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Code Is Cheap Now, and That Changes Everything
- twosdai 6mo agoFound 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.
- qazxcvbnmlp 6mo agoThey allude to it, but I think one of the new skills that will be valuable is reasoning about systems where you don't know the code. This is what “owners” and managers who don’t touch code do today.
- Madmallard 6mo agoThis isn't really a thing. You can't create an accurate 4K image from a low res JPG. Owners and managers who don't touch code don't know shit and have to go to the developers to learn about important decisions made in the application and how they work in detail.
- dude250711 6mo ago"That’s not a forecast. That’s the current state." Something about this sentence sequence looks vaguely familiar...
- kranner 6mo agoMany other patterns in the text, re-arranging to make it more obvious: Why do we estimate stories? Because developer time is expensive and someone has to budget for it. Why do we prioritise features in backlogs? Because we can’t build everything and we need to choose what’s worth the cost. Why do we agonise over whether to refactor this module or write that debug interface? Because the time spent on one thing is time not spent on another. We have compilers: either it compiles or it doesn’t. We have test suites: either the tests pass or they don’t. Planning. Estimating. Feature prioritisation. Code review. Architecture review. Sprint planning. All of it is downstream of the assumption that writing code is the expensive part. ... type systems, linters, static analysis. Software gives us verification tools that most other domains lack.
- kratos007 6mo ago[dead]
- d0100 6mo agoAI assisted development is the generalists dream Althought it still hasn't solved procrastinating the next plan prompt
- bwestergard 6mo agoHave you seen the meme with three spidermen, labeled "Designer", "Product Manager", and "Engineer" wherein each is pointing to the other two and saying "I don't need you anymore!"? Most of the time, the person saying that is wrong.
- dist-epoch 6mo ago> 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.
- croes 6mo agoPrompting themselves to do what?
- dist-epoch 6mo agospecify, verify, iterate
- xienze 6mo agoOh, you'll still need a human to give the initial prompt, like say "Write me a Notion clone." But after that, what value is the human developer really providing? Expertise? Why can't LLMs advance sufficiently to cover that in addition to the programming? This is a tale as old as time. Techies are so enamored with new gadgets that they eagerly develop the tools business managers will bury them with.
- tovej 6mo agoI 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 6mo ago> sub-prime technical debt is now easy to take on Vibe-coded projects can't keep up with the scale of technical debt accretion. See the proliferation of OpenClaw clones - instead of fixing it we're iterating on rewriting it from scratch without fixing the core issues. (Give it a year and the "minimal" Claw-clones will also collapse under technical debt, because they're also vibe-coded, with all that implies.)
- otabdeveloper4 6mo agoShit code was always cheap, this is why "technical debt" exists as a concept.
- jditu 6mo ago[dead]
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- kranner 6mo agoTowards 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?
- jubilanti 6mo agoAnd why are they talking about Etsy as if it doesn't bring in $2+ billon in revenue?
- lmeyerov 6mo agoI'm not too familiar with etsy, but presumably most etsy sellers are closer to being lemonade stands than they are to being ikea And yes, sometimes it's nice to support a local lemonade stand. For my family's income, I know which segment I'd feel more confident to work for..
- kranner 6mo agoQuality indie software in a niche that Ikea is not addressing can make a decent income unlike a lemonade stand. And unlike at (this hypothetical) Ikea, you wouldn't have to maintain the impression of 20x AI-augmented output to avoid being fired. Well, you could still use AI as much as you want, but you wouldn't have to keep proving you're not underusing it.
- kjksf 6mo agoThe comparison valid for his example would be to compare revenues from mass produced pottery vs. revenues of handmade pottery sold on etsy. Methinks that mass produced pottery makes more than $2 billion and etsy pottery is a tiny fraction of overall etsy sales.
- nicpottier 6mo ago> 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.
- xienze 6mo agoI find it amusing that software developers have no issue with having an LLM churn out slop code but have such a visceral reaction to slop articles.
- philipov 6mo agoYou are falling into the trap of thinking there's a single monolithic being called Software Developers that has inconsistent opinions. In fact, you're observing different people with conflicting values.
- xienze 6mo agoYeah yeah. But LLMs certainly have been embraced by a large number of developers. Many of whom I've observed react with disgust when they see "not X, but Y" or emdashes in an article. But when it comes to code, "wow this is so awesome!"
- kjksf 6mo agoI have no issue with with code generated by e.g. Claude because it's not "slop". On average, it's probably better than the code I would write. I say "on average" because AI doesn't make stupid mistakes, doesn't invert logical conditions. I know I do. Which I eventually fix, but it's better to not make them in the first place, hence "on average". And in cases that AI doesn't generate code up to my quality standards, I re-prompt it until it does. Or fix it myself. I'm not a hapless victim of AI. I'm a supervisor. I operate a machine that generates good code most of the time but not all of the time. I'm there to spot and correct the "not all of the time" cases.
