[aster0id]

> Code is so cheap it’s practically free. Code that works continues to carry a cost, but that cost has plummeted now that coding agents can check their work as they go.

I personally think that even before LLMs, the cost of code wasn't necessarily the cost of typing out the characters in the right order, but having a human actually understand it to the extent that changes can be made. This continues to be true for the most part. You can vibe code your way into a lot of working code, but you'll inevitably hit a hairy bug or a real world context dependency that the LLM just cannot solve, and that is when you need a human to actually understand everything inside out and step in to fix the problem.

[monkpit]

I wonder if we will trend towards a world where maintainability is just a waste of time and money, when you can just knock together a new flimsy thing quicker and cheaper than maintaining one thing over multiple iterations.

[killingtime74]

I don't think most business processes can afford to have that many issues with their code. Customers and contracts will be lost. Reputations will be lost

[ozozozd]

Without maintainability, adding a new type of input or feature will break existing features.

Doesn’t matter how quick it is to write from scratch, if you want varying inputs handled by the same piece of code, you need maintainability.

In a way, software development is all about adding new constraints to a system and making sure the old constraints are still satisfied.

[ranger_danger]

Don't adequate tests make this much less of an issue?

[skydhash]

I don’t think that will ever be true. Let’s take a shell session as an example of ad-hoc code: People are still writing programs and scripts. Stuff doesn’t really change that often to warrant starting from scratch. Easier to add a new format to a music player than writing a new player from scratch.