Code Is Cheap Now, and That Changes Everything | Hacker News Reader

Code Is Cheap Now, and That Changes Everything

perevillega.com

67 pointsv-mdev57 comments

Code is not cheap. It's just heavily subsidised with VC money. But that won't last forever.

Uber Eats also used to be dirt cheap. Surprise! it's not anymore.

And even if you just pay API prices for Opus - as opposed to using a subsidized subscription - you can easily reach the point where the tokens for AI-generated code become comparable in price to just paying a junior dev salary for a manual implementation. AI is great for greenfield projects, where there is little to no existing context. But on real codebases, people memorize large parts of it. That allows them to navigate files with 100k+ tokens in them. (Wherease the Opus API will charge you $2.5 for each time the model runs through 100k thinking tokens reviewing your file.)

But what AI can imitate pretty well is the result of having a clueless middle-manager review your code. So my prediction would be that the AI "revolution" will slim out management layers before it'll reach actual developers.

I doubt that all of the providers hosting open models on open platforms are losing money on serving inference. They have the benefit of not having to pay for training, but the models are open and aren't going away anytime soon.

Sadly, I have not been able to find any open model that comes close to Opus 4.6. So while they are much cheaper to deploy, they also aren't good enough for unsupervised agent execution. But you need a model that can run unsupervised for the claim "Code is Cheap" to become possible.

I don't really think so. Maybe it's because the systems I build need to be reliable and understandable to humans, but I don't think Opus 4.6 is good enough to be unsupervised. I've spent a lot of time using it and I have to tell it no semi frequently and rewrite by hand/iterate with the model frequently. It's saves me a lot of time when used this way, I think, but I still have to give it overall structure and keep it scoped to small changes to prevent it from going down wrong paths and generating tons of unnecessary code (which is how you end up with unmaintainable slop). Less code is pretty much always better and these models made it really easy to ignore that until it's too late. This is on a healthy mix of greenfield and brownfield projects.

To that end, I've actually found Kimi K2.5 to be "good enough" for a lot of that, not quite as good at Opus 4.6, but good enough that it gets me like 80% of the value for a fraction of the cost and more speed.

Hardware has always gotten cheaper every year, and always will. You will be able to run Opus 4.6 tier models locally with junkyard hardware in 2035.

Citation needed. Hardware prices have gone up substantially in the past year.

"global warming is not real because it's really cold today"

i guess my point was that it isn't a given that hardware will always be cheaper, considering that memory prices this past year have gone through the roof.

you may argue that it is an outlier and capacity will increase to meet demand, which it probably will, but who's to say that won't just mean further demand from unlimited money ai companies and then further increased consumer prices?

would opus 4.6 be relevant in 2035 ?

Towards the end this article contradicts itself so severely I don't think a human wrote this.

But this isn’t really about AI enthusiasm or AI scepticism. It’s about industrialisation. It has happened over and over in every sector, and the pattern is always the same: the people who industrialise outcompete those who don’t. You can buy handmade pottery from Etsy, or you can buy it mass-produced from a store. Each proposition values different things. But if you’re running a business that depends on pottery, you’d better understand the economics.

So which is it?

Will an industrialised process always outcompete a pre-industrial process? Or do they not compete at all, because they value different things?

And why are they talking about Etsy as if it doesn't bring in $2+ billon in revenue?

I'm not too familiar with etsy, but presumably most etsy sellers are closer to being lemonade stands than they are to being ikea

And yes, sometimes it's nice to support a local lemonade stand. For my family's income, I know which segment I'd feel more confident to work for..

Quality indie software in a niche that Ikea is not addressing can make a decent income unlike a lemonade stand.

And unlike at (this hypothetical) Ikea, you wouldn't have to maintain the impression of 20x AI-augmented output to avoid being fired. Well, you could still use AI as much as you want, but you wouldn't have to keep proving you're not underusing it.

The comparison valid for his example would be to compare revenues from mass produced pottery vs. revenues of handmade pottery sold on etsy.

Methinks that mass produced pottery makes more than $2 billion and etsy pottery is a tiny fraction of overall etsy sales.

'It's not X, it's Y' sentence formulations are usually indicative of LLM assisted writing.

Do you disagree with his analogy?

Hand made pottery cannot compete on price with industrially made pottery and therefore majority of pottery is made industrially.

100% human written code cannot compete on price with AI assisted code and therefore majority of code will be written with assistance of AI.

