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  spicyusername
  A lot of people down on AI in this thread, but I'm watching the industry slip over the line of trust with these latest frontier models. GPT 5.5 is the first model good enough for me to just let rip.Every jira ticket I see now has acceptance criteria, reproduction steps, and detailed information about why the ticket exists.Every commit message now matches the repo style, and has detailed information about what's contained in the commit.Every MR now has detailed information about what's being merged.Every code base in the teams around me now has 70 to 90%+ code coverage.Every line of code now comes with best practices baked in, helpful comments, and optimized hot paths.I regularly ship four features at a time now across multiple projects.The MCP has now automated away all of the drudgery of programming, from summarizing emails, to generating confluence documentation, to generating slide decks.People keep screaming that tech debt is going to pile up, but I think it's going to be exactly the opposite. Software is going to pile up because developing it is now cheap.Most code before llms sucked. Most projects I on-boarded to were a massive ball of undocumented spaghetti, written by humans. The floor has been raised significantly as to what bad code can even look like, and fixing issues is now basically free if your company is willing to shell out for tokens.
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  lionkor
  If writing code was the only part of the job, and it was easy, these jobs wouldn't pay so well.Engineering is hard. It's always going to be hard. I'm glad that AI makes some parts of it easier, and we (software engineers) can focus on engineering, that's nice.Code is NEVER cheap. Just because, at current completely unrealistic AI pricing, using agents is cheaper than hiring juniors, does not make code cheap. It makes producing code cheap, which has always been low-cost. Every line of code is a cost, is a maintenance burden, is complexity. An AI, even with somehow infinite context window, will cost more money the more code you have.Could you replace a whole team of engineers with AI? Probably, yeah. Could you simply fire everyone at your company and close it down, without much of a problem? Also probably yes, for most companies.AIs can help with debugging, can help with writing code, with drafting designs, they can help with almost every step. The second you let OpenAI, or Anthropic, take full code ownership over your products, and you fire the last engineer, is the time when the AI pricing can go up to match what engineers make today. You've just reinvented the highly paid consultant.Or you could take the middle-ground and hire good engineers, make sure they maintain an understanding of the codebase, and let them use whatever tools they use to get the job done, and done well. This is the way that I've seen competent companies handle it.
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  noelwelsh
  Certain types of code are cheap. Proof of concept is cheap. Adding small features that fit within the existing architecture is cheap. Otherwise, I'm not so sure. Coding agents are fantastic at minutiae, but have no taste. They'll turn a code base into a ball of mud very quickly, given the opportunity.
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  torben-friis
  I came here exactly to point out what I'm glad to see is 10. "Free as in puppies" is a wonderful way to put it.Every time I open linkedin I'm scared of how many big heads have taken the wrong lesson that coding almost free == free engineering. So many bait posts asking engineers why they would need to pay them any longer, or being glad they're generating millions of lines a month....this is going to end badly.
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  faangguyindia
  I am in India, junior developer hiring is all down. Ai has reduced offshoring to India and eliminated the need for janitor work (often offloaded to juniors).Many people are finding it difficult to even land internships.The most affected areas are sysadmin, devops, and frontend. Where you'll have very hard time getting any offer.Companies like BrowserStack are withdrawing campus placement offers.Meanwhile, I am writing apps for my own use and have reached 10,000+ monthly active users already, even though I am making zero money from doing all this, but it's fun.
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  asG1298
  Guy works for the Overture Map Foundation, with Amazon, Microsoft etc. being sponsors. He has been boosting AI all over the Internet. I'm sure Microslop and Amazon are very happy with these efforts.I'm glad that "10 ways to do X" submissions are allowed as long as they boost AI.
• jerf
  We change how we value code: https://jerf.org/iri/post/2026/what_value_code_in_ai_era/Short-short version, code will still be accruing value in proportion to how much of the real world it has encountered. The bottleneck on building valuable code will be how much real world there is to go around. As is so often the case, what may initially seem to kill SaaS will actually make them stronger as they end up with more exposure to the real world than some random guy's random AI code.
• ua709
  Not all code is cheap. Some code remains very expensive.But the idea that some code is cheap and some code is expensive is not new.The only new thing is there are some adjustments on how to asses the value of the code you’re presently, or about to, work on.AI has absolutely expanded the set of code that is cheap and if you can make a thing easily with AI then so can someone else. That project is unlikely to result in valuable code. Which is not to say it doesn’t have utility. Just its monetary value is low.
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  utopiah
  This is such a weird argument, beside obvious #10 which will bite back with a vengeance, because... code can't be cheaper than free!Since at least the early 80s a LOT of very important code wasn't cheap, it was free. Both free of cost (you could "just" download it and run it) but also free as freedom-respecting software.I just don't get the argument that cheap is new. Cheap is MORE expensive than free!
