When I started coding professionally, I joined a team of only interns in a startup, hacking together a SaaS platform that had relative financial success. While we were very cheap, being paid below minimum wage, we had outages, data corruption, db wipes, server terminations, unresolved conflicts making their way to production and killing features, tons of tech debt and even more makeshift code we weren't aware of...
So yeah, while writing code was cheap, the result had a latent cost that would only show itself on occasion.
So code was always expensive, the challenge was to be aware of how expensive sooner rather than later.
The thing with coding agents is that it seems now that you can eat your cake and have it too. We are all still adapting, but results indicate that given the right prompts and processes harnessing LLMs quality code can be had in the cheap.