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

51–60 of 744 posts

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

#51

Post by throwaway31131 »

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…

Just out of curiosity, what software product were you making in two weeks before using AI? Or maybe I’m misunderstanding your use of shipping.

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

#52

Post by martinald »

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…

Agreed. I think a core problem is many developers (on HN) don't realise how "bad" so much human written code is.

I've seen unbelievably complex logistics logic coded in... WordPress templates and plugins to take a random example. Actually virtually impossible to figure out - but AI can actually extract all the logic pretty well now.

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

#53

Post by thot_experiment »

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.

To be fair, writing a SaaS software is like an order, perhaps two orders of magnitude more effort than writing software that runs on a computer and does the thing you want. There's a ton of stuff that SaaS is used for now that's basically trivial and literally all the "engineering" effort is spent on ensuring vendor lock in and retaining control of the software so that you can force people to keep paying you.

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

#54

Post by MrPapz »

BigHatLogan wrote: post #5

Good write-up. I don't disagree with any of his points, but does anybody here have practical suggestions on how to move forward and think about one's career? I've been a frontend (with a little full stack) for a few years now, and much of the modern landscape concerns me, specifically with how I should be positioning myself. I hear vague suggestions like "get better at the business domain" and other things like that.…

My suggestion would be to move to a higher level of abstraction, change the way which you view the system.

Maybe becoming full stack? Maybe understanding the industry a little deeper? Maybe analyzing your company's competitors better? That would increase your value for the business (a bit of overlap with product management though). Assuming you can now deliver the expected tech part more easily, that's what I'd do.

As for me, I've moved to a permanent product management position.

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

#55

Post by LPisGood »

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…

I feel like I have have heard this exact statement about model FooBar X.Y about a half dozen times over the last couple of years.

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

#56

Post by paulddraper »

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.

> 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.

NODS HEAD VIGOROUSLY

Last 12 months: Docusign down 37%, Adobe down 38%, Atlassian down 41%, Asana down 41%, Monday.com down 44%, Hubspot down 49%. Eventbrite being bought for pennies.

They are being replaced by newer, smaller, cheaper, sometimes internal solutions.

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

#57

Post by jimbokun »

debo_ wrote: post #19

> I'm sure every organisation has hundreds if not thousands of Excel sheets tracking important business processes that would be far better off as a SaaS app. Far better off for who? People constantly dismiss spreadsheets, but in many cases, they are more powerful, more easily used by the people who have the domain knowledge required to properly implement calculations or workflow, and are more or less universally acce…

Better security. Better availability. Less chance of losing data.

Assuming the SaaS is implemented competently, of course. Otherwise there's not much advantage.

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

#58

Post by martinald »

bdavid21wnec wrote: post #38

I keep seeing articles like these popup. I am in the industry but not in the “AI” industry. What I have no concept of, is the current subsidized, VC funded, anywhere close to what the final product will be? I always fall back to the Uber paradox. Yes it was great at first, now it’s 3x what it cost and has only given cabs pricing power. This was good for consumers to start but now it’s just another part of the k shape…

But even if that did happen, the open source models are excellent and cost virtually nothing?

Like I prefer Opus 4.5 and Gemini 3 to the open weights models, but if Anthropic or Google upped the pricing 10x then everyone would switch to the open weights models.

Arguably you could say that the Chinese labs may stop releasing them, true, but even if all model development stopped today then they'd still be extremely useful and a decent competitor.

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

#59

Post by jimbokun »

bdangubic wrote: post #22
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.

one year in, AI slop > Human-written slop

Does this mean the AI slop is higher quality or that there's more of it?

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

#60

Post by paoaoaks »

martinald wrote: post #52
bdangubic wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Agreed. I think a core problem is many developers (on HN) don't realise how "bad" so much human written code is. I've seen unbelievably complex logistics logic coded in... WordPress templates and plugins to take a random example. Actually virtually impossible to figure out - but AI can actually extract all the logic pretty well now.

[dead]
Post reply on HN