Coding agents make reverse engineering cheap

Simon Willison observes a growing number of people using coding agents to reverse engineer and automate home devices. He sees this as a result of declining coding costs. Before agents, reverse engineering was technically feasible but the cost-benefit ratio was problematic: development time, failure costs, and future API changes made maintenance daunting. Coding agents change the equation: writing simple automation scripts becomes much cheaper, and the cost of trial and error drops significantly. Because code generation is so inexpensive, even if future maintenance or a rewrite is needed, the mental burden is much smaller. For developers or hobbyists wanting to automate their own devices, they can now try reverse engineering with very low risk, no longer worrying about long-term maintenance costs from future changes.