The cost of writing software had dropped by 90% since outsourcing was invented and all the software jobs have moved to India was I was told 15 years ago.
Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?
171–180 of 744 posts
Re: Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?
#172Had 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 has dropped by maybe MORE than 90%. My sons school recently asked me to build some tools for them -- I did this over a decade ago for them, for free. I did it again using AI tools (different problem though) and I had it mostly done in 30 minutes (after I got the credentials set up properly -- that took up more time than the main coding part). This was probably several days of work for me in the past.
"Building software" is a bit too general, though. I believe "Building little web apps for my son's school" has gotten at least 10x easier. But the needle has not moved much on building something like Notion, or Superhuman, or Vercel, or .
Even with perfect prompt engineering, context rot catches up to you eventually. Maybe a fundamental architecture breakthrough will change this, but I'm not holding my breath.
Re: Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?
#173This article was more of an advertisement for...something than any meaningful commentary.
How good are tests written by AI, really? The junk "coverage" unit tests sure, but well thought out integration tests? No way. Testing code is difficult, some AI slop isn't going to make that easier because someone has to know the code and the infrastructure it is going in to and reason about all of it.
Re: Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?
#174It'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…
DigitalOcean version 1 was a duck taped together mash of bash, chron jobs and perl, 2 people out of 12 understood it, 1 knew how to operate it. It worked, but it was insane, like really, really insane. 0% chance the original chatgpt would have written something as bad as DO v1.
Re: Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 componen…
> You are in a sea of people telling you that they are developing software much quicker which ticks the required boxes But that's exactly not the case. Everyone is wondering what tf this is supposed to be for. People are vehemently against this tech, and yet it gets shoved down our throats although it's prohibitively expensive. Coding should be among the easiest problems to tackle, yet none of the big models can writ…
> Coding should be among the easiest problems to tackle, yet none of the big models can write basic "real" code. They break when things get more complex than pong. And they can't even write a single proper function with modern c++ templating stuff for example.
This is simply false and ignorant
Re: Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?
#176It'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 hear this argument all the time but it seems to leave out code reviews
Re: Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?
#177> 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…
I’m yet to see a spreadsheet workflow successfully replaced by something else.
maybe the strategy in those cases is to augment the core spreadsheet with tools that can unit test it and broadcast changes etc
Re: Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?
#178The 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.
I’ve found they are able to compose well, let it build small components and stitch them together
Re: Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?
#179Had 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 abou…
Yep. Software construction was branded a team sport. Hence, social coding, tool quality being considered more important (good thing for sure), and, arguably, less emphasis on individual skill and agency.
This was in service of a time when tech was the great equalizer, powered by ZIRP. It also dovetailed perfectly with middle managers needing more reports in fast growing tech companies. Perhaps the pendulum is swinging back from the overly collective focus we had during the 2010s.
Re: Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?
#180Betteridge's law proven correct once again. The answer to the headline is: no. Perhaps it will be true in the future, nobody knows.
I'm skeptical the extent to which people publishing articles like this use AI to build non-trivial software, and by non-trivial I mean _imperfect_ codebases that have existed for a few years, battle tested, with scars from hotfixes to deal with fires and compromises to handle weird edge cases/workarounds and especially a codebase where many developers have contributed to it over time.
Just this morning I was using Gemini 3 Pro working on some trivial feature, I asked it about how to go about solving an issue and it completely hallucinated a solution suggesting to use a non-existing function that was supposedly exposed by a library. This situation has been the norm in my experience for years now and, while this has improved over time, it's still very, very common occurrence. If it can't get these use cases down to an acceptable successful degree, I just don't see how much I can trust it to take the reins and do it all with an agentic approach.
And this is just a pure usability perspective. If we consider the economics aspect, none of the AI services are profitable, they are all heavily subsidized by investor cash. Is it sustainable long term? Today it seems as if there is an infinite amount of cash but my bet is that this will give in before the cost of building software drops by 90%.