"What was expensive was everything around it" - when I say that code has always been expensive that's part of what I'm factoring in.
But even typing that first few hundred lines used to have a much more significant cost attached.
I just pasted 256 lines of JavaScript into the 2000s-era SLOCount tool (classic Perl, I have a WebAssembly hosted version here https://tools.simonwillison.net/sloccount) and it gave me a 2000s-era cost estimate of $6,461.
I wouldn't take that number with anything less than a giant fist of salt, but there you have it.
> when I say that code has always been expensive that's part of what I'm factoring in.
Fair, but when an LLM writes code in response to a prompt I really don't get the sense that it's doing as much of that "everything around" part as you might expect.
No, that’s why you have a bunch of prompts make artifacts before the prompt that writes code, and prompts afterwards that run tests on code, etc…if you are just vibe coding code with one prompt, it’s not going to work out very well.
It was a bit more than a domain name - they had 330 employees and $13.5 million in revenue for a quarter - but that acquisition was definitely peak dot-com boom.
i would love another bubble. i feel like tech has been in a corner for going on ten years now (covid spike was so brief). it's so concentrated in ai it sucks up everything.
But even typing that first few hundred lines used to have a much more significant cost attached.
I just pasted 256 lines of JavaScript into the 2000s-era SLOCount tool (classic Perl, I have a WebAssembly hosted version here https://tools.simonwillison.net/sloccount) and it gave me a 2000s-era cost estimate of $6,461.
I wouldn't take that number with anything less than a giant fist of salt, but there you have it.