The aside about etsy handmade pottery is that because they can't compete with industrially made pottery on price so they were killed in mass market pottery products and had to find a tiny niche. Before industrialization handmade pottery was mass market pottery. It was outcompeted in mass market and had to move into a niche.

And that part of doesn't even translate into code. People are not buying lines of code, so you're not going to be buying handmade code.

Handmade pottery can offer variety (designs) not available in mass produced pottery. When you look at software, you can't tell if it was 100% handwritten or written with assistance of AI.

If the argument was about cost per unit output, bringing in Etsy didn't make sense at all, especially when they explicitly mention it was about valuing different things.

Handmade pottery can certainly be better quality than mass-produced pottery, just like handwritten code can be better quality than AI-assisted code. There is a spate of new MacOS apps that are clearly AI-written, with memory leaks, high CPU usage and UI that doesn't conform to MacOS conventions (in one instance I'm aware of, the interface has changed completely between updates). Of course users can tell the difference.

If you're going to spend a lot of time making sure the AI-generated code is perfect, does the industrialisation analogy still hold? There's a spectrum here from vibe-coded to agentic to Copilot-level assistance to no AI assistance (which may be a little silly) of course.

This is interesting because the cost of cloning code is zero. The human written code could be cheaper than the AI one because of the cost of distribution. The same does not apply for pottery because to create/distribute an extra bowl, you need >0 resources.

My point is (and the issue I have with the article) is that the quality of code (whatever that means) is not measured by the number of lines. Whether the code is generated by AI or humans, the market is not going to care. Same where it didn't care whether it was written by someone in Silicon Valley or in the middle of East Asia.

Production grade code is still expensive for any non-trivial product. I think it may be getting even more expensive.

It gets even harder when there's an expectation that your products implement some sort of AI.

Not an LLM necessarily, but to succeed they need to feel easy and magical, the bar is higher, and that makes it expensive: more edge cases, harder to deploy, more expensive to run, and so on.

Someone has to babysit the security and the runtimes, PMs still run around figuring out the competitive landscape and so on.

AI just moved the pain points, for every part that's gotten easier, some other part got way harder mainly because we don't yet have the experience on how to effectively tackle the scale change of the challenges.

Interestingly, they landed on a conclusion which I have often argued against these days [0]. Code is absolutely cheap, and previously, it was the most important resource that we guarded.

Entire job descriptions and functions were built to guard the engineer's time. Product owners, product managers, customer success, etc., all shielded the engineers who produced code because that was the scarcest resource.

With that scarcity gone, we really need to be thinking about the entire structure differently. I'm definitely in the we still need people camp. The roles are wildly different, though. We can't continue doing the same job that we did with a slight twist.

[0] https://dheer.co/gatekeeping-on-a-different-stage/

I partially disagree for two reasons:

1. Code is absolutely cheap, but good, correct, non-vulnerable code is much cheaper than it was a few years ago but is still not free, especially in a large application.

2. Requirements management is less important when the cost of software is lower because iteration is cheaper, but bad customer communication can absolutely result in negatively useful software, and there is a skill to understanding what people want and need that takes a lot of time to use well, so in many cases a product manager can still help do useful work... most won't though.

That's partly the harness for me. I do believe product managers are still important, but they're important in deciding what gets shipped, not what gets built.

Engineers are still important. They're important in building the harness to ensure that anything which is being built/shipped is of sufficient quality.

In my opinion, testing/QA/etc is now the core product.

But the best code that you'll get is literally connecting to the pain point the customer was saying to the agentic workflow that is building your product.

Bad customer communication in my experience is the result of every person who handled the convo pre-engineers posturing the message trying to make sure the next person is motivated to get it to the next gatekeeper.

This is all very biased based on my own workflow though.

According to Block. https://block.xyz/inside/from-hierarchy-to-intelligence. There will be three generalized roles in tech:

     Individual contributors (ICs) who build and operate capabilities, the model, the intelligence layer, and the interfaces. They are deep specialists and experts in a specific layer of the system. The world model provides the context that a manager used to provide, so ICs can make decisions about their layer without waiting to be told what to do.
     Directly Responsible Individuals (DRI) who own specific cross-cutting problems or opportunities and customer outcomes. A DRI might own the problem of merchant churn in a specific segment for 90 days, with full authority to pull resources from the world model team, the lending capability team, and the interface team as needed. DRIs may persist on certain problems or move elsewhere to solve new ones.
     Player-coaches who combine building with developing people. They replace the traditional manager whose primary job was information routing. A player-coach still writes code or builds models or designs interfaces. They also invest in the growth of the people around them. They don't spend their days in status meetings, alignment sessions, and priority negotiations. The world model handles alignment. The DRI structure handles strategy and priority. The player-coach handles craft and people.

