alt Hacker News"What was expensive was everything around it" - when I say that code has always been expensive that's part of what I'm factoring in.
But even typing that first few hundred lines used to have a much more significant cost attached.
I just pasted 256 lines of JavaScript into the 2000s-era SLOCount tool (classic Perl, I have a WebAssembly hosted version here https://tools.simonwillison.net/sloccount) and it gave me a 2000s-era cost estimate of $6,461.
I wouldn't take that number with anything less than a giant fist of salt, but there you have it.
Replies
trgn • yesterday at 5:16 PM
people became millionaires writing html 30 years ago. there's been these shifts in the past.
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dingnuts • yesterday at 4:50 PM
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> when I say that code has always been expensive that's part of what I'm factoring in.
Fair, but when an LLM writes code in response to a prompt I really don't get the sense that it's doing as much of that "everything around" part as you might expect.