- voidUpdate 6mo agoCode 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...
- guzfip 6mo agoEasy when you’ve got direct injections of free ponzi money continuously.
- kjksf 6mo agoThis is not first time in history that RAM prices spiked. And it'll be resolved the same way all others were. demand > supply => higher prices => incentive to produce more => produce more => supply > demand => lower prices The drastic drop in price of code is permament.
- voidUpdate 6mo agoHow long does it take to spin up enough completely new chip fabs to supply the demand?
- cr125rider 6mo agoExactly. The problem with capitalism is how slow it is to respond to changes.
- croes 6mo ago>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 6mo agoProduction 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 6mo agoInterestingly, 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/ https://dheer.co/gatekeeping-on-a-different-stage/
- datadrivenangel 6mo agoI partially disagree for two reasons: 1. Code is absolutely cheap, but good, correct, non-vulnerable code is much cheaper than it was a few years ago but is still not free, especially in a large application. 2. Requirements management is less important when the cost of software is lower because iteration is cheaper, but bad customer communication can absolutely result in negatively useful software, and there is a skill to understanding what people want and need that takes a lot of time to use well, so in many cases a product manager can still help do useful work... most won't though.
- bushido 6mo agoThat's partly the harness for me. I do believe product managers are still important, but they're important in deciding what gets shipped, not what gets built. Engineers are still important. They're important in building the harness to ensure that anything which is being built/shipped is of sufficient quality. In my opinion, testing/QA/etc is now the core product. But the best code that you'll get is literally connecting to the pain point the customer was saying to the agentic workflow that is building your product. Bad customer communication in my experience is the result of every person who handled the convo pre-engineers posturing the message trying to make sure the next person is motivated to get it to the next gatekeeper. This is all very biased based on my own workflow though.
- 6mo ago
- didgetmaster 6mo agoAn 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?
- kjksf 6mo agoAI is assisting you. It'll write efficient code if you guide it to write efficient code. You're not a hapless victim of ai written code. To give you a concrete examples. Recently pretext library made waves. I looked at the code and noticed that isCJK could possibly faster. So I spent 30 minutes TELLING claude to write a benchmark and implement several different, hopefully faster, versions. Some claude came up with by itself and some were based on my guidance. You can see the result here: https://github.com/chenglou/pretext/issues/2 https://github.com/chenglou/pretext/issues/2 The original isCJK, also written by AI (I assume), was fast. It wasn't obviously slow like lots of human JavaScript code I see. Claude did implement a faster version. Could I do the same thing (write multiple implementations and benchmark them) without Claude? Yes. Would I do it? Probably not. It would take significantly longer than 30 min. and I don't have that much time to spend on isCJK. Would I achieve as good result? Probably no. The big win came from replacing for .. of with regular for loop. Something that didn't occur to me but Claude did it because I instructed it to "come up with ideas to speed it up". I'm an expert in writing fast code but I don't know everything and I all good ideas. AI knows everything, you just need to poke it the right way.
- didgetmaster 6mo agoWhat worries me is that good, efficient code will no longer be widely shared like before. Everyone will just write their own inefficient version of a general purpose function or library because Claude or some other AI coder made it cheap and easy.
- ChrisArchitect 6mo agoRelated from Simon in February: Writing code is cheap now https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47125374 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47125374
- eqvinox 6mo agoAs 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 6mo agoCode 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.
- packetlost 6mo agoI doubt that all of the providers hosting open models on open platforms are losing money on serving inference. They have the benefit of not having to pay for training, but the models are open and aren't going away anytime soon.
- fxtentacle 6mo agoSadly, I have not been able to find any open model that comes close to Opus 4.6. So while they are much cheaper to deploy, they also aren't good enough for unsupervised agent execution. But you need a model that can run unsupervised for the claim "Code is Cheap" to become possible.
- packetlost 6mo agoI don't really think so. Maybe it's because the systems I build need to be reliable and understandable to humans, but I don't think Opus 4.6 is good enough to be unsupervised. I've spent a lot of time using it and I have to tell it no semi frequently and rewrite by hand/iterate with the model frequently. It's saves me a lot of time when used this way, I think, but I still have to give it overall structure and keep it scoped to small changes to prevent it from going down wrong paths and generating tons of unnecessary code (which is how you end up with unmaintainable slop). Less code is pretty much always better and these models made it really easy to ignore that until it's too late. This is on a healthy mix of greenfield and brownfield projects. To that end, I've actually found Kimi K2.5 to be "good enough" for a lot of that, not quite as good at Opus 4.6, but good enough that it gets me like 80% of the value for a fraction of the cost and more speed.
- cassianoleal 6mo ago> 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.