To give a sports analogy. The player-coaches are the coach who rose through the ranks and now gets to choose and develop the other players on the team. The individual contributors are functional specialists e.g., defender, halfback, forward etc. The DRI "own" specific scenarios e.g.: penalty kicks, throw-in at the corner etc.

Code is cheap, as long as you ignore the knock-on effects on RAM prices, storage prices, environmental costs, the fact that people are still burning thousands of dollars on tokens...

Easy when you’ve got direct injections of free ponzi money continuously.

This is not first time in history that RAM prices spiked.

And it'll be resolved the same way all others were.

demand > supply => higher prices => incentive to produce more => produce more => supply > demand => lower prices

The drastic drop in price of code is permament.

How long does it take to spin up enough completely new chip fabs to supply the demand?

Exactly. The problem with capitalism is how slow it is to respond to changes.

"That’s not a forecast. That’s the current state."

Something about this sentence sequence looks vaguely familiar...

Many other patterns in the text, re-arranging to make it more obvious:

Why do we estimate stories? Because developer time is expensive and someone has to budget for it.

Why do we prioritise features in backlogs? Because we can’t build everything and we need to choose what’s worth the cost.

Why do we agonise over whether to refactor this module or write that debug interface? Because the time spent on one thing is time not spent on another.

We have compilers: either it compiles or it doesn’t.

We have test suites: either the tests pass or they don’t.

Planning. Estimating. Feature prioritisation. Code review. Architecture review. Sprint planning. All of it is downstream of the assumption that writing code is the expensive part.

... type systems, linters, static analysis. Software gives us verification tools that most other domains lack.

As a FOSS maintainer… code was already cheap before. Good code wasn't. And it still isn't… even if only because the cost includes review, but still often enough for the code itself too.

AI assisted development is the generalists dream

Althought it still hasn't solved procrastinating the next plan prompt

Have you seen the meme with three spidermen, labeled "Designer", "Product Manager", and "Engineer" wherein each is pointing to the other two and saying "I don't need you anymore!"?

Most of the time, the person saying that is wrong.

An important element that Willison left out of his definition of 'good code' is efficient!

Software has an amazing multiplier effect. It can be copied to millions of machines and run billions of times each day. Code that wastes resources (time, memory, disk space, electricity, etc.) can become incredibly expensive to run, even if it was vibe coded in a day for a few dollars.

Has anyone taken a serious look at all the code being spit out by AI with regards to how efficient it is?

AI is assisting you. It'll write efficient code if you guide it to write efficient code. You're not a hapless victim of ai written code.

To give you a concrete examples. Recently pretext library made waves. I looked at the code and noticed that isCJK could possibly faster.

So I spent 30 minutes TELLING claude to write a benchmark and implement several different, hopefully faster, versions. Some claude came up with by itself and some were based on my guidance.

You can see the result here: https://github.com/chenglou/pretext/issues/2

The original isCJK, also written by AI (I assume), was fast. It wasn't obviously slow like lots of human JavaScript code I see.

Claude did implement a faster version.

Could I do the same thing (write multiple implementations and benchmark them) without Claude? Yes.

Would I do it? Probably not. It would take significantly longer than 30 min. and I don't have that much time to spend on isCJK.

Would I achieve as good result? Probably no. The big win came from replacing for .. of with regular for loop. Something that didn't occur to me but Claude did it because I instructed it to "come up with ideas to speed it up". I'm an expert in writing fast code but I don't know everything and I all good ideas. AI knows everything, you just need to poke it the right way.

What worries me is that good, efficient code will no longer be widely shared like before. Everyone will just write their own inefficient version of a general purpose function or library because Claude or some other AI coder made it cheap and easy.

> AI is a nail gun. In the hands of someone unskilled, it’s dangerous. In the hands of a professional, it speeds them up enormously. And in the end, all anyone cares about is that a nail exists in that location.

This is very interesting. In the world of AI coding, it's not enough to put the nail on the right spot, at the right angle and flush with the surface. You also need to ensure each nail will remain in that exact position as the system evolves. Agents have a tendency to touch parts of the system they didn't have to, and catching those problems can be evry tricky.

