AI coding-агенты удешевили реверс-инжиниринг: наблюдение Саймона Уиллисона

Developer and Django web framework creator Simon Willison published a note on July 20, 2026, observing that AI coding agents have radically cut the cost of reverse-engineering home devices: tasks that previously didn't pay off because of the labor involved are now taken on in passing.

What changed in the economics of code

Coding agents have collapsed the cost of two things at once — writing a one-off automation and failing at the attempt to write it. According to Simon Willison's observation, what used to stop people was the price of effort, not technical impossibility: "cracking open" a smart bulb, outlet, or vacuum and hooking it up to your own script was always feasible — the only question was whether the result justified the time spent.

Willison points to a stream of stories from people who use agents to reverse-engineer and automate devices in their own homes. He sees this as a clear illustration of how the falling cost of writing code changes the very frame of the decision: the question shifts from "can I pull this off" to "is it worth it."

Why didn't it pay off before?

Reverse-engineering home devices was possible even before agents — it came down to ROI. Any experienced programmer knows that undocumented, unstable APIs break easily and change in future versions. Spending a weekend on a custom integration meant signing up for an endless maintenance cycle: the manufacturer ships a firmware update, and everything stops working again.

It was this future maintenance burden, not the initial complexity, that most often killed the idea at the start. When both fixing the code is expensive and writing it takes noticeable effort, it's more rational to simply not start.

"Coding agents completely change this equation," writes

Simon Willison on his blog.

Code as a consumable

The main shift is in treating code as a consumable rather than as an asset that needs to be preserved. Now that code is cheap, the cost of failure has dropped too: trying and not succeeding isn't as painful anymore, because rewriting everything from scratch doesn't cost much.

Along with this, the psychological weight of future maintenance disappears. According to Willison, the prospect of maintaining a project for years — or scrapping it and starting over — stops being an argument against taking on the task.

"The thought that the code will need to be maintained in the future — or thrown away and started over — carries far less psychological weight," notes

Simon Willison.

What this means

Cheap code changes not so much the speed of development as the list of tasks people bother to take on at all. The "is it worth it" threshold shifts downward: a whole range of small, once-unprofitable automations — from smart home devices to personal scripts — move from the "someday later" category into "I'll do it tonight." Reverse engineering stops being the domain of enthusiasts with spare time on their hands and becomes an ordinary tool.