Code is cheap. Show me the talk

I think if your job is to assemble a segment of a car based on a spec using provided tools and pre-trained processes, it makes sense if you worry that giant robot arms might be installed to replace you.

But if your job is to assemble a car in order to explore what modifications to make to the design, experiment with a single prototype, and determine how to program those robot arms, you’re probably not thinking about the risk of being automated.

I know a lot of counter arguments are a form of, “but AI is automating that second class of job!” But I just really haven’t seen that at all. What I have seen is a misclassification of the former as the latter.

I keep on wondering how much of the AI embrace is marketing driven. Yes, it can produce value and cut corners. But it seems like self driving by 2016 Musk prediction. Which never happened. With IPO/Stock valuations closely tied to hype, I wonder if we are all witnessing a giant bubble in the making

How much of this is mass financial engineering than real value. Reading a lot of nudges how everyone should have Google or other AI stock in their portfolio/retirement accounts

The original phrase "talk is cheap" is generally used to mean "it's easy to say a whole lot of shit and that talk often has no real value." So this cleaver headline is telling me the code has even less value than the talk. That alone betrays a level of ignorance I would expect from the author's work. I go to read the article and it confirmed my suspicion.

I see a lot of the same (well thought out) pushback on here whenever these kinds of blind hype articles pop up.

But my biggest objection to this "engineering is over" take is one that I don't see much. Maybe this is just my Big Tech glasses, but I feel like for a large, mature product, if you break down the time and effort required to bring a change to production, the actual writing of code is like... ten, maybe twenty percent of it?

Sure, you can bring "agents" to bear on other parts of the process to some degree or another. But their value to the design and specification process, or to live experiment, analysis, and iteration, is just dramatically less than in the coding process (which is already overstated). And that's without even getting into communication and coordination across the company, which is typically the real limiting factor, and in which heavy LLM usage almost exclusively makes things worse.

Takes like this seem to just have a completely different understanding of what "software development" even means than I do, and I'm not sure how to reconcile it.

To be clear, I think these tools absolutely have a place, and I use them where appropriate and often get value out of them. They're part of the field for good, no question. But this take that it's a replacement for engineering, rather than an engineering power tool, consistently feels like it's coming from a perspective that has never worked on supporting a real product with real users.

> Software development, as it has been done for decades, is over.

I'm pretty sure the way I was doing things in 2005 was completely different compared to 2015. Same for 2015 and 2025. I'm not old enough to know how they were doing things in 1995, but I'm pretty sure there very different compared to 2005.

For sure, we are going through some big changes, but there is no "as it has been done for decades".

talk is even cheaper, still show me the code, people claim 10x productivity that translates to 10x of work done in a month, even with Opus 4.5 out since November 2025 I haven't seen signs of this. AI makes the level of complexity with modern systems bearable, it was getting pretty bad before and AI kinda saved us. A non-trivial React app is still a pain to write. Also creating a harness for a non-deterministic api that AI provides is also pain. At least we don't have to fight through typing errors or search through relevant examples before copying and pasting. AI is good at automating typing, the lack of reasoning and the knowledge cutoff still makes coding very tedious though.

> because one is hooked on and dependent on the genie, the natural circumstances that otherwise would allow for foundational and fundamental skills and understanding to develop, never arise, to the point of cognitive decline.

After using AI to code, I came to the same conclusion myself. Interns and juniors are fully cooked:

- Companies will replace them with AI, telling seniors to use AI instead of juniors

- As a junior, AI is a click away, so why would you spend sleepless nights painstakingly acquiring those fundamentals?

Their only hope is to use AI to accelerate their own _learning_, not their performance. Performance will come after the learning phase.

If you're young, use AI as a personal TA, don't use it to write the code for you.

> Code was always a means to an end. Unlike poetry or prose, end users don’t read or care about code.

Yes and no. Code is not art, but software is art.

What is art, then? Not something that's "beautiful", as beauty is of course mostly subjective. Not even something that works well.

I think art is a thing that was made with great care.

It doesn't matter if some piece of software was vibe-coded in part or in full, if it was edited, tested, retried enough times for its maker to consider it "perfect". Trash is something that's done in a careless way.