Obvious caveat that as the system evolves, a prior nail may actually have to be removed. That's not the situation I'm talking about.

>Code Is Cheap Now

And electricity comes from the outlet and milk from the supermarket.

At the moment billons of dollars of investor money heavily subsidizes the AI services, let's wait for the price when those companies need to generate profit

> This isn’t a minor detail, it’s the core constraint that shaped virtually every habit and institution in our industry.

I am so so tired of this turn of phrase in LLM created content. I guess I don't know for sure whether this article was LLM written but I suspect so. Or, scarier still we are changing our own writing to match this slop.

I find it amusing that software developers have no issue with having an LLM churn out slop code but have such a visceral reaction to slop articles.

You are falling into the trap of thinking there's a single monolithic being called Software Developers that has inconsistent opinions. In fact, you're observing different people with conflicting values.

Yeah yeah. But LLMs certainly have been embraced by a large number of developers. Many of whom I've observed react with disgust when they see "not X, but Y" or emdashes in an article. But when it comes to code, "wow this is so awesome!"

I have no issue with with code generated by e.g. Claude because it's not "slop".

On average, it's probably better than the code I would write.

I say "on average" because AI doesn't make stupid mistakes, doesn't invert logical conditions. I know I do. Which I eventually fix, but it's better to not make them in the first place, hence "on average".

And in cases that AI doesn't generate code up to my quality standards, I re-prompt it until it does. Or fix it myself.

I'm not a hapless victim of AI. I'm a supervisor. I operate a machine that generates good code most of the time but not all of the time. I'm there to spot and correct the "not all of the time" cases.

But that's my point. LLMs generate good prose "most of the time", certainly better than most people are capable of doing. Yet we frequently react with disgust when we see tell-tale signs of LLM-generated text in articles. Why? Because it indicates the person was probably too lazy to write it themselves and are simply chucking a half-formed thought over the wall? Why don't we hold generated code to the same standard?

One is made for humans to consume, the other for a compiler or interpreter. Good code is supposed to look like other code and follow common patterns. The best writing is original and novel.

I would question the framing that code is cheap now. That's not really meaningful. What is the cost most associated with software? Maintenance.

Considering that, I would say a much more accurate statement is that sub-prime technical debt is now easy to take on.

I'm surprised at the low quality of the grifting comments in this thread. I have a feeling that the vibe coding enjoyers used to at least make defensible statements. Now it's just pure hype. Seems like we're in the SBF being lauded for FTX part of the bubble.

> sub-prime technical debt is now easy to take on

Vibe-coded projects can't keep up with the scale of technical debt accretion. See the proliferation of OpenClaw clones - instead of fixing it we're iterating on rewriting it from scratch without fixing the core issues. (Give it a year and the "minimal" Claw-clones will also collapse under technical debt, because they're also vibe-coded, with all that implies.)

Related from Simon in February:

Writing code is cheap now

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47125374

Found this really well written. I really enjoyed reading it, and found myself agreeing with a lot of it.

I wish the author wrote more about the day 2 problem cases with AI built applications. It somewhat matters what the programming language is, the architecture and design for debugging and reasoning verification when we want to alter the system specification.

Basically as a Dev, or "Owner" of the application, we are responsible for the continuous changes and updates to the system. Which I've found hard to reason about in practice when speaking to other people, if I dont know the code explicitly.

They allude to it, but I think one of the new skills that will be valuable is reasoning about systems where you don't know the code. This is what “owners” and managers who don’t touch code do today.

This isn't really a thing. You can't create an accurate 4K image from a low res JPG. Owners and managers who don't touch code don't know shit and have to go to the developers to learn about important decisions made in the application and how they work in detail.

Owners and managers will believe the AI companies that AI can create an accurate 4K image from a low res JPG.

Shit code was always cheap, this is why "technical debt" exists as a concept.

> Developers who learn to specify, verify, and iterate will thrive.

This will last for about one year.

From next year agents will be prompting themselves. Human developers will have approximately zero economic value.

Prompting themselves to do what?

specify, verify, iterate

Oh, you'll still need a human to give the initial prompt, like say "Write me a Notion clone." But after that, what value is the human developer really providing? Expertise? Why can't LLMs advance sufficiently to cover that in addition to the programming?

This is a tale as old as time. Techies are so enamored with new gadgets that they eagerly develop the tools business managers will bury them with.

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