Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?

martinalderson.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 744 posts

Re: Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?

#41

Post by p2detar »

JohnMakin wrote: post #12

This article mentions cost to ship, but ignores that the largest cost of any software project isn't consumed by how long it takes to get to market, but by maintenance and addition of new features. How is agentic coding doing there? I've only seen huge, unmaintainable messes so far.

While this is true, I think some fields like game development may not always have this problem. If your goal is to release a non-upgradable game - fps, arcade, single-player titles, maintenance may be much less important than shipping.

edit: typos

Re: Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?

#42

Post by LPisGood »

tonyarkles wrote: post #33
martinald wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author here. Of course not everything needs to be a web app. But I'm meaning a lot of core sheets I see in businesses need more structure round them. Especially for collaboration, access controls, etc. Not to mention they could do with unit testing.

Counterpoint: if a small part of the process is getting tweaked, how responsive can the team responsible for these apps be? That’s the killer feature of spreadsheets for business processes: the accountants can change the accounting spreadsheets, the shipping and receiving people can change theirs, and there’s no team in the way to act as a bottleneck. That’s also the reason that so-called “Shadow IT” exists. Teams wi…

I have never heard of shadow IT. What is that?

Re: Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?

#43

Post by llmslave »

qwertyastronaut wrote: post #10

I don’t know if it’s 90%, but I’m shipping in 2 days things that took 2-4 weeks before. Opus 4.5 in particular has been a profound shift. I’m not sure how software dev as a career survives this. I have nearly 0 reason to hire a developer for my company because I just write a spec and Claude does it in one shot. It’s honestly scary, and I hope my company doesn’t fail because as a developer I’m fucked. But… statistical…

Yeah, I really think software engineering is over. Not right now, but Opus 4.5 is incredible, it wont be long before 5 and 5.5 are released.

They wont automate everything, but the bar for being able to produce working software will plummet.

Re: Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?

#44

Post by martinald »

nine_k wrote: post #35

Had the cost of building custom software dropped 90%, we would be seeing a flurry of low-cost, decent-quality SaaS offering all over the marketplace, possibly undercutting some established players. From where I sit, right now, this does not seem to be the case. This is as if writing down the code is not the biggest problem, or the biggest time sink, of building software.

It is happening though internally in businesses I've worked with. A few of them are starting to replace SaaS tools with custom built internal tooling. I suspect this pattern is happening everywhere to a varying level.

Often these SaaS tools are expensive, aren't actually that complicated (or if they are complicated, the bit they need isn't) and have limitations.

For example, a company I know recently got told their v1 API they relied on on some back office SaaS tool was being deprecated. V2 of the API didn't have the same features.

Result = dev spends a week or two rebuilding that tool. It's shipped and in production now. It would have taken similar amount of time to work around the API deprecation.

Re: Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?

#45

Post by szundi »

bdangubic wrote: post #32
JohnMakin wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am highly skeptical of this claim.

personal experience, not general claim. I am 30-years in the industry and have seen a lot of human-written code…

Like it means AI cannot be even worse

Re: Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?

#46

Post by jackie293746 »

bdangubic wrote: post #29
more_corn wrote: post #3

Ask someone who builds software for a fee. Are you able to do 90% more? Fire 9/10 engineers? Produce 90% faster? No, no, and no.

90% more - nope. 35-55% more, just about on average. I am 30-year in though, not sure what these numbers are for junior devs

[dead]

Re: Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?

#47

Post by bdangubic »

bdangubic wrote: post #32
JohnMakin wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am highly skeptical of this claim.

personal experience, not general claim. I am 30-years in the industry and have seen a lot of human-written code…

there are many millions of people writing code… that’s way too many to get any good quality. you might get lucky and get involved with codebase which does not make you dizzy (or outright sick) but most of us are not that lucky

Re: Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?

#48

Post by averageRoyalty »

on_the_train wrote: post #20

Ai saves me like an hour per month tops. I still don't understand the hype. It's a solution in search of a problem. It can't solve the hard coding problems. And it doesn't say when it can't solve the essay ones either. It's less valuable than resharper. So the business value is maybe $10 a month. That can't finance this industry.

I read these sort of comments every so often and I do not understand them. You are in a sea of people telling you that they are developing software much quicker which ticks the required boxes. I understand that for some reason this isn't the case for your work flow, but obviously it has a lot more value for others.

If you are a chairmaker and everyone gains access to a machine that can spit out all the chair components but sometimes only spits out 3 legs or makes a mistake on the backs, you might find it pointless. Maybe it can't do all the nice artisan styles you can do. But you can be confident others will take advantage of this chair machine, work around the issues and drive the price down from $20 per chair to $2 per chair. In 24 months, you won't be able to sell enough of your chairs any more.

Re: Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?

#49

Post by e10jc »

I totally agree with you. I am working on a new platform right now for a niche industry. Maybe theres $10m ARR to make total in the industry. Last year, it wouldn’t be worth the effort to raise, hire a PM, a few devs, QA, etc. But for a solo dev like myself with AI, it definitely is worth it now.
Post reply on HN