| Not sure if “code has always been expensive” is the right framing. Typing out a few hundred lines of code was never the real bottleneck. What was expensive was everything around it: making it correct, making it maintainable (often underestimated), coordinating across teams and supporting it long term. You can also overshoot: Testing every possible path, validating across every platform, or routing every change through layers of organizational approval can multiply costs quickly. At some point, process (not code) becomes the dominant expense. What LLMs clearly reduce is the short-term cost of producing working code. That part is dramatically cheaper. The long-term effect is less clear. If we generate more code, faster, does that reduce cost or just increase the surface area we need to maintain, test, secure, and reason about later? Historically, most of software’s cost has lived in maintenance and coordination, not in keystrokes. It will take real longitudinal data to see whether LLMs meaningfully change that, or just shift where the cost shows up. |
But even typing that first few hundred lines used to have a much more significant cost attached.
I just pasted 256 lines of JavaScript into the 2000s-era SLOCount tool (classic Perl, I have a WebAssembly hosted version here https://tools.simonwillison.net/sloccount) and it gave me a 2000s-era cost estimate of $6,461.
I wouldn't take that number with anything less than a giant fist of salt, but there you have it.