Lessons for Agentic Coding: What should we do when code is cheap?

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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!

Realize it's going to be 10-100x more expensive once you have no way back?

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).

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.

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.

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.

It's cheap to change code, it doesn't mean you have to add more of it...

Learn to throw code away

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

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>What should we do when code is cheap?

Buy in bulk and resell. /s