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"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
by simonw 9mo 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 9mo ago[dead]
- trgn 9mo agopeople became millionaires writing html 30 years ago. there's been these shifts in the past.
- gitlinuxgreat 9mo agoPeople became billionaires from domain names in the dot com era.
- zahlman 9mo ago> 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.
- simonw 9mo agoYeah it absolute isn't, but the time it's saving you means you can spend more effort on all of that stuff.
- seanmcdirmid 9mo agoNo, 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.