Quoting Charity Majors

2026-06-17 · Source: Simon Willison's Weblog · Field: Technology & Digital — Software Development & Engineering, Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning · Depth: Intermediate, quick

Summary

In 2025, the economics of code production underwent a fundamental inversion, as highlighted by Charity Majors. What was once a very hard, time-consuming, and expensive process to generate code became effectively free and instant. This rapid transformation, occurring practically overnight, shifted the status of lines of code from being treasured, reused, and carefully curated assets to disposable and regenerable commodities. This profound change in code's value proposition necessitates a significant re-evaluation of existing engineering practices and a heightened emphasis on discipline to effectively manage the implications of such abundant and easily generated code.

Key takeaway

For software engineering leaders managing development teams, the shift to free and instant code generation means your team's focus must pivot from code scarcity to code abundance. You should prioritize robust engineering discipline, emphasizing quality, maintainability, and architectural integrity over mere line-of-code production. This change impacts resource allocation and skill development.

Key insights

AI's impact in 2025 made code generation free and instant, transforming code from treasured asset to disposable commodity.

Principles

• Code production economics inverted.
• Code became disposable, regenerable.

Topics

• Code Generation
• AI Impact
• Software Economics
• Engineering Discipline
• Development Workflow

Best for: CTO, VP of Engineering/Data, Software Engineer, AI Engineer, Director of AI/ML

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Editorial summary, takeaway, and curation by AIssential. Original article published by Simon Willison's Weblog.