Comment by jh00ker
11 hours ago
>I suspect it's not seen as a problem by providers because more lines generated means more tokens used and hence more billing put out on customers.
I have also grown skeptical of token usage in order to run up my bill! But since I feel like it takes me MORE effort to write LESS lines of code myself, I'd expect a quick and dirty AI-generated solution to be MORE lines of code and cost LESS to generate than a concise/elegant solution in LESS lines of code.
The latest frontier models will write code better than you and more elegant, with less lines of code, in 100th of the time, with full test coverage. Hand coding is like writing out assembly/machine code rather than using a compiler.
This hasn’t been my experience. State of the art models available to the public still do all sorts of bandaids and bad hacks. Putting code where it doesn’t belong. Stapling types onto variable (in TypeScript) when abstractions/types already exist to use. I use it to generate code, but still have to review every line and have corrections/steering basically every time.
Maybe you have access to some other model?
> The latest frontier models will write code better than you and more elegant
They often do, but they often don’t. I regularly have to push for more elegant, or less lazy solutions.
This.
Insisting on writing code by hand when LLMs are available is not software engineering in 2026. Engineers find the most cost-effective solution for the problem at hand that meets the requirements.