Writing Code Was Never The Bottleneck

The marginal cost of adding new software is approaching zero, especially with LLMs. But what is the price of understanding, testing, and trusting that code? Higher than ever.

LLMs reduce the time it takes to produce code, but they haven’t changed the amount of effort required to reason about behavior, identify subtle bugs, or ensure long-term maintainability. That work can be even more challenging when reviewers struggle to distinguish between generated and handwritten code or understand why a particular solution was chosen.