alt Hacker NewsWriting code is cheap now
Comments
Writing code was always cheap! You could outsource for inconsequential amounts of money and get massive amounts of code in return. Yet, the vast majority of companies do not do so. Because coding is not the hard part of being a software engineer / programmer.
That's like saying that photography killed painting because it saved you from having to draw things. Drawing is basically free now, I just take the photo. But the number of painters (and by that I mean, artists who paint) is dramatically higher today than in 1800. Artists didn't die because of mechanical reproduction, they flourished, because that wasn't the problem they were solving.
the interesting shift is where the time goes. before: thinking + typing. now: thinking + reviewing. the thinking part didn't get cheaper -- domain knowledge, edge cases, integration constraints -- none of that is free. what changed is you now review AI output instead of type your own, which is genuinely faster but not as different as it sounds. the hard part was always understanding what to build, not the keystrokes.
I think the framing is still too code-centric.
The real bottleneck isn’t writing (or even reviewing) code anymore. It’s:
1. extracting knowledge from domain experts
2. building a coherent mental model of the domain
3. making product decisions under ambiguity / tradeoffs
4. turning that into clear, testable requirements and steering the loop as reality pushes back
The workflow is shifting to:
Understand domain => Draft PRD/spec (LLM helps) => Prompt agent to implement => Evaluate against intent + constraints => Refine (requirements + tests + code) => Repeat
The “typing” part used to dominate the cost structure, so we optimized around it (architecture upfront, DRY everywhere, extreme caution). Now the expensive part is clarity of intent and orchestrating the iteration: deciding what to build next, what to cut, what to validate, what to trust, and where to add guardrails (tests, invariants, observability).
If your requirements are fuzzy, the agent will happily generate 5k lines of very confident nonsense. If your domain model + constraints are crisp, results can be shockingly good.
So the scarce skill isn’t “can you write good code?” It’s “can you interrogate reality well enough to produce a precise model—and then continuously steer the agent against that model?”
Sometimes it feels what we are seeing is Code becoming just like any other "asset" in the globalised economy: cheap - but not quality; just like the priors of clothing (disintegrating after a few washes), consumer electronics (cheap materials), furniture (Instagram-able but utterly impracticable), etc: all made for quick turn-overs to rake in more profit and generate more waste but none made to last long.
Put another way: “reading code costs the same as it always did” arguably more when you consider that the cost of reading goes down when the ability read goes up. in other words if you wrote the thing it is likely you can read it fast. but reading someone elses stuff is harder.
Scathophagidae are flies that really like eating shit. We know how to cheaply produce massive amounts of shit.
But that doesn't mean we solved world hunger. In the same way, AIs churning out millions of lines of code doesn't mean we have solved software engineering.
Actually, I would argue that high LOCs are a liability, not an asset. We have found a very fast way of turning money into slop, which will then need maintenance and delay every future release. Unless, of course, you have an expert code reviewer who checks the AI output. But in that case, the productivity gains will be max 10%. Because thoroughly reviewing code is almost the same amount of work as writing it.
Understanding computers and programming is not the same as coding.
i’ve yet to see an agent that can take a figma design and produce high fidelity UI
maybe writing code is cheap . But writing unit tests that actually test stuff that matters is suddenly so much more important and expensive.
Well another consequence of that is that you’re going to have a lot more tools to maintain.
And LLMs aren’t half as good as maintaining code as they are to generate it in the first place. At least yet.
For everyone who is responding to the "Writing code is cheap now" heading without reading the article, I'd encourage you to scroll down to the "Good code still has a cost" section.
The interesting thing nobody's talking about here is that cheap code generation actually makes throwaway prototypes viable. Before, you'd agonize over architecture because rewriting was expensive. Now you can build three different approaches in a day and pick the one that works.
The real cost was never the code itself. It was the decision-making around what to build. That hasn't gotten cheaper at all.
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[flagged]
"Writing" code is cheap but this just scratches the surface. Its a completely different paradigm. All forms of digital generation is cheap and on the verge of being fully automated which comes with self recursion loops.
Automated intelligence is now cheap....