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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%?

#251

Post by viraptor »

figers wrote: post #248
viraptor wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Very specific training app for guitar with spaced repetition, automated message forwarder (all good ones demand subscription), and something very specific to me.

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

#252

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

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.

And why would this happen? Local to what every SaaS product I use is available on my Mac, Windows, iPhone and iPad and the web. Some are web only and some are web and apps.

Who is going to maintain the local software? Who is going to maintain the servers for self hosted or the client software?

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

#254

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

figers wrote: post #246
nugger wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

And now you have to spend money on developers for a system that “doesn’t make the beer taste better”. Does it give you a competitive advantage in the market?

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

#255

Post by bitwize »

kenjackson wrote: post #135
jazzyjackson wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I haven't looked at my own code in 6 months it might as well have been written by someone else.

The most brilliant programmer I know is me three years ago. I look at code I wrote and I'm literally wondering "how did I figure out how to do that -- that makes no sense, but exactly what is needed!"

Wow. Lucky you. When I come across code I wrote months ago, usually I'm like "what kind of crack was I on when I wrote this?"

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

#256

Post by eirikbakke »

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.

I'd also expect to see a lot more AI-generated PRs on open source projects.

(Or at least AI-assisted to the point where the author feels like they should mention it.)

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

#257

Post by crubier »

SauntSolaire wrote: post #86
crubier wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Streamlit apps or similar are doing a great job at this where I'm at. As simple to build and deploy as Excel, but with the right data types, the right UI, the right access and version control, the right programming language that LLMs understand, the right SW ecosystem and packages, etc.

Are they actually as simply to deploy as Excel? My guess would be that most streamlit apps never make it further than the computer they're written on.

If you have the right tooling (e.g. Streamlit.io) then yes, literally.

To 'deploy' an Excel file I go to Office365 and create my excel file and hit share

To 'deploy' a Streamlit file I go to Streamlit and write my single file python code (can be a one liner) and hit share

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

#258

Post by nrhrjrjrjtntbt »

RajT88 wrote: post #215
zqna wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 2018 We had kubernetes, which improved the development speed another 300%!

Kubernetes with production workloads allowed companies to finally realize the "fail fast" ethos.

With Kubernetes this hated it must be boring enough to safely start using!

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

#259

Post by Terr_ »

simonw wrote: post #158

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.

> The cost of writing simple code has dropped 90%.

Plus there's a lot of simple code you shouldn't be writing either way, because it's in a library by now.

By their nature, LLMs will do their best with things that could be plagiarized.

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

#260

Post by pessimizer »

qwertyastronaut wrote: post #10

I don’t know if it’s 90%, but I’m shipping in 2 days things that took 2-4 weeks before. Opus 4.5 in particular has been a profound shift. I’m not sure how software dev as a career survives this. I have nearly 0 reason to hire a developer for my company because I just write a spec and Claude does it in one shot. It’s honestly scary, and I hope my company doesn’t fail because as a developer I’m fucked. But… statistical…

I have no idea how you could debug something in two days that is sufficient to ship. I certainly think that an LLM could write a few thousand lines, but who could read them?

Are you shipping things you haven't reviewed at all, and pronouncing them high quality?

I find these threads baffling. I haven't seen a glut of new software anywhere. I certainly haven't seen a bunch of companies fixing the same bugs that have been sitting in their trackers for years. People keep telling me there's this deluge of LLM code happening, but it (the actual code) is all a secret and behind closed doors. Why in the world would you keep it a secret? Why would any multibillion dollar company that ships AI features have any known bugs left in their flagship products?

I haven't seen a difference anywhere when looking outwards. I personally find it useful, but I have to constantly force refactors and rearchitecting to make the code intelligible. When I add features, bugs get reinserted, refactors get reverted, and instrumentation silently disappears. If I don't do the constant refactors, I wouldn't even notice this was happening half the time.

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