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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%?

#291

Post by MangoToupe »

codegeek wrote: post #94
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.

The keyword is "building". Yes costs may have dropped 90% just to build software. But there are 1000 other things that comes after it to run a successful software for months let alone years. - Maintenance, Security - Upgrades and patches - Hosting and ability to maintain uptime with traffic - Support and dealing with customer complexities - New requirements/features - Most importantly, ability to blame someone else (…

All of this can be written off as "building software", though. What this reveals is that the costs in a given market are likely not software at all

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

#292

Post by [deleted] »

throwaway31131 wrote: post #51
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…

Just out of curiosity, what software product were you making in two weeks before using AI? Or maybe I’m misunderstanding your use of shipping.

[deleted]

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

#293

Post by MangoToupe »

acessoproibido wrote: post #283
socketcluster wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is assuming the marketplace works perfectly... Which is an incorrect assumption. Reality is that the marketplace is highly controlled by algorithms. New platforms will struggle to get exposure... No exposure, no credibility, no word of mouth, no users, catch 22... You think the big players will allow small SaaS projects to gain traction on their platforms? Have you seen how centralized the Internet is these days…

"Everything is controlled by algorithms" doesnt make any sense - its like saying everything is subject to entropy - well sure but also what?

> Everything is controlled by algorithms" doesnt make any sense - its like saying everything is subject to entropy - well sure but also what?

Of course it makes sense. You just refuse to cope. This is like thinking that marxism is "rich people bad"

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

#294

Post by saxenaabhi »

overfeed wrote: post #274
loandbehold wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thin…

Not the OP but we use LLMs to build a restaurant pos system with reservations, loyalty, webshop etc. Almost at feature parity with bigwigs like lightspeed/toast.

> 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

Just right now I had it improve QR payments on POS. This is standard stuff, and I have done it multiple time but i'm happy I didn't have to spend the mental energy to implement it and just had to review the code and test it.

```

Perfect! I've successfully implemented comprehensive network recovery strategies for the OnlinePaymentModal.tsx file. Here's a summary of what was added:

  Implemented Network Recovery Strategies

  1. Exponential Backoff for Polling (lines 187-191)
  2. Network Status Detection (lines 223-246, 248-251)
  3. Transaction Timeout Handling (lines 110-119)
  4. Retry Logic for Initial Transaction (lines 44-105)
  5. AbortController for Request Cancellation (lines 134-139, 216-220)
  6. Better Error Messaging (lines 85-102, 193-196)
  7. Circuit Breaker Pattern (lines 126-132)
  All strategies work together to provide a robust, user-friendly payment
  experience that gracefully handles network issues and automatically
  recovers when connectivity is restored.
```

> 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.

Can you share what domain your work is in? Is it deeptech. Maybe coding agents right now work better for transactional/ecommerce systems?

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

#295

Post by manquer »

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.

Yes, but for experienced engineers that is still a huge huge change .

Even 12 months ago simplifying tasks alone was insufficient, you still needed a large group engineers to actually write, review and maintain a typical product for solid startup offering. This came with the associated overhead of hiring and running mid sized teams.

A lot of skilled people (y)our age/experience are forced into doing people management roles because there was no other way to deliver a product that scales(in team and complexity not DAU).

A CTO of mid-stage startup had to be good architect, a decent engineering manager, be deeply involved in product and also effectively communicate with internal and external customers.

Now for startups setting up new you can either defer the engineering manager and people complexity lot latter than you did before. You could have a very senior but small team who can be truly 10x level and be more productive without the overhead of communication, alignment and management that comes with large teams.

----

tldr; Skilled engineers can generate outsized returns to orgs that set them up to be successful(far more than before), I can't say if compensation is reflecting this yet, if not it soon will.

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

#296

Post by jmward01 »

I am a believer in the new agentic coding tools (I wasn't 6 months ago) but the delays and time it takes to build something haven't really changed even though everyone I know is using them. What I see is what has always been there:

Product doesn't understand the product because if it was easy to understand then someone else would have solved the problem already and we wouldn't have jobs. This means you need to iterate and discuss and figure out just like always. The iterations can be bolder, bigger, etc and maybe a bit faster but ultimately software scales np so a 10x improvement in -individual- capability doesn't scale to 10x improvement in -organizational- capability.

Let me put it another way. If your problem was so simple you could write a 200 word prompt to fully articulate it then you probably don't have much of a moat and aren't providing enough value to be competitive.

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

#297

Post by ryandrake »

overfeed wrote: post #274
loandbehold wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thin…

I've come to the same conclusion: If you just want a huge volume of code written as fast as possible, and don't care about 1. how big it is, 2. how fast it runs, 3. how buggy it is, 4. how maintainable or understandable it is, or 5. the overall craftsmanship and artistry of it, then you're probably seeing huge productivity gains! And this is fine for a lot of people and for a lot of companies: Quality really doesn't matter. They just care about shitting out mediocre code as fast as possible.

If you do care about these things, it will take you overall longer to write the code with an LLM than it would by hand-crafting it. I started playing around with Claude on my hobby projects, and found it requires an enormous amount of exhausting handholding and post-processing to get the code to the point where I am really happy with it as a consistent, complete, expressive work of art that I would be willing to sign my name to.

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

#298

Post by interstice »

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.

While I would love for this to be true for financial and egotistical reasons, I have a growing feeling that this might not be true for long unless progress really starts to stall.

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

#299

Post by robot-wrangler »

overfeed wrote: post #274
loandbehold wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thin…

Claims about agentic workflows are the new version of "works on my machine" and should be treated with skepticism if they cannot be committed to a repository and used by other people.

Maybe parent is a galaxy-brained genius, or.. maybe they are just leaving work early and creating a huge mess for coworkers who now must stay late. Hard to say. But someone who isn't interested in automating/encoding processes for their idiosyncratic workflows is a bad engineer, right? And someone who isn't interested in sharing productivity gains with coworkers is basically engaged in sabotage.

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

#300

Post by figers »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #254
figers wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

We already had Developers and the system in place this was a tiny feature in the scheme of things.

Internally it gives us a competitive advantage of the data being in our system from the beginning of the pipeline through the rest of the system where the data would be needed anyway.

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