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rahilbyesterday at 9:50 PM7 repliesview on HN

> the cost of shipping code now approaches zero

Does anyone actually believe this is the case? I use LLMs to ‘write’ code every day, but it’s not the case for me; my job is just as difficult and other duties expand to fill the space left by Claude. Am I just bad at using the tools? Or stupid? Probably both but c’est la vie.


Replies

Foobar8568today at 10:33 AM

I feel I spend easily 3-5 times more on "QA" with LLM vibe coding than doing myself, the only difference, I couldn't code what I am currently making without LLM, the breath of knowledge required is just too vast.

oxidanttoday at 3:38 AM

Exactly the point I was going to make. Shipping something requires knowing how to ship it, monitor it, and fix it.

Writing code is the "easy" part and kind of always has been. No one triggers incidents from a PR that's been in review for too long.

zackliscioyesterday at 10:07 PM

It would probably have been more accurate to say "the cost of writing code" -- and you're totally right about the rise of other duties (and technologies) that expand to fill that gap.

As a dev team, we've been exploring how we grapple with the cultural and workflow changes that arise as these tools improve--it's definitely an ongoing and constantly evolving conversation.

antidamagetoday at 4:08 AM

I think the answer is that by the time AI can replace every function you do, it's also replaced everyone else and the world will either already have or will need to change radically.

I personally hope that the future becomes a UBI consumer-as-a-job thing, minus too much of the destructive impact that current consumerism has on the world.

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globular-toasttoday at 3:10 PM

Of course it's the case. However, "shipping code" isn't valuable and never has been. Shipping the right code that actually works and actually solves a problem is what is valuable.

nicohornyesterday at 10:02 PM

Same here. I use Claude Code everyday, very useful, but nowhere near to where I don't have to jump in and fix very simple stuff. I actually have a bug in an app that I don't fix because I use it as a test for LLM's and so far not one could solve it, it's a CSS bug!

fragmedeyesterday at 10:29 PM

It's those who are shipping easily who are stupid. And what I mean by that is you can just ask the LLM to use the browser to get API keys and then use them to deploy. That's how the cost of shipping is zero. A hefty amount of YOLO code on top of YOLO deploy. I mean, you could also have the LLM build you a CI CD pipeline, but that's not YOLO.