Part I. The Monkey Learned to Type10 min

A Million Lines for a Dollar

A space shuttle lifts off the launch pad amid clouds of smoke and flame. — Space Shuttle Columbia lifts off on 12 April 1981, the programme's first flight. The shuttle's code cost over eighty dollars per line per year. Source: NASA, Public domain

The title of this chapter is easy to check with a calculator, and I checked it. Language models charge for so-called tokens, bits of text ranging from a single letter to a whole short word, and a line of ordinary program code takes up on average about ten such bits, sometimes fewer, sometimes more, depending on the language and the author’s habits. In the autumn of 2026 the cheapest models charge about thirteen cents per million tokens of output, so a million lines costs them a little over a dollar. A model you would not be afraid to trust with real work is about thirty times more expensive, and then a million lines comes to a few dozen dollars, roughly the price of dinner for two at a good restaurant. So if the title exaggerates, it is not by much.

For comparison, consider one of the most expensive programs in history. In 1996 the journalist Charles Fishman wrote a piece for Fast Company about the group that wrote the software controlling the Space Shuttle. The program was 420,000 lines long, and the group spent thirty-five million dollars a year on it. Divide roughly and you get more than eighty dollars per line, every year, for as long as the program exists. In return, in each of the three most recent versions of the program at the time, exactly one error had been found, and across eleven versions there had been seventeen, whereas a commercial program of comparable complexity, by an estimate in the same article, would have had about five thousand.

Between eighty dollars a line and a dollar for a million lines lies a difference of almost a hundred million times, and this chapter is about what happens to the world when the cost of something falls that far.

Try itWriting a line and keeping it

Writing prices from the chapter, autumn 2026. The upkeep price from Charles Fishman’s 1996 article on the group that wrote the shuttle’s software. Dijkstra said lines should be booked as spent, and this scale shows why.

An office at dawn: a desk buried in neat stacks of fresh printouts and binders, a person in a coat standing in the doorway, back to us. — The morning after an agent's night shift: as much was done overnight as a team of five would do in a month.

While code was expensive, software development had a natural brake that nobody noticed, because it was built into the economics of the business. Every new module, every button, every report for the accounting department had to be written by someone, and that someone drew a salary, got sick, went on holiday and had the unpleasant habit of asking what it was for. Because of this, an enormous system of selection grew up around programming: estimates, task lists ordered by priority, meetings where it was decided what to do this quarter and what to put off until the next, and managers who said “no” far more often than “yes.” Programmers traditionally hated this system and considered it bureaucracy getting in the way of work.

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