alt Hacker News> Code has always been expensive. Producing a few hundred lines of clean, tested code takes most software developers a full day or more. Many of our engineering habits, at both the macro and micro level, are built around this core constraint.
Wasn't writing code always cheap? I see this more like a strawmen argument. What is clean code? Tested code? Should each execution path of a function be tested with each possible input?
I think writing tests is important but you can over do it. Testing code for every possible platform takes of course much time and money.
Another cost factor for code is organization overhead, if adding a new feature needs to go through each layer of the organization signing it off before a user can actually see it. Its of course more costly than the alternative of just pushing to production with all its faults.
There is a big difference of short term cost and long term ones. I think LLMs reduce the short time cost immensely but may increase the long term costs. It will take some real long studies to really show the impact.
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> Wasn't writing code always cheap?
No.
If you’re a startup that wanted to ship your product, you were stuck hiring developers and waiting 6 months. I’m old enough to remember th “6-8 weeks” it was supposed to take to build the first version of Stackoverflow (hint it was more like several months).
Creating a v1 of a product / feature is now cheap. When you’re a mature product and need to make complicated / iterative decisions - that’s not cheap and requires expertise to make good decisions.
I think code was always expensive. If it seemed cheap, the cost was hidden somewhere else.
When I started coding professionally, I joined a team of only interns in a startup, hacking together a SaaS platform that had relative financial success. While we were very cheap, being paid below minimum wage, we had outages, data corruption, db wipes, server terminations, unresolved conflicts making their way to production and killing features, tons of tech debt and even more makeshift code we weren't aware of...
So yeah, while writing code was cheap, the result had a latent cost that would only show itself on occasion.
So code was always expensive, the challenge was to be aware of how expensive sooner rather than later.
The thing with coding agents is that it seems now that you can eat your cake and have it too. We are all still adapting, but results indicate that given the right prompts and processes harnessing LLMs quality code can be had in the cheap.