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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%?

#231

Post by zahlman »

PaulHoule wrote: post #199
zahlman wrote: post #170

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. Don't forget the second-order effect of clients deciding they could do it in-house.

In fact that is where AI could win. An in house system only needs to serve the needs of one customer whereas the SAAS has to be built for the imagined needs of many customers —- when you’re lucky you can “build one to throw away” and not throw it away.

Yes, that was my point. It gets hard for the new SaaS competitors to "undercut" the established players when the underlying market disappears.

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

#233

Post by jdswain »

Software Development is much more than writing code. Writing code may have become 90% easier, but a lot of the other development tasks haven't appreciably changed due to AI, although that might come. So, for now at least the answer to the question posed in the headline is no.

An exception might be building something that is well specified in advance, maybe because it's a direct copy of existing software.

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

#234

Post by skydhash »

ed_elliott_asc wrote: post #220

Im really liking it for writing boring code. As an example I wanted a plugin for visual studio. In the past I would have spent hours on it or just not bothered but I used Claude code to write it, it isn’t beautiful or interesting code, it lacks tests but it works and saves me time. It isn’t worth anything, won’t ever be deployed into production, I’ll likely share it but won’t try to monetise it, it is boring ugly cod…

A plugin that does what exactly? A lot of comments here and under other posts are just declaring things with the following template: "I wanted to do X, but before it would took me N amount of hours, but now with LLM tool L, it has taken me way less time. I can't share anything about X, but LLM tool L is very useful. Just trust me, bro"

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

#235

Post by viraptor »

klntsky wrote: post #100
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

Same. I hate doing mobile coding, but just in the last few months I AI-coded 3 apps specifically for my needs. They'll never get released publicly, because they'd need polish and features that I don't care about personally. They potentially replace some SaaS too.

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

#236

Post by rimeice »

bdavid21wnec wrote: post #63
martinald wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 use…

Again I’m not in the “AI” industry so I don’t fully understand the economics and don’t run open models locally. What’s the cost to run this stuff locally, what type of hardware is required. When you say virtually nothing, do you mean that’s because you already have a 2k laptop or gpu? Again I am only asking because I don’t know. Would these local models run OK on my 2016 Mac Pro intel or do I need to upgrade to the l…

Basically yes, the useful models need a modernish GPU to get inference running at a usable speed. You can get smaller parameter models 3b/7b running on older laptops, it just won’t produce output at a useful speed.

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

#237

Post by CobrastanJorji »

jcelerier wrote: post #196
CobrastanJorji wrote: post #181

I love the hand drawn chart. Apparently "Open Source" was invented around 2005, which significantly reduced development cost, then AWS was invented in 2011 or so and made development even cheaper, but then, oh no, in 2018 "complexity" happened and development became harder!

I don't read this as when open-source was invented, but when it happened for the corporate world. In 2002 it was a very reasonable choice for $BIG_COMPANY to use a proprietary web server, e.g. IIS. In 2008 that would have been really be weird.

But why did that make development cheaper? An enterprise copy of Windows with IIS cost maybe a thousand bucks, right? Maybe there were more costs, my knowledge is, y'know, 23 years out of date.

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

#238

Post by PaulHoule »

phantasmish wrote: post #160
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 abou…

Circa 2005 my boss and I would pitch that the relational database + HTML forms paradigm was a breakthrough that put custom software within reach of more customers: for one thing you could just delete all the Installshield engineers but also memory safety was a big problem in the Win95 era not so much about being hacked and more about application state in applications would get corrupted over time so you just expected Word to crash once an hour or so.

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

#239

Post by blibble »

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.

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

what do you think "AI" is trained on exactly?

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

#240

Post by hurturue »

jdmoreira wrote: post #148
hurturue wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you back and forth with the model, and discuss/approve every change it does, that's the problem. you need to give it a bigish thing so it can work 15 min on it. and in those 15 min you prepare the next one(s)

Sure. But am I supposed to still understand that code at some point? Am I supposed to ask other team members to review and approve that code as if I had written it? I'm still trying to ship quality work by the same standards I had 3 or 5 years ago.

when compiler appeared assembly programmers would complain all day how ugly and inneficient the generated code was

if you want to get the productivity gain you need to figure out how to solve the code review problem

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