STORY · VERKTOY_
Coding agents make reverse-engineering home devices practical
Simon Willison observes that coding agents are increasingly being used to reverse-engineer and automate home appliances. Since AI agents make it cheap and easy to write code, the ROI calculation changes entirely—it's now worth the effort to automate things that previously didn't make economic sense.
WHY IT MATTERS
This illustrates a fundamental shift in the economics of programming: when code writing becomes so cheap that the psychological threshold for trying and failing disappears, it opens entirely new use cases. It also shows how AI agents give people technical superpowers for everyday tasks.
SOURCES
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