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wiki/concepts/code-as-throwaway.md

@@ -16,6 +16,11 @@ When the cost of writing code trends to zero, code stops being a precious asset.
 
 - **The trust carve-out.** Eugene puts a date and a boundary on it: "Code isn't something elite anymore. From 4.6 on, the code is safe enough — though **authorization and payments** I still wouldn't trust to Claude." Cheap code does not mean uniformly trusted code; the exceptions are where a silent error is unrecoverable rather than merely wrong. Consistent with the safety-critical exception noted below.
 
+- **The production datapoint.** [[thorsten-ball]] reports **99% of [[amp]]'s code is written by AI** — the corpus's only figure from inside a shipping company rather than an individual workflow, and the strongest available answer to "does this survive contact with a real product?" He polled his team offering 99%+, 90–99% and <90%; the one engineer who said he still wrote "a bunch" by hand landed at ~95% when pushed. Self-reported, and from a company that sells an agent — but specific.
+- **Slop is a human problem.** "Most of slop comes from humans not having good product. With AI they can just build trash products faster." Slop = lack of ideas, lack of playfulness, not knowing what you want to exist — *not* an AI defect. His counter-demonstration is taste at AI speed: 15 generated icon variants across styles and 18 palettes, one picked by hand. This converges with Theo's anti-slop stance from a different direction — Theo defends cheap code with *verification discipline*, Thorsten with *taste* — and both reject the vibe-coder reading of this page.
+
+- **The lifetime boundary.** [[2026-07-29-what-if-we-vibe-code-it]] adds the third cost besides writing and verifying: **maintenance**. Throwaway code is safe *because it is never maintained* — the trap begins at the first user, which converts code into a service ([[maintenance-is-the-real-cost]]). "I can write it in a week ≠ it's worth writing" is Theo's ship/no-ship line restated over the artifact's lifetime rather than at review time.
+
 Caveat: legacy/hobby niches persist (COBOL in banks — no training data; coding "for the love of it, like an old-timer car") — but not where time, quality, and money matter.
 
 ## Evidence
@@ -24,15 +29,18 @@ Caveat: legacy/hobby niches persist (COBOL in banks — no training data; coding
 - Kill code without guilt, guilt-merging, G-brain markdown tier — [[2026-07-14-everything-we-knew-about-software-has-changed]].
 - "Code isn't elite anymore" from 4.6 on; authorization and payments withheld; browser-over-emulator testing note — [[2026-07-21-larysa-interview]].
 - Ship/no-ship line, four tiers, 100-lines-of-slop-per-shipped-line, "make more cheap code" — [[2026-07-24-youre-reading-way-too-much-code]].
+- 99% AI-written at AMP; the hand-coding poll; "slop comes from humans"; the 15-icon-variant workflow — [[2026-07-28-agentic-engineering-10x-developer]].
+- Writing was never the bottleneck; cost of software = maintenance; "can write in a week ≠ worth writing" — [[2026-07-29-what-if-we-vibe-code-it]].
 
 ## Related Pages
 
-- Concepts: [[make-more-cheap-code]], [[product-ownership]], [[think-wider-not-bigger]], [[skills-as-memory]], [[decoupling-identity-from-profession]], [[leave-less-room-for-imagination]]
-- Entities: [[theo-browne]], [[sebastian]], [[eugene]]
+- Concepts: [[make-more-cheap-code]], [[maintenance-is-the-real-cost]] (the lifetime boundary), [[product-ownership]], [[think-wider-not-bigger]], [[skills-as-memory]], [[decoupling-identity-from-profession]], [[leave-less-room-for-imagination]], [[emacsification-of-software]] (cheap code makes the bespoke fork rational), [[explosion-of-internal-software]], [[shedding-weight]]
+- Entities: [[theo-browne]], [[sebastian]], [[eugene]], [[thorsten-ball]]
 
 ## Contradictions / Uncertainty
 
 - "Most code isn't high-value" is a generalization; safety-critical/regulated code is a clear exception (see [[enterprise-ai-reality]]).
+- The 99% figure is self-reported by a founding engineer at the company selling the agent, and describes a codebase whose authors are all expert users of that agent. It bounds what is *possible*, not what is typical. Status: tentative.
 
 ## Next Questions