MechanismArticle · 49:00 — 50:00
Previously, the time-cost of writing code served as natural discipline that filtered out marginal ideas; coding agents remove that friction, making it far easier to justify features that would once have been dismissed as not worth the effort.
When code took a week to write, engineers naturally self-filtered out low-value ideas; with agents, the same feature takes an hour, removing the friction that once enforced design discipline. ✦ AI generated
Simon Willison · Simon Willison's Weblog · 2026-08-19 · original ↗
It all keeps coming back to discipline. It used to be that the discipline was enforced on you by the amount of time it took. You'd come up with an idea for a crazy feature and think "yeah, but that would take me a week — I cannot justify that, so I'll forget about it." If it takes an hour, it's so much easier to justify.
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explains mechanism → The Winchester Mystery House is an apt analogy for what happens when coding agents make it trivially cheap to add features: software accumulates endlessly without coherent design, and decision-making becomes harder as complexity grows.Simon Willison · Simon Willison's Weblogexplains mechanism → AI may shift software development from treating code like pets to treating it like cattle, because generating and replacing code can become cheaper than editing it.Charity Majors · The Pragmatic Engineerprovides context → Getting software to compile in order to hack on it used to be enough friction that I often wouldn't bother, but now I treat building and checkout as a zero-time-investment challenge delegated to Codex or Claude Code.Author (Hacker News comment) · Simon Willison's Weblog