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Lessons for Agentic Coding: What should we do when code is cheap?

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10 Lessons for Agentic Coding What should we do when code is cheap? Lately, this blog has featured a lot of writing about agentic coding. Frontier models are really good at coding these days, much better than they are at other tasks. Coding with agents feels like a preview of the future, a playground for seeing how far we can push agent capabilities. It’s invigorating, rewarding, and deeply weird....
The narrative suggests that the accessibility of coding capabilities via agents introduces a critical tension between rapid creation and long-term sustainability. The focus on "implement to learn" and "rebuild often" correctly frames the process as an iterative experiment, acknowledging that the cheap nature of code allows for exploration of possibilities previously constrained by cost. However, this pursuit of cheap creation risks masking the essential trade-off between speed and resilience. Th...