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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%?

#241

Post by bitwize »

marcosdumay wrote: post #184
CobrastanJorji wrote: post #154

Man, that's a big title. I can't wait to see the data on how the cost has dropped so far. > AI Agents however in my mind massively reduce... Nevermind. It's a vibe 90%.

That. I was expecting some overview of the last couple of decades in a "There's no Silver Bullet" fashion. Instead it's some guy that claims it takes a team to make CI/CD for something he can vibe-code in a day, and that agentic code totally solves the complexity problems caused by too much React.

Even if that were true, so we've made development needlessly more complicated, only to gain back the time lost by running numberwang across enough datacenters to fill a small country? You haven't abstracted anything away, Morty, just created another layer of shit.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22601623

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

#243

Post by actionfromafar »

almosthere wrote: post #226
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.

LLMs, long term, have killed most SaaS. Most SaaS used to be killed by bespoke software engineers that would build some custom thing, and it was integrated perfectly into the legacy system. Then all those people decided to be managers and go on "i dont care" autopilot mode and hired a bunch of teens that still do care, to some extent. But those teens suck at it, and the old guys just don't really care anymore. Now wi…

Creating code sprawl, weird ball of twine systems etc until someone says, enough, we will just buy this SAAS solution which integrates it all. Rinse, repeat.

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

#244

Post by AnimalMuppet »

layer8 wrote: post #193
thot_experiment wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, writing a SaaS software is like an order, perhaps two orders of magnitude more effort than writing software that runs on a computer and does the thing you want. There's a ton of stuff that SaaS is used for now that's basically trivial and literally all the "engineering" effort is spent on ensuring vendor lock in and retaining control of the software so that you can force people to keep paying you.

We should also get a flurry of low-cost, decent-quality native local-first software, but I’m not seeing any.

Also also, we should reach the point where you have decent quality source code for a local application, and you can tell GPT "SaaS this", and it works.

I'm not seeing that either.

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

#245

Post by vinipolicena »

> Software engineering has got - in my opinion, often needlessly - complicated, with people rushing to very labour intensive patterns such as TDD, microservices, super complex React frontends and Kubernetes.

TDD as defined by Kent Beck (https://tidyfirst.substack.com/p/canon-tdd ) doesn't belong in that list. Beck's TDD is a way to order work you'd do anyway: slice the requirement, automate checks to confirm behavior and catch regressions, and refactor to keep the code healthy. It's not a bloated workflow, and it generalizes well to practices like property-based testing and design-by-contract.

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

#246

Post by figers »

nugger wrote: post #74
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…

I don't understand the timelines here at all.

We were paying for Salesforce, then built the features we needed to do the same tracking into our interal tool and got rid of Salesforce to save money and simplify the data internally across departments

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

#247

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

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.

Well, because no self interested decision maker in any company of size is going to ever trust their business to an unknown company run by a one person operation.

And why would the benefits of being able to code faster accrue to a small independent developer over a large company that already has an established reputation and a customer base?

“No one ever got fired for buying Salesforce”.

I once had influence over the buying decision to support an implementation I was leading. I found this perfect SaaS product by a one man shop who was local.

Working with my CTO and lawyers, we made a proposal to the founder. We would sign with him and be 70% of his post signing revenue if he agreed to give us our own self hosted instance and put his latest code in escrow with a third party (Green Mountain) and we would have non exclusive rights to use the code (but not distribute it) under certain circumstances.

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

#248

Post by figers »

viraptor wrote: post #235
klntsky wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What did the 3 apps do?

I did the same for one app to give me my speed in MPH as huge text as a HUD in a car

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

#249

Post by devin »

kenjackson wrote: post #217
devin wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does that mean you don't think you learned anything valuable through the experience of working through this complexity yourself? I'm not advocating for everyone to do all of their math on paper or something, but when I look back on the times I learned the most, it involved a level of focus and dedication that LLMs simply do not require. In fact, I think their default settings may unfortunately lead you toward shallow…

I wouldn't say there is no value to it, but I do feel like I learned more using LLMs as a companion than trying to figure everything out myself. And note, using an LLM doesn't mean that I don't think. It helps provide context and information that often would be time consuming to figure out, and I'm not sure if the time spent is proportional to the learning I'd get from it. Seeing that these memory locations mapped to…

Hard to argue with such a pragmatic conclusion!

I think the difficulty I have is that I don't think it's all that straightforward to assess how it is exactly that I came not just to _learn_, but to _understand_ things. As a result, I have low confidence in knowing which parts of my understanding were the result of different kinds of learning.

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