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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%?

#271

Post by myk9001 »

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…

> that would replace their need for a Jira or a Splunk

Or a JS runtime like Bun. Oh, wait...

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

#272

Post by mewpmewp2 »

Terr_ wrote: post #259
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.

Aren't we having major issues with there being too many small libraries right now and dependency chain that grows exponentially? I have thought LLMs will actually benefit us a lot here, with not having to use a lib for every little thing (leftpad etc?).

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

#273

Post by psunavy03 »

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!"

How can I learn this skill? Past Me is usually just this idiot who made work for Present Me.

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

#274

Post by overfeed »

loandbehold wrote: post #225
nuclearnicer wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

For me, as a remote developer, it means I'm able to finish my work in 1 hour instead of 8 hours. So I'm able to capture "extra value" in the form of time. In our team everyone uses GitHub Copilot and I use Claude Code. My teammates' productivity increased slightly but my productivity increased a lot. This is because 1. Claude Code is just a better coding agent 2. I invested time to get good at agentic coding. Eventua…

I'm really curious on what your role is, and which industry are you in? I'm awed by these productivity gains others report, but I feel like AI helps in such a small part of my job (implementing specific changes as I direct).

Agentic workflows for me results in bloated code, which is fine when I'm willing to hand over an subsystem to the agent, such as a frontend on a side project and have it vibe code the entire thing. Trying to get clean code erases all/most of my productivity gains, and doesn't spark joy. I find having a back-end-forth with an agent exhausting, probably because I have to build and discard multiple mental models of the proposed solution, since the approach can vary wildly between prompts. An agent can easily switch between using Newton-Raphson and bisection when asked to refactor unrelated arguments, which a human colleague wouldn't do after a code review.

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

#275

Post by vidarh »

Terr_ wrote: post #259
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.

LLMs work great at identifying libraries I'd never have otherwise found and use them, as long as you ask them for solutions instead of micromanage how they should get things done.

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

#276

Post by vidarh »

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.

For a lot of SaaS projects building the software is the simplest part.

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

#277

Post by djmips »

It's fascinating to read these comments - I believe everyone. Some are getting huge productivity gains and others very little - so perhaps we are not in the same business. I know that I've ranged over various work - all called software development and the variety of work was quite different - some I wouldn't call challenging but still needed a lot of manual labor - perhaps this is the type of work that finds easy wins from AI automation. Still other work was much more challenging but I've never really attempted to use AI in my work because it was forbidden by policy. I've used AI at home for fun projects and it has helped me with languages I've never used before but I've never come close to 90% productivity boost. Anyway, fascinating!

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

#279

Post by arach »

this probably levels the playing field for a while, and then dramatically raises the bar over a longer period of time

as better engineers and better designers get more leverage with lower nuisance in the form of meetings and other people, they will be able to build better software with a level of taste and sophistication that wouldn't make sense if you had to hand type everything

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

#280

Post by roncesvalles »

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.

There is also the missing explosion of App Store app submissions and other such metrics.
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