[btbuildem]

"Code is cheap" has two interpretations here: one, that's its no longer seen as the artisanally-crafted fine product, now it's "manufactured". Two, though, is that it's cheaper in ops -- once the criteria are fully discovered, once no more new paths for the agents to roam, things that have been cast into code consume minimal resources (in AI scale of things), they're doggedly deterministic, and are free of heavy dependencies.

So yeah, I believe "it's a phase" but in a sense that it's a development phase, just like planning or prototyping.