For everyone who is responding to the "Writing code is cheap now" heading without reading the article, I'd encourage you to scroll down to the "Good code still has a cost" section.
Totally agree - that's what I was trying to get at with "organizational habits". The way we plan, organize and deliver software projects is going to radically change.
I'm not ready to write about how radically though because I don't know myself!
It wasn't the hard or valuable part of software engineering, but it was a very time-consuming part. That's what's interesting about this new era - the time-consuming-but-easy bit has suddenly stopped being time-consuming.
The second chapter is more of a classic pattern, it describes how saying "Use red/green TDD" is a shortcut for kicking the coding agent into test-first development mode which tends to get really good results: https://simonwillison.net/guides/agentic-engineering-pattern...
What's different today really is the LLMs and coding agents. The reason to never rewrite in another language is that it requires you to stop everything else for months or even years. Stopping for two weeks is a lot less likely to kill your project.
He's still right if you don't have good automated testing and you lost most of the original developers (or you don't have other seniors ceva familiar with the domain).
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