If you truly love and use what you made, it's likely someone else will. If not, well... why would anyone?

In January 2026, prototype code is cheap. Shitty production code is cheap. If that's all you need—which is sometimes the case—then go for it.

But actually good code, with a consistent global model for what is going on, still won't come from Opus 4.5 or a Markdown plan. It still comes from a human fighting entropy.

Getting eyes on the code still matters, whether it's plain old AI slop, or fancy new Opus 4.5 "premium slop." Opus is quite smart, and it does its best.

But I've tried seriously using a number of high-profile, vibe-coded projects in the last few weeks. And good grief what unbelievable piles of shit most of them are. I spend 5% of the time using the vibe-coded tool, and 95% of the time trying to uncorrupt my data. I spend plenty of time having Opus try to look at the source to figure out what went wrong in 200,000 lines of vibe-coded Go. And even Opus is like, "This never worked! It's broken! You see, there's a race condition in the daemonization code that causes the daemon to auto-kill itself!"

And at that point, I stop caring. If someone can't be bothered to even read the code Opus generates, I can't be bothered to debug their awful software.

This "Code is cheap. Show me the talk." punchline gets overused as a bait these days. It is an alright article but that's a lot of words to tell us something we already know. There's nothing here that we don't already know. It's not just greedy companies riding the AI wave. Bloggers and influencers are also riding the AI wave. They know if you say anything positive or negative about AI with a catchy title it will trend on HN, Reddit, etc.

Also credit where credit is due. Origin of this punchline:

https://nitter.net/jason_young1231/status/193518070341689789...

https://programmerhumor.io/ai-memes/code-is-cheap-show-me-th...

> Ignoring outright bad code, in a world where functional code is so abundant that “good” and “bad” are indistinguishable, ultimately, what makes functional AI code slop or non-slop?

I'm sorry, but this is an indicator for me that the author hasn't had a critical eye for quality in some time. There is massive overlap between "bad" and "functional." More than ever. The barrier-to-entry to programming got irresponsibly low for a time there, and it's going to get worse. The toolchains are not in a good way. Windows and macOS are degrading both in performance and usability, LLVM still takes 90% of a compiler's CPU time in unoptimized builds, Notepad has AI (and crashes,) simple social (mobile) apps are >300 MB download/installs when eight years ago they were hovering around a tenth of that, a site like Reddit only works on hardware which is only "cheap" in the top 3 GDP nations in the world... The list goes on. Whatever we're doing, it is not scaling.

From the article:

  Historically, it would take a reasonably long period of consistent effort and many iterations of refinement for a good developer to produce 10,000 lines of quality code that not only delivered meaningful results, but was easily readable and maintainable. While the number of lines of code is not a measure of code quality—it is often the inverse—a codebase with good quality 10,000 lines of code indicated significant time, effort, focus, patience, expertise, and often, skills like project management that went into it. Human traits.

  Now, LLMs can not only one-shot generate that in seconds,

Feels like this website is yelling at me with its massive text size. Had to drop down to -50% to get it readable.

Classical indicators of good software are still very relevant and valid!

Building something substantial and material (ie not an api wrapper+gui, to-do list) that is undeniably well made, while being faster and easier than it used to be, still takes a _lot_ of work. Even though you don't have to write a line of code, it moves so fast that you are now spending 3.5-4 days of your work week reading code, using the project, running benchmarks and experimental test lanes, reviewing specs and plans, drafting specs, defining features and tests.

The level of granularity needed to get earnestly good results is more than most people are used to. It's directly centered at the intersection between spec heavy engineering work and writing requirements for a large, high quality offshore dev team that is endearingly literal in how they interpret instructions. Depending on the work, I've found that I average around one 'task' per 22-35 lines of code.

You'll discover a new sense of profound respect for the better PMs, QA Leads, Eng Directors you have worked with. Months of progress happen each week. You'll know you're doing it right when you ask an Agent to evaluate the work since last week and it assumes it is reviewing the output of a medium sized business and offers to make Jira tickets.

Talk is never cheap. Communicating your thoughts to people without the exact same kind of expertise as you is the most important skill.

This quote is from Torvalds, and I'm quite sure that if he weren't able to write eloquent English no one would know Linux today.

