bloated software suites. With LLMs it now also becomes more achievable to build custom software per user.
- duxup 7mo ago
  I find it is more a rubber hits the road thing where they have to use it to really understand.

simonw 7mo ago

"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 https://tools.simonwillison.net/sloccount) and it gave me a 2000s-era cost estimate of $6,461. I wouldn't take that number with anything less than a giant fist of salt, but there you have it.

dingnuts 7mo ago
[dead]
trgn 7mo ago
people became millionaires writing html 30 years ago. there's been these shifts in the past.
- gitlinuxgreat 7mo ago
  People became billionaires from domain names in the dot com era.
  - trgn 7mo ago
    haha! do you know details, what domains?
    - simonw 7mo ago
      Mark Cuban sold broadcast.com to Yahoo for $5.7bn It was a bit more than a domain name - they had 330 employees and $13.5 million in revenue for a quarter - but that acquisition was definitely peak dot-com boom.
      - trgn 7mo ago
        thanks! i would love another bubble. i feel like tech has been in a corner for going on ten years now (covid spike was so brief). it's so concentrated in ai it sucks up everything.

hluska 7mo ago

I don’t understand why you would agree with the entire article yet frame it as disagreement.

NoNameHaveI 7mo ago

2 things to think about here: 1. Coding is just one phase of the software development life cycle (SDLC). We still have to gather requirements, design, test, release, and most importantly maintain. I was taught, albeit years ago, that code spends most of its life in maintenance and that is the phase where the most money is spent. 2. Keep in mind Amdahl's law. The limit of software cost as coding cost approaches zero is the cost of the other phases of the SDLC. Apologies to Amdahl for the cheap, dirty bastardization.