What we lost the last time code got cheap | Hacker News

A Hacker News discussion focused on how AI makes code generation cheaper, but can also weaken human understanding of the codebase.

Commenters suggested decision logs and reasoning documents such as decisions.md, CLAUDE.md, or AGENTS.md to preserve intent.

Several participants argued for human-in-the-loop workflows so engineers still review architecture, tradeoffs, and accountability.

Others noted that coding agents are increasingly used not just to write code, but also to read and explain existing code.