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Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?

martinalderson.com

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

#91

Post by wongarsu »

lossolo wrote: post #73
martinald wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 v…

> It is happening though internally in businesses I've worked with How many samples do you have? Which industries are they from? Which SaaS products were they using, exactly and which features? > ...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 ... dev spends a week or two rebuilding that tool Was that Saa…

Lots of companies make good money selling the equivalent of leftpad for confluence or jira. Anecdotally, that's exactly the kind of stuff that gets replaced with homegrown AI-built solutions at our company

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

#92

Post by hagbarth »

BobbyJo wrote: post #85
paulddraper wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, sm…

Stock prices down or revenue down? The former would do very little to support your point.

Revenue is all up. And as far as I can see beating expectations.

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

#93

Post by ares623 »

colonCapitalDee wrote: post #24
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.…

Blind leading the blind, but my thinking is this: 1. Use the tools to their fullest extend, push boundaries and figure out what works and what doesn't 2. Be more than your tools As long as you + LLM is significantly more valuable than just an LLM, you'll be employed. I don't know how "practical" this advice is, because it's basically what you're already doing, but it's how I'm thinking about it.

Realistically, someone else + LLM at -10% compensation will be employed

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

#94

Post by codegeek »

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.

The keyword is "building". Yes costs may have dropped 90% just to build software. But there are 1000 other things that comes after it to run a successful software for months let alone years.

- Maintenance, Security

- Upgrades and patches

- Hosting and ability to maintain uptime with traffic

- Support and dealing with customer complexities

- New requirements/features

- Most importantly, ability to blame someone else (at least for management). Politics plays a part. If you build a tool in-house and it fails, you are on the chopping block. If you buy, you at least can say "Hey everyone else bought it too and I shouldn't be fired for that".

Customers pay for all of the above when they buy a SAAS subscription. AI may come for most of the above at some point but not yet. I say give it 3-5 years to see how it all pans out.

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

#95

Post by tschellenbach »

It depends. For AI to work for large projects (did a post on this forever ago in AI terms. https://getstream.io/blog/cursor-ai-large-projects/)

But you need: a staff level engineer to guide it, great standardization and testing best practices. And yes in that situation you can go 10-50x faster. Many teams/products are not in that environment though.

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

#96

Post by andybak »

tschellenbach wrote: post #95

It depends. For AI to work for large projects (did a post on this forever ago in AI terms. https://getstream.io/blog/cursor-ai-large-projects/ ) But you need: a staff level engineer to guide it, great standardization and testing best practices. And yes in that situation you can go 10-50x faster. Many teams/products are not in that environment though.

I work on a big ball of open source spaghetti and AI has become invaluable in helping me navigate my way through it. Even when it's wrong - it gives me valuable clues.

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

#97

Post by Agingcoder »

> One objection I hear a lot is that LLMs are only good at greenfield projects. I'd push back hard on this. I've spent plenty of time trying to understand 3-year-old+ codebases where everyone who wrote it has left.

Where I am, 3 year old is greenfield, and old and large is 20 years old and has 8million lines of nasty c++. I’ll have to wait a bit more I think …

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

#98

Post by devnull3 »

I think the cost of prototyping has definitely gone down.

Developing production grade software which you want to people to rely on and pay for it is not gone down so much. The "weak" link is still human.

Debugging complex production issues needs intimate knowledge of the code. Not gonna happen in next 3-4 years atleast.

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

#99

Post by samdoesnothing »

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.…

Also blind leading the blind here but I see two paths.

1) Specialize in product engineering, which means taking on more business responsibility. Maybe it means building your own products, or maybe it means trying to get yourself in a more customer-facing or managerial role? Im not very sure. Probably do this if you think AI will be replacing most programmers.

2) Specialize in hard programming problems that AI can't do. Frontend is probably most at risk, low level systems programming least at risk. Learn Rust or C/C++, or maybe backend (C#\Java\Go) if you don't want to transition all the way to low level systems stuff.

That being said I don't think AI is really going to replace us anytime soon.

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

#100

Post by klntsky »

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.

People vibe one-off solutions for themselves all the time. They just don't have the desire to productionalize them. Frankly, product knowledge is something LLMs are not that good at
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