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Simon Willison: 'Cheap Reverse-Engineering' — Coding Agents Changed the Economics of Hacking Your Own Devices, Not the Capability
In a July 20 essay Willison argues the barrier to reverse-engineering home devices and undocumented APIs was never technical — it was effort versus payoff, with maintenance burden making the initial investment feel risky. 'Coding agents change that equation entirely. The effort to get a simple automation working has dropped, as has the cost of trying and failing to get it to work.' The insight generalizes past home automation: when code becomes cheap to produce, abandonment stops being a sunk cost, which unlocks a whole class of projects builders previously dismissed on maintenance grounds alone.
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