AI Coding Shifts Costs: Cheap Generation, Expensive Code Review

dotey · x · 2026-08-10

The author highlights a profound shift brought by AI-assisted programming: historically, writing code was much more expensive than reviewing it, but the AI era has flipped this dynamic.

Today, while generating code with AI is extremely cheap, the effort and expertise required for human code review have skyrocketed to keep up with quality control. To some extent, developers are shifting the burden of cost onto the reviewers. This also explains why code review has become so controversial—it has evolved beyond simply how to build into the philosophical realm of what to build and ownership.

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