the cost of creating a great product and amount of time it takes to get infront of the customers has still not reduced
Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?
201–210 of 744 posts
Re: Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?
#202Writing a giant unit test suite being the primary example that stuck out to me from that article really doesn't give a lot of credence to the question?
And yet, the conclusion seems to be as if the answer is yes?
Until AI can work organizationally as opposed to individually it'll necessarily be restricted in its abilities to produce gains beyond relatively marginal improvements (Saved 20 hours of developer time on unit tests) for a project that took X weeks/months/years to work it's way through Y number of people.
So sure, simple projects, simple asks, unit tests, projects handled by small teams of close knit coworkers who know the system in and out and already have the experience to differentiate between good code and bad? I could see that being reduced by 90%.
But, it doesn't seem to have done much for organizational efficiency here at BigCo and unit tests are pretty much the very tip of a project's iceberg here. I know a lot of people are using the AI agents, and I know a lot of people who aren't, and I worry for the younger engineers who I'm not sure have the chops to distinguish between good, bad, and irrelevant and thus leave in clearly extraneous code, and paragraphs in their documents. And as for the senior engineers with the chops, they seem to do okay with it although I can certainly tell you they're not doing ten times more than they were four years ago.
I kinda rambled at the end there, all that to say... organizational efficiency is the bug to solve.
(It's very difficult, I believe the 2D interfaces we've had for the last 40 years or whatever are not truly meeting the needs of the vast cathedrals of code we're working in, same thing for our organizations, our code reviews, everything man)
Re: Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
I'm trying to understand where this kind of thinking comes from. I'm not trying to belittle you, I sincerely want to know: Are you aware that everyone writing software has the goal of releasing software so perfect it never needs an upgrade? Are you aware that we've all learned that that's impossible?
> I'm trying to understand where this kind of thinking comes from.
I used to be a game developer.
Re: Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?
#204The 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 would add "predictable" to that as well.
I fed Claude Pro a REST API spec and told it to spit out a Powershell module and well... So far that 27k lines of code largely checks out (minus the undocumented stuff I knew about).
Getting it to write the pester scripts was a very different matter...
Re: Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?
#205Earlier 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…
You can use NFS on AWS, they have a hosted version (EFS) that is actually pretty neat.
Re: Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?
#206The 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.
Most of software work is maintaining "legacy" code, that is older systems that have been around for a long time and get a lot of use. I find Claude Code in particular is great at grokking old code bases and making changes to it. I work on one of those old code bases and my productivity increased 10x mostly due to Claude Code's ability to research large code bases, make sense of it, answer questions and making careful…
This is great. Asking questions of library code is a big pattern of mine too.
Here's an example I saw on twitter. Asking an LLM to document a protocol from the codebase:
https://ampcode.com/threads/T-f02e59f8-e474-493d-9558-11fddf...
Do you think you will be able to capture any of this extra value? I think I'm faster at coding, but the overall corporate project timeline feels about the same. I feel more relaxed and confident that the work can be done. Not sure how to get a raise out of this.
Re: Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm trying to understand where this kind of thinking comes from. I'm not trying to belittle you, I sincerely want to know: Are you aware that everyone writing software has the goal of releasing software so perfect it never needs an upgrade? Are you aware that we've all learned that that's impossible?
this was basically true until consoles started getting an online element. the up-front testing was more serious compared to the complexity of the games. there were still bugs, but there was no way to upgrade short of a recall.
And why did we abandon this model?
Also, computer games existed at the same time as consoles. People were playing games loaded from floppy disks on computers back in the early 1980's
Re: Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?
#208The cost of generating lines of code which look good has dropped 90%.... Take that as you will.
Re: Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
one year in, AI slop > Human-written slop
Does this mean the AI slop is higher quality or that there's more of it?
certainly not more of it now, we have decades and decades of human-written code if I am understanding the question correctly.
all's I am saying is that "anti-AI" HN crowd literally glorifies human-written code every second of every day here, "AI slop this, AI code unmaintainable that..." I have been a contractor for many years now and usually brought on to fix shit and human-written code is in vast majority of cases much worse compared to AI generated code. the sample size of the latter is smaller but my general argument remains. I think people that write these "AI slop" comments should pick their favorite language/framework/... and then go to github and browse through codebases, written by humans (ignore commits before xxxxxx) and then see if they like what they see :)
Re: Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?
#210The 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.
> The cost of writing simple code has dropped 90%. Need to add, “…and what ‘simple’ means is getting broader by the day.”
and varies person to person
especially based on their prompting skills