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- Hacker News
- It's not a question of cheap or expensive; it's when to pay what costs.
With LLM's, it's arguably easier to avoid exporting costs to the future, or to export them.
Whether because of LLM's or frameworks, process consistency typically creates a forcing function to continuously improve quality (i.e., avoid exporting costs); for each problem, create step in the process to surface and address it - hopefully in an automated way.
Having spent lifetimes trying to get teams to up their game, I'm hopeful this may help, if it gets baked in not just to code generation, but to process.
by w10-1 - "We" should not do anything. The LLM industry should go and find solutions for the problems they created, themselves. Not offload it to others through sneaky influencer posts. And we should hold them responsible, should they not be able to address the problems they are creating.by hansmayer
- I used to work as a VP and a part of my responsibilities was to chop up tasks to self-contained work units that can be easily assigned to random devs. This was both morally problematic for humans (i.e. EVPs forced treating human = CPU) and very optimistic when it came to individual dev capabilities and domain knowledge. However, this style is precisely what works well with agentic AI coding and I have no qualms to use it.by storus
- We change how we value code: https://jerf.org/iri/post/2026/what_value_code_in_ai_era/
Short-short version, code will still be accruing value in proportion to how much of the real world it has encountered. The bottleneck on building valuable code will be how much real world there is to go around. As is so often the case, what may initially seem to kill SaaS will actually make them stronger as they end up with more exposure to the real world than some random guy's random AI code.
by jerf - This is such a weird argument, beside obvious #10 which will bite back with a vengeance, because... code can't be cheaper than free!
Since at least the early 80s a LOT of very important code wasn't cheap, it was free. Both free of cost (you could "just" download it and run it) but also free as freedom-respecting software.
I just don't get the argument that cheap is new. Cheap is MORE expensive than free!
by utopiah - Re: personalized software via vibe coding
Free but you're responsible for maintaining it means it's not free. It's the same issue as maintaining your own fork. It's just an ongoing cost.
(Though as AI becomes autonomous enough to be the maintainer, that cost kind of goes away. Then it's just the cost of managing the "dev".)
by andai - Realize it's going to be 10-100x more expensive once you have no way back?by boesboes
- What will close the way back?by theshrike79
- There is no moat. https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat...
- How do you reconcile these ideas with the fact that cheap open weight models are only slightly behind the state of the art?
If anything, I would bet that next year you could get today’s flagship performance for significantly cheaper via an open-weights model.
by user34283 - Guy works for the Overture Map Foundation, with Amazon, Microsoft etc. being sponsors. He has been boosting AI all over the Internet. I'm sure Microslop and Amazon are very happy with these efforts.
I'm glad that "10 ways to do X" submissions are allowed as long as they boost AI.
by asG1298 - Are you suggesting that Microsoft and Amazon's sponsorship of Overture comes with an understanding that people who work on Overture will spend their time writing articles that "boost AI"?
Does "boosting AI" include opening an article with "Frontier models are really good at coding these days, much better than they are at other tasks"?
by simonw - I am in India, junior developer hiring is all down. Ai has reduced offshoring to India and eliminated the need for janitor work (often offloaded to juniors).
Many people are finding it difficult to even land internships.
The most affected areas are sysadmin, devops, and frontend. Where you'll have very hard time getting any offer.
Companies like BrowserStack are withdrawing campus placement offers.
Meanwhile, I am writing apps for my own use and have reached 10,000+ monthly active users already, even though I am making zero money from doing all this, but it's fun.
- I'm surprised sys-admin hires are down, is AI doing a lot of that as well?by aspectrr
- Looking at the entire market in Europe it is also down but that is not due to "AI" but because they are easiest to fire with least consequences. There is a global recession looming, despite Wall Street saying otherwise.by consp
- I came here exactly to point out what I'm glad to see is 10. "Free as in puppies" is a wonderful way to put it.
Every time I open linkedin I'm scared of how many big heads have taken the wrong lesson that coding almost free == free engineering. So many bait posts asking engineers why they would need to pay them any longer, or being glad they're generating millions of lines a month....this is going to end badly.
by torben-friis - This is a repeat of paying devs by SLC(source line of code).by hacker_homie
- LinkedIn is a circle of hell even dante couldn't imagine.
- > 10. Code is cheap, but maintenance, support, and security aren’t.
I also keep circling around this point. So many software repositories in the AI space seem to follow a publish and forget pattern. If you simply can show that you have the patience to maintain a project, ideally with manual intervention instead of a fully autonomous AI, then you already have an outstanding project.
by mxmlnkn - I had a business owner tell me that they don't need to hire juniors anymore because claude can do all of that work for them. This was not a software shop so it's not even about writing code but I also thought that was something that will bite in the near future. A business that is not investing in juniors is a business that is not investing in the future.by scorpioxy
- Certain types of code are cheap. Proof of concept is cheap. Adding small features that fit within the existing architecture is cheap. Otherwise, I'm not so sure. Coding agents are fantastic at minutiae, but have no taste. They'll turn a code base into a ball of mud very quickly, given the opportunity.by noelwelsh
- Except here's the thing, that's the sort of code that was extremely expensive before, in large part because of our day jobs (which still to this day require mindfulness and can't just be vibe-coded).
