About whether AI has made writing code cheap.
Has this happened?
Yes 79 (66%)Not sure 30 (25%)No 11 (9%)
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
Hacker News has set AI a lot of challenges over the years. Which ones has it met?
About whether AI has made writing code cheap.
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
On a higher level, this is wishful thinking. However, for people who think this way, getting code to compile at all used to be very "expensive". AI makes abstract code above machine level much easier to compile.
My benchmark for code being cheap is when AI is able to write machine level code. At that point, yes, code is cheap. Currently, the Dollar Store version of code is available.