Code is important when it's the best medium to express the essence of your thoughts. Just like a composer cannot express the music in his head with English words.

>> Remember the old adage, “programming is 90% thinking and 10% typing”? It is now, for real.

> Proceeds to write literal books of markdown to get something meaningful

>> It requires no special training, no new language or framework to learn, and has practically no entry barriers—just good old critical thinking and foundational human skills, and competence to run the machinery.

> Wrote a paragraph about how it is important to have serious experience to understand the generated code prior to that

>> For the first time ever, good talk is exponentially more valuable than good code. The ramifications of this are significant and disruptive. This time, it is different.

> This time is different bro I swear, just one more model, just one more scale-up, just one more trillion parameters, bro we’re basically at AGI

My latest take on AI assisted coding is that AI tools are an amplifier of the developer.

- A good and experienced developer who knows how to organize and structure systems will become more productive.

- An inexperienced developer will also be able to produce more code but not necessarily systems that are maintainable.

- A sloppy developer will produce more slop.

AI was never the problem we have been having a downgrade in software in general AI just amplifies how badly you can build software. The real problem is people who just dont care about the craft just pushing out human slop, whether it be because the business goes “we can come back to that dont worry” or what have you. At least with AI me coming back to something is right here and right now, not never or when it causes a production grade issue.

Regardless, knowing syntax of programming language or remember some library API, is a dead business.

> The real concern is for generations of learners who are being robbed of the opportunity to acquire the expertise to objectively discern what is slop and what is not. How do new developers build the skills that seniors generated through time? I see my seniors having higher success in vibe-coding than me. How can I short-circuit the time they put through for myself?

code is cheap, show me the prompt

Lots of words to say that “now” communicating in regular human language is important.

What soft-skill buzzword will be the next one as the capital owners take more of the supposed productivity profits?

Long blog posts are cheap. Show me the prompt.

OK, fuck it, show me the demo (without staging it). show me the result.

Okay I was writing a comment to simon (and I have elaborated some there but I wanted this to be something catchy to show how I feel and something people might discuss with too)

Both Code and talk are cheap. Show me the trust. Show me how I can trust you. Show me your authenticity. Show me your passion.

Code used to be the sign of authenticity. This is whats changing. You can no longer guarantee that large amounts of code let's say are now authentic, something which previously used to be the case (for the most part)

I have been shouting into the void many times about it but Trust seems to be the most important factor.

Essentially, I am speaking it from a consumer perspective but suppose that you write AI generated code and deploy it. Suppose you talked to AI or around it. Now I can do the same too and create a project sometimes (mostly?) more customizable to my needs for free/very-cheap.

So you have to justify why you are charging me. I do feel like that's only possible if there is something additional added to value. Trust, I trust the decision that you make and personally I trust people/decisions who feel like they take me or my ideas into account. So, essentially not ripping me off while actively helping. I don't know how to explain this but the most thing which I hate is the feeling of getting ripped off. So justifiable sustainable business who is open/transparent about the whole deal and what he gets and I get just gets my respect and my trust and quite frankly, I am not seeing many people do that but hopefully this changes.

I am curious now what you guys of HN think about this & what trust means to you in this (new?) ever-changing world.

Like y'know I feel like everything changes all the time but at the same time nothing changes at the same time too. We are still humans & we will always be humans & we are driven by our human instincts. Perhaps the community I envision is a more tight knit community online not complete mega-sellers.

Thoughts?

Please no. Talk is cheap.

I hate this trend of using adjectives to describe systems.

Fast Secure Sandboxed Minimal Reliable Robust Production grade AI ready Let's you _____ Enables you to _____

But somewhat I agree, code is essentially free, you can shit out infinite amounts of code. Unless it's good, then show the code instead. If your code is shit, show the program. If your program is shit, your code is worse, but you still pursing an interesting idea (in your eyes), show the prompt instead of the slop generated. Or even better communicate an elaborate version of the prompt.

>One can no longer know whether such a repository was “vibe”

This is absurd. Simply false, people can spot INSTANTLY when the code is good, see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46753708

Uhh... how about show me both?

I think that's always been true. The ideas and reasoning process matter. So does the end product. If you produced it with an LLM and it sucks, it still sucks.