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It's like the allegory of the retired consultant's $5000 invoice (hitting the thing with a hammer: $5, knowing where to hit it: $4995).

Yeah, coding is cheaper now, but knowing what to code has always been the more expensive piece. I think AI will be able to help there eventually, but it's not as far along on that vector yet.

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Possibly even more important than knowing where to hit it (what to code), is knowing where not to hit it (what not to code). Hitting the thing in the wrong place can lead to catastrophe. Making a code change you don't need can blow up production or paint your architecture into a corner.

AIs so far seem to prefer addition by addition, not addition by subtraction or addition by saying "are you sure?".

This doesn't mean that "code is cheap" is bad. Rather, it means that soon our primary role will be to guide AIs to produce a high proportion of "code that was cheap", while being able to quickly distinguish, prevent, and reject "cheap code".

Spot on

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