Laurie Voss argues that while the cost of writing code has fallen dramatically, the costs of reviewing, fixing, and operating software are rising and will continue to do so. She emphasizes that the true expense lies in understanding user needs, precisely defining requirements, and ensuring a pleasant user experience—costs that are unique to each software product and do not scale with reuse. As software demand grows without an upper limit, these user‑centric costs will dominate the overall development effort.
The article highlights Paul Ford’s observation that web browsers are extremely powerful for building applications, and the cost of leveraging that power is continually decreasing. It emphasizes the growing accessibility and affordability of browser-based development tools.
But then users start to report a weird bug. It's the 4th time your team has been trying to fix it.
The article discusses how production code generated by Claude, Anthropic’s AI, should meet higher standards than human-written code. Anthropic enforces this through numerous guardrails such as lint rules, extensive testing, Claude-driven end‑to‑end tests, daily fuzzers, automated code and security reviews, and automated refactoring. These measures aim to prevent the code from becoming difficult to maintain.
Simon Willison describes his experience at a large company where all documentation, code, tests, PRDs, tickets, and reports are generated by Claude Code. His team is forced to ship rapidly, working long hours, yet management insists that code push is not a bottleneck, leading to frustration and a lack of meaningful reading or review. The situation highlights a reliance on AI-generated content that may undermine quality and collaboration.
My hypothesis is that there is a new opportunity for Extensible Software on the web . LLMs radically lower the cost of authoring extensions, and modern sandbox primitives lower the deployment cost and provide good security boundaries.