Reverse-engineering is cheap now
Coding agents make reverse-engineering home devices economically viable by slashing effort and maintenance anxiety
“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.”
Simon Willison observes that AI coding agents have fundamentally changed the ROI calculus for reverse-engineering personal devices, making previously impractical automations worthwhile. The key shift is psychological as much as technical: cheap code generation reduces the cost of failure and eliminates long-term maintenance anxiety. This reflects a broader pattern where agents are unlocking categories of work that were technically possible but economically irrational before.