Writing code is cheap now – Agentic Engineering Patterns – Simon Willison’s Weblog
February 24, 2026
The biggest challenge in adopting agentic engineering practices is getting comfortable with the consequences of the fact that writing code is cheap now.
Delivering new code has dropped in price to almost free… but delivering good code remains significantly more expensive than that.
For now I think the best we can do is to second guess ourselves: any time our instinct says “don’t build that, it’s not worth the time” fire off a prompt anyway, in an asynchronous agent session where the worst that can happen is you check ten minutes later and find that it wasn’t worth the tokens.
Simon Wilson has, for several years now, been one of the people I pay most attention to when it comes to software engineering and AI.
Simon has been working with his technologies and importantly bringing back the lessons he’s learned and sharing those on a daily basis for years now and his insights are pretty much unparalleled.
So I’m the first to make the observation that something that code generation gives us is the permission to do things we may otherwise not start because we have no idea how long they would take.
As Simon concludes concludes here, we have to get over our instincts as experienced software engineers, which say it’s not worth my time even exploring an idea, when exploring an idea can be measured in minutes, not hours or days.