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  boesboes
  Realize it's going to be 10-100x more expensive once you have no way back?
• jedahan
  Code is a liability - the more there is, the higher potential for bugs and poor performance. I'd recommend treating cheap code like cheap toxic waste, and try to minimize how much is generated.
• hansmayer
  "We" should not do anything. The LLM industry should go and find solutions for the problems they created, themselves. Not offload it to others through sneaky influencer posts. And we should hold them responsible, should they not be able to address the problems they are creating.
• storus
  I used to work as a VP and a part of my responsibilities was to chop up tasks to self-contained work units that can be easily assigned to random devs. This was both morally problematic for humans (i.e. EVPs forced treating human = CPU) and very optimistic when it came to individual dev capabilities and domain knowledge. However, this style is precisely what works well with agentic AI coding and I have no qualms to use it.
• dzonga
  the best code is the code you never have to write.this means code also written by 'A.i'.seems as an industry we're hellbent on optimizing for the wrong-thing.
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  luodaint
  #10 needs more emphasis than it receives. Cheaper code doesn't automatically lead to good product decisions.Instead of focusing on whether you can build it, the scarcer resource becomes whether you should build it. And most teams lack a clear process for addressing this latter question. Requirements are collected in all sorts of places without ever being prioritized in an organized fashion. This is exacerbated by cheaper code. With cheaper code, you can release five times what you used to be able to release in a given period of time, but only if you knew which five products you needed.
• KevinMS
  Is it cheap though? Do we actually know how much it costs? Isn't it possible that TODO app you vibe coded in 15 minutes actually costs investors $50k?
• __mharrison__
  Would add my biggest tip to that: TDD. Most people omit it.There is a difference between:- write code, write testsAnd- write tests, write codeHad another agentic (vibe) coding experience, which confirmed that for me. Creating an SDK for a $500 light so I can control it from my Steam Deck instead of my phone (no SDK existed before yesterday). For anyone interested, I'm teaching my vibe coding (I meant agentic) tutorial at pycon next week. The 3-hour-long version should be posted to YouTube soon thereafter.
• melvinroest
  > What should we do when code is cheap?Make usable software. Cheap code means that you can create a lot more prototypes to then perform usability tests by finding a user and sitting next to them. I mostly worked on internal apps lately, so perhaps it's much easier for me to do than it is for some others.
• pjc50
  Apart from (2), the first seven lessons are exactly identical to good project management practices with humans. Which are also the difficult bits.Once upon a time, highly bureaucratic organizations tried to make a distinction between "analyst", "programmer" and "coder": https://cacm.acm.org/opinion/the-myth-of-the-coder/The pure "coder" role, per that paper, died out almost immediately. Nowadays it's done by compilers (a deterministic automation). The distinction between analyst and programmer held out a bit longer - ten years ago I was working somewhere that had "business analysts", essentially requirements-wranglers. It's possible that the "programmer" job of converting a well-defined specification into a program is also going to start disappearing... but that still leaves the specification as the difficult bit! It remains like the old stories with genies: the genie can give you what you ask for. But you need to be very sure what you want, very clear about it, and aware that it may come with unasked-for downsides if you're not.
• jmull
  I think you can boil down most of the list to: Understand what you want to do.I’m not convinced about rebuilding repeatedly as a learning tool though. As relatively quick as it is, it over emphasizes the front line problems you face early. Those tend to be simpler, more straightforward issues that can be more quickly solved by a few minutes of thought (and more cheaply too).
• remify
  Code might be cheaper but it's still a liability. In that regard anything that's not been properly designed and documented is going to be an even bigger issue.
• beepbooptheory
  > Automate everything thats easy.Hold on, I better write this down, this is good stuff..
• gitgud
  It's cheap to change code, it doesn't mean you have to add more of it...
• azyc
  Stick to patterns which were painful before. For example, I recently refactored a project written in TS to use better-result instead of throwing errors. Without Claude writing out all of that boilerplate I could not have imagined transitioning to this. Right now the cost of "doing it right" is decreased so much there is no reason to ship slop / poorly thought out code.
• SKILNER
  Disappointing - not a very insightful list
• cermicelli
  Learn to throw code away
• j45
  People should do what has always been needed, rather than focus on how hard it is to build something, or easy, find what is needed, what right is, what good is, what quality is that actually solves problems and do those things.
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  schnitzelstoat
  I've found the get-shit-done tool[1] to be quite useful for forcing me to properly plan the implementation and ensuring the context remains small and relevant at all times.It is slower than when I was just using Claude directly though.[1] https://github.com/gsd-build/get-shit-done
• maxothex
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• jimmypk
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• conorliu
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• nelfrancis
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• vorsken
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• neowalter
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• DeathArrow
  >What should we do when code is cheap?Buy in bulk and resell. /s