Cheap code makes coherent software harder to protect

A feature that once took a week now looks reasonable to add in an hour. Repeat that decision often enough and a product can become a collection of individually attractive additions that no longer fit together.

Simon Willison connects that problem to conceptual integrity: a system whose boundaries and behavior make sense as a whole. Implementation time used to impose discipline by making speculative features expensive. Coding agents remove some of that friction without supplying the product judgment it accidentally enforced.

He also offers a qualified defense of counting code. Producing more working, tested, maintainable software is a real gain when quality holds constant. Raw volume without that condition says little.

The resulting constraint is cognitive capacity. An engineer may generate code much faster without being able to understand and maintain proportionally more of it. Teams still distribute responsibility for the system, even as agents accelerate construction.