Today I released the community plugins for Voiden.
This is a big one because one of the things I dont want is the API tool to become bloated with new features - so I want to allow anyone to build plugins to grow the tool.
Not sure if “code has always been expensive” is the right framing.
Typing out a few hundred lines of code was never the real bottleneck. What was expensive was everything around it: making it correct, making it maintainable (often underestimated), coordinating across teams and supporting it long term.
You can also overshoot: Testing every possible path, validating across every platform, or routing every change through layers of organizational approval can multiply costs quickly. At some point, process (not code) becomes the dominant expense.
What LLMs clearly reduce is the short-term cost of producing working code. That part is dramatically cheaper.
The long-term effect is less clear. If we generate more code, faster, does that reduce cost or just increase the surface area we need to maintain, test, secure, and reason about later?
Historically, most of software’s cost has lived in maintenance and coordination, not in keystrokes. It will take real longitudinal data to see whether LLMs meaningfully change that, or just shift where the cost shows up.
"What was expensive was everything around it" - when I say that code has always been expensive that's part of what I'm factoring in.
But even typing that first few hundred lines used to have a much more significant cost attached.
I just pasted 256 lines of JavaScript into the 2000s-era SLOCount tool (classic Perl, I have a WebAssembly hosted version here https://tools.simonwillison.net/sloccount) and it gave me a 2000s-era cost estimate of $6,461.
I wouldn't take that number with anything less than a giant fist of salt, but there you have it.
> when I say that code has always been expensive that's part of what I'm factoring in.
Fair, but when an LLM writes code in response to a prompt I really don't get the sense that it's doing as much of that "everything around" part as you might expect.
No, that’s why you have a bunch of prompts make artifacts before the prompt that writes code, and prompts afterwards that run tests on code, etc…if you are just vibe coding code with one prompt, it’s not going to work out very well.
It was a bit more than a domain name - they had 330 employees and $13.5 million in revenue for a quarter - but that acquisition was definitely peak dot-com boom.
i would love another bubble. i feel like tech has been in a corner for going on ten years now (covid spike was so brief). it's so concentrated in ai it sucks up everything.
> The long-term effect is less clear. If we generate more code, faster, does that reduce cost or just increase the surface area we need to maintain, test, secure, and reason about later?
My take is that the focus is mostly oriented towards code, but in my experience everything around code got cheaper too. In my particular case, I do coding, I do DevOps, I do second level support, I do data analysis. Every single task I have to do is now seriously augmented by AI.
In my last performance review, my manager was actually surprised when I told him that I am now more a manager of my own work than actually doing the work.
This also means my productivity is now probably around 2.5x what it was a couple of years ago.
> In my last performance review, my manager was actually surprised when I told him that I am now more a manager of my own work than actually doing the work.
I think this is very telling. Unless you have a good manager who is paying attention, a lot of them are clueless and just see the hype of 10x ing your developers and don't care about the nuance of (as they say) all the surrounding bits to writing code. And unfortunately, they just repeat this to the people above them, who also read the hype and just see $$ of reducing headcount. (sorry, venting a little)
This has been my experience, too. In dealing with hardware, I'm particularly pleased with how vision models are shaping up; it's able to identify what I've photographed, put it in a simple text list, and link me to appropriate datasheets. yday, it even figured out how I wanted to reverse engineer a remote display board for a just-released inverter and correctly identified which pin of which unfamiliar Chinese chip was spitting out the serial data I was interested in; all I actually asked for was chip IDs with a quick vague note on what I was doing. It doesn't help me solder faster, but it gets me to soldering faster.
A bit OT, but I would love to see some different methods of calculating economic productivity. After looking into how BLS calculates software productivity, I quit giving weight to the number altogether and it left me feeling a bit blue; they apply a deflator in part by considering the value of features (which they claim to be able to estimate by comparing feature sets and prices in a select basket of items of a category, applying coefficients based on differences); it'll likely never actually capture what's going on in AI unless Adobe decides to add a hundred new buttons "because it's so quick and easy to do." Their methodology requires ignoring FOSS (except for certain corporate own-account cases), too; if everyone switched from Microsoft365 to LibreOffice, US productivity as measured by BLS would crash.
BLS lays methodology out in a FAQ page on "Hedonic Quality Adjustment"[1], which covers hardware instead of software, but software becomes more reliant on these "what does the consumer pay" guesses at value (what is the value of S-Video input on your TV? significantly more than supporting picture-in-picture, at least in 2020).
2 things to think about here:
1. Coding is just one phase of the software development life cycle (SDLC). We still have to gather requirements, design, test, release, and most importantly maintain. I was taught, albeit years ago, that code spends most of its life in maintenance and that is the phase where the most money is spent.
2. Keep in mind Amdahl's law. The limit of software cost as coding cost approaches zero is the cost of the other phases of the SDLC. Apologies to Amdahl for the cheap, dirty bastardization.
Honestly, if I would just get what the end user “really wants” (they often don’t even know) that would save a huge percentage of the overall cost, and that’s not code that’s human nature.
That is also getting cheaper, you can now quickly present him with a few working prototypes so he can quickly make up his mind what best suites him.
Another problem is that most users want different things, that's why you get these big bloated software suites. With LLMs it now also becomes more achievable to build custom software per user.
code was expensive, is and will be expensive. the real cost is hidden. takes a mature eye to see a codebase that works and is not a dumpster fire.
correctness (doing what its supposed to, nothing else), maintainability (accommodating unknown future changes), cost ( deployment, refactoring, integrations) and performance (making the right tradeoffs) are not obvious, don't come naturally till you burn your fingers and differentiate a good from a horrible end result.
one of the creators here - you are right in the sense that most tools start open source and then they close source. For us it was different/ the opposite. We first made it as a product and then we open sourced it. It was never our intention to make it a SaaS though nor charge for it.
I suppose part of the problem is that I don't understand why "Voiden" in the first place, but if we assume Voiden is a good name:
The logo neither says "voids" nor "API tool". It is a blocky infinity symbol that to me means nothing in-context. Also the duotone and slight asymmetry (of a normally symmetric symbol) gives hints of duality/gemini, which also means nothing to me in the context of what the tool is and the name that it has.
well void is also the blank slate in the sense that Voiden is a tool without rules - without explicit directions to the users on how they should do xyz. So yeah, our inspiration comes from an empty sheet, a blank slate to work with APIs. And if there are no restrictions then there are infinite opportunities. :) thts how it makes sense to us.
Today I released the community plugins for Voiden.
This is a big one because one of the things I dont want is the API tool to become bloated with new features - so I want to allow anyone to build plugins to grow the tool.
docs: https://docs.voiden.md/docs/plugins/build-a-plugin
reply