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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%?

#151

Post by bob1029 »

In context of B2B SaaS products that require a high degree of customization per client, I think there could be an argument for this figure.

The biggest bottleneck I have seen is converting the requirements into code fast enough to prove to the customer that they didn't give us the right/sufficient requirements. Up until recently, you had to avoid spending time on code if you thought the requirements were bad. Throwing away 2+ weeks of work on ambiguity is a terrible time.

Today, you could hypothetically get lucky on a single prompt and be ~99% of the way there in one shot. Even if that other 1% sucks to clean up, imagine if it was enough to get the final polished requirements out of the customer. You could crap out an 80% prototype in the time it takes you to complete one daily standup call. Is the fact that it's only 80% there bad? I don't think so in this context. Handing a customer something that almost works is much more productive than fucking around with design documents and ensuring requirements are perfectly polished to developer preferences. A slightly wrong thing gets you the exact answer a lot faster than nothing at all.

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

#152

Post by _puk »

LPisGood wrote: post #42
tonyarkles wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It's where you have processes etc set up to manage your IT infra, but these very processes often make it impossible / too time consuming to use anything.

The team that needs it ends up managing things itself without central IT support (or visibility, or security etc..)

Think being given a locked down laptop and no admin access. Either get IT to give you admin access or buy another laptop that isn't visible to IT and let's you install whatever you need to get your job done.

The latter is often quicker and easier.

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

#153

Post by sharpy »

I think AI can be really powerful tool. I am more productive with it than not, but a lot of my time interacting with AI is reviewing its code, finding problems with it (I always find some issues with it), and telling it what to do differently multiple times, and eventually giving up, and fixing up the code by hand. But it definitely has reduced average time it takes me to implement features. But I also worry that not everyone would be responsible and check/fix AI generated code.

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

#155

Post by vb-8448 »

sdoering wrote: post #118
vb-8448 wrote: post #101

It's not just about "building" ... who is going to maintain all this new sub-par code pushed to production every day? Who is going to patch all bugs, edge cases and security vulnerabilities?

I happily got rid of a legacy application (lost the pitch, another agency now must deal with the shit) I inherited as a somewhat technically savvy person about a year ago. It was built by real people. Not a single line of AI slop in it. It was the most fragile crap I had ever the misfortune to witness. Even in my wildest vibe coding a prototype moments I was not able to get the AI to produce that amount of anti patte…

AI doesn't overcome the limits of the one who is giving the input, like in pre-ai era SW, if the input sucks the output sucks.

What changed is the speed: AI and vibe coding just gave a turboboost to all you described. The amount of code will go parabolic (maybe it's already parabolic) and, in the mid-term, we will need even more swe/sre/devops/security/ecc to keep up.

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

#157

Post by krupan »

I love how LLMs have made everyone forget how hard it is to verify software correctness and how hard it is to maintain existing software. There is endless gushing about how quickly LLMs can write code. Whenever I point out the LLMs make a lot of mistakes people just wave their hands and say software is easy to validate. The huge QA departments at all software shops would beg to disagree, along with the CVE database, the zero day brokers, etc. But you know, whatever, they're just boomers right?

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

#158

Post by simonw »

The cost of writing simple code has dropped 90%.

If you can reduce a problem to a point where it can be solved by simple code you can get the rest of the solution very quickly.

Reducing a problem to a point where it can be solved with simple code takes a lot of skill and experience and is generally still quite a time-consuming process.

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

#159

Post by [deleted] »

dismantlethesun wrote: post #131
lossolo wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I'm not the OP, but I do have an annectote. We've got an backend pipeline that does image processing. At every step of the pipeline, it would make copies of small (less than 10MB) files from an S3 storage source, do a task, then copy the results back up to the storage source. Originally, it was using AWS but years ago it was decided that AWS was not cost effective so we turned to another partner OVH and Backblaze. Un…

[deleted]

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

#160

Post by phantasmish »

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.

Something weird happened to software after the 90s or so.

You had all these small-by-modern-standards teams (though sometimes in large companies) putting out desktop applications, sometimes on multiple platforms, with shitloads of features. On fairly tight schedules. To address markets that are itty-bitty by modern standards.

Now people are like “We’ll need (3x the personnel) and (2x the time) and you can forget about native, it’s webshit or else you can double those figures… for one platform. What’s that? Your TAM is only (the size of the entire home PC market circa 1995)? Oh forget about it then, you’ll never get funded”

It seems like we’ve gotten far less efficient.

I’m skeptical this problem has to do with code-writing, and so am skeptical that LLMs are going to even get us back to our former baseline.

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