Reverse-engineering is cheap now
Simon Willison · Simon Willison · 2026-07-20
Simon Willison argues that AI coding agents have fundamentally shifted the economics of reverse-engineering home devices by reducing both the upfront effort and the psychological burden of future code maintenance.
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Extraction
Topics: coding-agentsreverse-engineeringai-assisted-programmingeconomics-of-code
Claims
- AI coding agents have significantly reduced the effort required to reverse-engineer undocumented home device APIs.
- The psychological cost of future code maintenance has decreased because agent-produced code is cheap to rewrite or discard.
- Lower cost of failure now makes experimentation with unstable, undocumented APIs economically rational for individual developers.
- Prior to coding agents, the ROI on reverse-engineering home devices was too low to justify the effort and ongoing maintenance burden.
Key quotes
Coding agents change that equation entirely. The effort to get a simple automation working has dropped, as has the cost of trying and failing to get it to work.
Since the code is so cheap, the idea of having to maintain it in the future - or throw it away and start again - carries way less psychological baggage.