The lore that Sarah Winchester built her mansion to house ghosts killed by Winchester rifles is likely just gossip and marketing, Drew Breunig says, citing a piece that summarizes Captive of the Labyrinth:
Ignoffo found no evidence supporting the idea that Sarah Winchester communed with spirits. She believes that what drove Sarah Winchester to build was her desire to be an architect.
Sarah Winchester lived at a time when it was highly unusual for women to be architects. She wasn’t licensed, so her own home was the perfect place—and the only place—where she could practice architecture.
Whatever her motivations were, Sarah Winchester built a house with more than 150 rooms, 2000 doors, 47 fireplaces, 40 bedrooms, 40 staircases, 17 chimneys, 13 bathrooms, six kitchens, three elevators, two basements, and one shower. She spent nearly all of her life being an architect.
We aren’t as rich as Sarah Winchester, Drew Breunig says, but when AI-generated code is cheap, we don’t need to be:
After Opus 4.5 and recent work enabling Agent Teams, the average net lines added by Claude per commit is now smooth and steady at 1,000 lines of code per commit.
1,000 lines of code per commit is ~2 magnitudes higher than what a human programmer writes per day.
If you search for human benchmarks, you’ll find many citing Fred Brooks’ The Mythical Man Month while claiming a good engineer might write 10 cumulative lines of code per day. If you further explore, you’ll find numbers higher than 10 cited, but generally less than 100.
[…]
Unfortunately, everything else remains roughly the same cost and roughly the same speed. Feedback hasn’t gotten cheaper; the “eyeballs” that guided the software developed by the bazaar haven’t caught up to AI.
There is only one source of feedback that moves at the speed of AI-generated code: yourself. You’re there to prompt, you’re there to review. You don’t need to recruit testers, run surveys, or manage design partners. You just build what you want, and use what you build.
And that’s what many developers are doing with cheap code: building idiosyncratic tools for ourselves, guided by our passions, taste, and needs.
(Hat tip to Gaikokumaniakku.)