However, an extra script here or there to make your life easier, adding extra UI features based on some datapoint to your internal dashboard, ect, these were things that could've taken a few days you didn't have before to get exactly right and now they can be done with only a few minutes of attention.
by zjaffee - Preproduction code was always cheap or even free. Sales people have been selling software that didn't do what was on the tin since the dawn of time. Those features cost 0 dollars to write!
Production code. Especially production code with bugs is expensive. It can cost you customers, you can even get negative money for it in the form of law suits.
Coding agents are great for preproduction and one offs. For production I really wouldn't chance it at any scale above normal human output.
- While I agree with you that agentic coding still has quite a way to go and is not always producing the quality that I would want from it, I can say quite confidently that its baseline is way above some of the production code in many applications many people use today. It really isn’t that code before agents was primarily written with taste and beautiful structure in mind. Your average code base is a messy hell full of quick fixes that turned into all kinds of debt over the years.by pell
- If writing code was the only part of the job, and it was easy, these jobs wouldn't pay so well.
Engineering is hard. It's always going to be hard. I'm glad that AI makes some parts of it easier, and we (software engineers) can focus on engineering, that's nice.
Code is NEVER cheap. Just because, at current completely unrealistic AI pricing, using agents is cheaper than hiring juniors, does not make code cheap. It makes producing code cheap, which has always been low-cost. Every line of code is a cost, is a maintenance burden, is complexity. An AI, even with somehow infinite context window, will cost more money the more code you have.
Could you replace a whole team of engineers with AI? Probably, yeah. Could you simply fire everyone at your company and close it down, without much of a problem? Also probably yes, for most companies.
AIs can help with debugging, can help with writing code, with drafting designs, they can help with almost every step. The second you let OpenAI, or Anthropic, take full code ownership over your products, and you fire the last engineer, is the time when the AI pricing can go up to match what engineers make today. You've just reinvented the highly paid consultant.
Or you could take the middle-ground and hire good engineers, make sure they maintain an understanding of the codebase, and let them use whatever tools they use to get the job done, and done well. This is the way that I've seen competent companies handle it.
by lionkor - "Producing code has always been low cost"
Relative to what?
I don't understand people dismissing the massive decrease in both cost of producing code and the speed of producing code.
Before AI, people running businesses had similar issued as people have with AI now, but the costs were much greater.
They could hire someone to write them a prototype for their idea, but it would cost them on the order of 1000s of dollars, and it would take weeks at the minimum!
Now it could cost them 20$ and be done in a few days. The feedback loop is the bottleneck.
by peab - A lot of people down on AI in this thread, but I'm watching the industry slip over the line of trust with these latest frontier models. GPT 5.5 is the first model good enough for me to just let rip.
Every jira ticket I see now has acceptance criteria, reproduction steps, and detailed information about why the ticket exists.
Every commit message now matches the repo style, and has detailed information about what's contained in the commit.
Every MR now has detailed information about what's being merged.
Every code base in the teams around me now has 70 to 90%+ code coverage.
Every line of code now comes with best practices baked in, helpful comments, and optimized hot paths.
I regularly ship four features at a time now across multiple projects.
The MCP has now automated away all of the drudgery of programming, from summarizing emails, to generating confluence documentation, to generating slide decks.
People keep screaming that tech debt is going to pile up, but I think it's going to be exactly the opposite. Software is going to pile up because developing it is now cheap.
Most code before llms sucked. Most projects I on-boarded to were a massive ball of undocumented spaghetti, written by humans. The floor has been raised significantly as to what bad code can even look like, and fixing issues is now basically free if your company is willing to shell out for tokens.
- > I regularly ship four features at a time now across multiple projects.
Many people are missing the fact that LLMs allow ICs to start operating like managers.
You can manage 4 streams now. Within a couple years, you may be able to manage 10 streams like a typical manager does today.
IME, LLMs don't speed you up that much if 1) you're already an expert at what you're doing (inherently not scalable), 2) you're only working on one thing (doesn't make sense when you can manage multiple streams), or 3) doing something LLMs are particularly bad it (not many remaining coding tasks, but definitely still some).
- > I regularly ship four features at a time now across multiple projects.
Can that happen without you? I would assume this is the next step. I don't find it either good or bad, but I'm genuinely curious where this all goes.
by p2detar - >I regularly ship four features at a time now across multiple projects.
Well, this explains why so much software nowadays is so slow, buggy, and chaotic.
by duskdozer