I don’t see that it increases the costs. I’ve written software and PMd other software builds in a previous life. Software has bugs and either I fix it slowly because I have to wait for winter to have time, or the AI does it while I drive a tractor for a couple bucks in tokens. AI can architect fine now and if you use your head, you can cross-check the codebase to ease maintenance with other LLMs, then come in and give it a final QA yourself.

I have a bugtracker I build into any software I build, an agent watches for new entries by users and does some preliminary work before bringing it to my attention and then every day I get a report that I can say what gets worked on while I have coffee. Honestly, I don’t care if the agent decides to refactor the whole mary-anne, it pings me perioidically in Matrix and I steer it around like I do my hired men asking which field to cultivate next.

At this point I have almost entirely vibe-coded software that’s been dogfooded for almost 2 years that works great and massively improves our operation. And I have a dozen other ideas ready for me to give some attention to in order to get them off the ground. It’s an exciting time. I love it.