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Coding agents have lowered both the effort of building a working automation and the cost of failed attempts, so the psychological burden of future maintenance or having to rewrite the code no longer discourages people from doing it.
The author argues coding agents shift the ROI calculation entirely: cheaper code means less psychological weight to maintaining or discarding a reverse-engineered automation later. ✦ AI generated
Simon Willison · Simon Willison's Weblog · 2026-07-20 · original ↗
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.
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- ·Effort to build a simple automation has dropped
- ·Cost of trying and failing has also dropped
- ·Cheap code shifts the entire equation
- ·Future maintenance no longer discourages starting
- ·Throwing code away carries less weight
- ·Cheap to reverse-engineer without lasting commitment
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explains mechanism → Coding agents powered by today's frontier models have overturned the old rule that you should never stop the world and rewrite a large piece of software from the ground up.Simon Willison · Simon Willison's Weblogexplains mechanism → People are using coding agents to reverse-engineer and automate home devices, and this trend illustrates the broader impact of the falling cost of writing code.Simon Willison · Simon Willison's Weblog