A quote from James Shore
Simon Willison’s Weblog
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11th May 2026
Your AI coding agent, the one you use to write code, needs to reduce your maintenance costs. Not by a little bit, either. You write code twice as quick now? Better hope you’ve halved your maintenance costs. Three times as productive? One third the maintenance costs. Otherwise, you’re screwed. You’re trading a temporary speed boost for permanent indenture. [...]
The math only works if the LLM decreases your maintenance costs, and by exactly the inverse of the rate it adds code. If you double your output and your cost of maintaining that output, two times two means you’ve quadrupled your maintenance costs. If you double your output and hold your maintenance costs steady, two times one means you’ve still doubled your maintenance costs.
— James Shore, You Need AI That Reduces Maintenance Costs
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This is a quotation collected by Simon Willison, posted on 11th May 2026.
ai 2014
generative-ai 1785
llms 1751
ai-assisted-programming 380
coding-agents 200
agentic-engineering 49
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