alt Hacker NewsCode has a generation cost and a maintenance cost.
If you just look at generation then sure it's super cheap now.
If you look at maintenance, it's still expensive.
You can of course use AI to maintain code, but the more of it there the more unwieldy it gets to maintain it even with the best models and harnesses.
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I 'love' that folks are seemingly inching slowly towards more acceptance of crappy llm code. Because it costs marginally less to produce to production if you just pass some smoke tests? Have we not learned anything about technical debt and how it bites back hard? Its not even seniority question, rather just sane rational approach to our craft unless one wants to jump companies every few months like a toxic useless apple (not sure who would hire such person but world is big and managers often clueless).
There are of course various use cases, for few this is an acceptable tradeoff but most software ain't written once and never touched (significantly) again, in contrary.
Once writing code is cheap you don't maintain code. You regenerate it from scratch.
What you maintain is the specification harness, and change that to change the code.
We have to start thinking at a higher level, and see code generation in the same way we currently see compilation.