alt Hacker NewsEach line of code is a liability.
I think it’s funny that we’re all measuring lines of code now and smiling.
It was/is expensive because engineers are trying to manage the liability exposure of their employers.
Agents give us a fire hose of tech debt that anyone can point at production.
I don’t think the tool itself is bad. But I do think people need to reconsider claims like this and be more careful about building systems where an unaccountable program can rewrite half your code base poorly and push it to production without any guard rails.
Replies
gitprolinux • today at 1:39 PM
Writing code is expensive. Maintaining code is expensive. Whatever way, it ain't cheap.
This is the under-discussed part. We spent decades building authorization layers around code deployment -- review gates, CI checks, staging, rollback. That infrastructure exists because code changes are high-consequence operations that compound.
"Code is cheap" means generation is cheap. But the authorization to ship it remains expensive for very good reason. Removing the generation bottleneck without replacing the judgment layer is a control gap, not a productivity gain.
The parallel is giving someone a master key because they're fast at opening doors. Speed was never the constraint that justified the lock.