samrolken/nokode

The author built samrolken/nokode, a web server with no application code, where an LLM with three tools (SQLite database access, HTTP response generation, and markdown memory updates) handles every request. The experiment built a working contact manager, with forms submitting correctly, data persisting across restarts, and APIs returning valid JSON. However, each request took 30-60 seconds and cost $0.01-0.05, compared with 10-100 milliseconds for traditional web apps. The author argues these shortcomings are problems of degree rather than kind, pointing to inference improving about 10x per year and costs heading toward zero, and suggests that application code may be largely transitional.