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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%?

#311

Post by ehnto »

djmips wrote: post #277

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 win…

I agree with your observations, in my own job I cover a great deal of the aspects of all software development practices for a few clients. Probably something you'd normally have a bunch of different roles do. Not because of AI, I have been in this role since before the AI boom, this is just how agency work is sometimes.

My observation is that there is perhaps 15% of my job that has been boosted by AI by quite a lot, and the rest it hasn't touched much at all. Most of the job just isn't coding badically. The code generation aspect is a bit flawed too because to get good results I often spend more time collating requirements and engineering the prompt that I again could have just done it quicker myself.

There is a sweet spot in there where the requirements were easy to write out, and the code was simple enough but there is a lot to write, that it's nice to not have to write it myself. But even then I am finding that AI is often not successful, and if it takes three tries to get it to do the work properly then there is no productivity gain. Often enough time is lost to the failed attempts.

Usually there isn't that much code to write, but it's fairly complex and needs to be correct, which is where I find LLMs have too many failed attempts and waste time.

(I am an 18+ year "everything" developer, my experiences are from using Claude Code)

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

#312

Post by zmmmmm »

loandbehold wrote: post #183
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.

Most of software work is maintaining "legacy" code, that is older systems that have been around for a long time and get a lot of use. I find Claude Code in particular is great at grokking old code bases and making changes to it. I work on one of those old code bases and my productivity increased 10x mostly due to Claude Code's ability to research large code bases, make sense of it, answer questions and making careful…

I've found this as well. In some cases we aren't fully authorised to use the AI tools for actual coding but even just asking "how would you make this change" or "where would you look to resolve this bug" or "give me an overview of how this process works" is amazingly helpful.

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

#313

Post by swatcoder »

citizenpaul wrote: post #305
ryandrake wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>shitting out mediocre code as fast as possible. This really is what businesses want and always have wanted. I've seen countless broken systems spitting out wrong info that was actively used by the businesses in my career, before AI. They literally did not want it fixed when I brought it up because dealing with errors was part of the process now in pretty much all cases. I don't even try anymore unless I'm specifical…

The adversarial tension was all that ever made any of it work.

The "Perfectionist Engineer" without a "Pragmatic Executive" to press them into delivering something good enough would of course still been in their workshop, tinkering away, when the market had already closed.

But the "Pragmatic Executive" without the "Perfectionist Engineer" around to temper their naive optimism would just as soon find themselves chased from the market for selling gilded junk.

You're right that there do seem to be some execs, in the naive optimism that defines them, eager to see if this technology finally lets them bring their vision to market without the engineer to balance them.

We'll see how it goes, I guess.

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

#314

Post by mattgreenrocks »

RajT88 wrote: post #212
mattgreenrocks wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. Software construction was branded a team sport. Hence, social coding, tool quality being considered more important (good thing for sure), and, arguably, less emphasis on individual skill and agency. This was in service of a time when tech was the great equalizer, powered by ZIRP. It also dovetailed perfectly with middle managers needing more reports in fast growing tech companies. Perhaps the pendulum is swingin…

I would make the case as well that software underwent demographic shift as the demand skyrocketed and the barriers to entering the profession with languages and tooling dropped. 80's/90's dev teams were more weird nerds with very high dedication to their craft. Today devs are much more regular people, but there are a lot more of them.

Definitely. There’s pluses and minuses to that shift.

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

#315

Post by turtletontine »

kalx wrote: post #308

Let’s say you’re right. Do we still want to, though? I mean. At some point we will no longer have the skill to babysit the AI agent.

When the LLM code bases are too complex for the humans on deck to understand and debug… that sounds like the turning point when companies go back to real developers IMO. Any serious mission critical code needs knowledgeable humans on deck who can leap into again when s** hits the fan, put out fires and patch critical bugs.

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

#317

Post by gaigalas »

I think the author underestimate the forces that introduce coordination overhead.

"Good AI developers" are a mystery being (not really, but for corporate they are). Right now, companies are trying to measure them to understand what makes them tick.

Once that is measured, I can assure you that the next step is trying to control their output, which will inevitably kill their productivity.

> This then allows developers who really master this technology to be hugely effective at solving business problems.

See what I mean?

"If only we could make them work to solve our problems..."

You can! But that implies additional coordination overhead, which means they'll not be as productive as they were.

> Your job is going to change

My job changes all the time. Developers are ready for this. They were born of change, molded by it. You know what hasn't caught up with the changes?

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

#318

Post by bluefirebrand »

mewpmewp2 wrote: post #272
Terr_ wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?).

Frankly if you were relying on libraries like Leftpad to you probably had no business writing code before AI

And if you rely on AI to write that code now you still have no business writing code

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

#320

Post by jordwest »

citizenpaul wrote: post #305
ryandrake wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>shitting out mediocre code as fast as possible. This really is what businesses want and always have wanted. I've seen countless broken systems spitting out wrong info that was actively used by the businesses in my career, before AI. They literally did not want it fixed when I brought it up because dealing with errors was part of the process now in pretty much all cases. I don't even try anymore unless I'm specifical…

> Perhaps there is some sort of failure of SWE's to understand that businesses don't care

I think it's an engineer's nature to want to improve things and make them better, but then we naively assume that everybody else also wants to improve things.

I know I personally went through a pretty rough disillusionment phase where I realised most of the work I was asked to do wasn't actually to make anything better, but rather to achieve some very specific metrics that actually made everything but that metric worse.

Thanks to the human tendency to fixate on narratives, we can (for a while) trick ourselves into believing a nice story about what we're doing even if it's complete bunk. I think that false narrative is at the core of mission statements and why they intuitively feel fake (mission statement is often more gaslighting than guideline - it's the identity a company wants to present, not the reality it does present).

AI is eager to please and doesn't have to deal with that cognitive dissonance, so it's a metric chaser's dream.

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