Coding has never been expensive as it is nothing more than a reification of a solution to a problem as it is understood at that time.
It is the underlying understanding of the problem which has always been expensive and remains so.
You can improve some parts with LLM (make more prototypes, iterate faster), but if humans are the bottleneck and the problem itself is complex it will not be 10x improvement.
Of course, maybe we talk about different type of project, there are also the type of projects like "a web-shop that sells stuff" that someone considered "expensive to code".
My experience is that users (customers) even when presented with a prototype (done fast by AI, or previously, in the slow way) can take days to "discover" or "think" about things they wish. Then more days to understand why some wishes can't be done because it breaks other stuff they want.
Maybe you have smarter, faster, more experienced and decided users. Then I can only say: good for you, you are lucky!
This conflates two orthogonal concerns; understanding what needs to be done with encoding a solution for what needs to be done. I am reminded of an axiom I have long held:
When making software, remember that it is a snapshot of
your understanding of the problem. It states to all,
including your future-self, your approach, clarity, and
appropriateness of the solution for the problem at hand.
Choose your statements wisely.
I disagree with the proposition that being able to generate "wrong code faster" has anything to do with understanding what ultimately needs to be done. In fact, exploratory efforts having the intent to refine problem domain understanding (a.k.a. "proof of concept" projects) is an established industry technique whose work product is best discarded.
But also, no, because they write:
> “coding” (not including bug fixing, testing, etc.)
What if bug fixing includes "coding", or "writing code", or however one would want to define that? Especially in the enterprise setting they evoke, a lot of work will not be "coding" in the sense of churning out new features, but "coding" in the sense of fixing bugs. I know a lot of my "coding" is in this category. But we're not given a number for it. I suspect the slice would be bigger if they included this type of "coding".