Quoting Charity Majors
Simon Willison · Simon Willison · 2026-06-17
Simon Willison amplifies Charity Majors's argument that AI has fundamentally inverted the economics of code production, transforming code from an expensive, carefully curated asset into a disposable, instantly regenerable commodity — a shift demanding more engineering discipline, not less.
Extraction
Topics: ai-assisted-programmingsoftware-engineeringai-economicsgenerative-ai
Claims
- AI inverted the economics of code production in 2025, making code generation effectively free and instant where it was previously expensive and time-consuming.
- Lines of code shifted from a treasured, reused, and carefully curated resource to a disposable and regenerable commodity almost overnight.
- This abundance of cheap code demands greater engineering discipline rather than less, because quality and maintainability problems scale with code volume.
Key quotes
What happened in 2025 was this: the economics of code production were turned upside down. Instead of being very hard, time-consuming, and expensive to generate code, it became effectively free and instant. Lines of code went from being treasured, reused, cared for and carefully curated, to being disposable and regenerable, practically overnight.