[simonw]

I was careful to say "Good code still has a cost" and "delivering good code remains significantly more expensive than [free]" rather than the more aesthetically pleasing "Good code is expensive.

I chose this words because I don't think good code is nearly as expensive with coding agents as it was without them.

You still have to actively work to get good code, but it takes so much less time when you have a coding agent who can do the fine-grained edits on your behalf.

I firmly believe that agentic engineering should produce better code. If you are moving faster but getting worse results it's worth stopping and examining if there are processes you could fix.

[akiselev]

Totally agreed. I’ve been reverse engineering Altium’s file format to enable agents to vibe-engineer electronics and though I’m on my third from scratch rewrite in as many weeks, each iteration improves significantly in quality as the previous version helps me to explore the problem space and instruct the agent on how to do red/green development [1]. Each iteration is tens of thousands of lines of code which would have been impossible to write so fast before so it’s been quite a change in perspective, treating so much code as throw away experimentation.

I’m using a combination of 100s of megabytes of Ghidra decompiled delphi DLLs and millions of lines of decompiled C# code to do this reverse engineering. I can’t imagine even trying such a large project for LLMs so while a good implementation is still taking a lot of time, it’s definitely a lot cheaper than before.

[1] I saw your red/green TDD article/book chapter and I don’t think you go far enough. Since we have agents, you can generalize red/green development to a lot of things that would be impractical to implement in tests. For example I have agents analyze binary diffs of the file format to figure out where my implementation is incorrect without being bogged down by irrelevant details like the order or encoding of parameters. This guides the agent loop instead of tests.

[inejge]

> I was careful to say "Good code still has a cost" and "delivering good code remains significantly more expensive than [free]" rather than the more aesthetically pleasing "Good code is expensive.

Which is nuance that will get overlooked or waved away by upper management who see the cost of hiring developers, know that developers "write code", and can compare the developer salary with a Claude/Codex/whatever subscription. If the correction comes, it will be late and at the expense of rank and file, as usual. (And don't be naive: if an LLM subscription can let you employ fewer developers, that subscription plus offshore developers will enable even more cost saving. The name of the game is cost saving, and has been for a long time.)

[dasil003]

Sure, but clueless leadership is not a new thing. While big companies with structural moats can shamble along with a surprising amount of dysfunction (which is why they tolerate so many muppets in middle management), even they rely on some baseline of system integrity that will erode pretty quickly if they let go of the people who know how things work.

Don’t get me wrong, I think SWE headcounts will reduce over time, but the mechanism will be teams that know how to leverage AI effectively will dominate ones who don’t. This takes more market cycles though, and it’s even hard to nail down the specifics of these skills with the speed agentic coding tools are currently evolving. My advice is make yourself part of the second group, and worry less about bad management decisions that are inevitable.

[jimbokun]

Value of Claude subscription: $0

Value of developer + Claude subscription: N * value of developer without Claude subscription where N is still the subject of intense debate.

[mexicocitinluez]

> I chose this words because I don't think good code is nearly as expensive with coding agents as it was without them.

Still navigating this territory, but I think a lot of people are getting caught up on the idea that producing code is simply a matter of typing it at the keyboard.

One of the benefits of something like Claude Code isn't just the code it produces, but the ability to quickly try out ideas, get some feedback, AND THEN write the good code.

> than the more aesthetically pleasing

Agreed. What even is "good" code? So much of the bad code I write isn't necessarily that it's ugly, it's bad because it misses the mark. Because I made too many assumptions and didn't take the time to actual learn the domain. If I can eek out even a few more hours a week to actually build worthwhile solutions because I was able to focus a bit more, it's a win to me. My users in particular have a really difficult time imagining features without actually seeing them. They have a hard to articulating what's wrong/right without something tangible in front of them. It would be hard to argue that having the ability to quickly prototype and demo features to people is a bad thing.

[jimbokun]

This was the single worthwhile point behind “agile” development: getting new code in front of users as quickly as possible to know whether or not you’re building the right thing.

With agile that meant delivering something to evaluate every two weeks instead of 6 months or a year. Now with AIs maybe it should be a new version every day? Are current processes outside of writing the code capable of supporting that cadence? Do users even want to try new versions that often?

[kranner]

> I was careful to say "Good code still has a cost" ...

Misleading headline, with the qualifier buried six paragraphs deep. You have a wide enough readership (and well deserved too). Clickbait tactics feel a little out of place on your blog.

[simonw]

This is the chapter title for a sort-of book I'm working on, and it's the central philosophy I'm building the book around.

I'm not going to change a good chapter title (and I do think it's a good chapter title) just because people on Hacker News won't read a few paragraphs of content.

A dishonest title would be "Code is cheap now" or "Programming is cheap now". I picked "Writing code is cheap now" to capture that specifically the bit where you type code into a computer is the thing that's cheap.

[kranner]

Fairly esoteric and self-serving definition of "writing code" if it represents just the typing part. I wouldn't call it a dishonest title, but perhaps not a fully honest one either.