> Code is so cheap it’s practically free. Code that works continues to carry a cost, but that cost has plummeted now that coding agents can check their work as they go.
I personally think that even before LLMs, the cost of code wasn't necessarily the cost of typing out the characters in the right order, but having a human actually understand it to the extent that changes can be made. This continues to be true for the most part. You can vibe code your way into a lot of working code, but you'll inevitably hit a hairy bug or a real world context dependency that the LLM just cannot solve, and that is when you need a human to actually understand everything inside out and step in to fix the problem.
I personally think that even before LLMs, the cost of code wasn't necessarily the cost of typing out the characters in the right order, but having a human actually understand it to the extent that changes can be made. This continues to be true for the most part. You can vibe code your way into a lot of working code, but you'll inevitably hit a hairy bug or a real world context dependency that the LLM just cannot solve, and that is when you need a human to actually understand everything inside out and step in to fix the problem.