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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%?

#321

Post by Pannoniae »

xdc0 wrote: post #180

Betteridge's law proven correct once again. The answer to the headline is: no. Perhaps it will be true in the future, nobody knows. I'm skeptical the extent to which people publishing articles like this use AI to build non-trivial software, and by non-trivial I mean _imperfect_ codebases that have existed for a few years, battle tested, with scars from hotfixes to deal with fires and compromises to handle weird edge…

>I asked it about how to go about solving an issue and it completely hallucinated a solution suggesting to use a non-existing function that was supposedly exposed by a library.

Yeah, that's a huge pain point in LLMs. Personally, I'm way less impacted by them because my codebase is only minimally dependent on library stuff (by surface area) so if something doesn't exist or whatever, I can just tell the LLM to also implement the thing it hallucinated :P

These hallucinations are usually a good sign of "this logically should exist but it doesn't exist yet" as opposed to pure bs.

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

#322

Post by vachina »

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.

> Local-first

> Not seeing any

Working exactly as intended?

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

#323

Post by threecheese »

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.

You might not be looking hard enough. There are a few sources you could look at, one is the GitHub Awesome YouTube channel. I am seeing a lot of several-hundred-stars open source projects with unreasonably large codebases starting to gain traction. This is the frontier of adoption, and my guess is this will start cascading outward.

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

#324

Post by rcxdude »

analog31 wrote: post #84
LPisGood wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never heard of shadow IT. What is that?

It's when the users start taking care of IT issues themselves. Maybe the name comes from the Shadow Cabinet in England? Where it might not be obvious is that IT in this context is not just pulling wires and approving tickets, but is "information technology" in the broader sense of using computers to solve problems. This could mean creating custom apps, databases, etc. A huge amount of this goes on in most businesses.…

I think the term is mainly just because it tends not to be very visible/legible to the organization as a whole (and that's probably the main risk of it: either someone leaves and a whole section of the IT infrastructure collapses, or someone sets up something horrifically insecure and the company gets pwned). Especially because most IT departments hate it so there's a strong incentive to keep it quiet (I personally think IT organizations should consider shadow IT a failing of themselves and seek out ways to collaborate with those setting it up or figure out what is lacking in the service they provide to the rest of the company that means they get passed over).

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

#325

Post by dimal »

interstice wrote: post #298
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.

I've actually gone in the other direction. A year ago, I had that feeling, but since then I've gotten more certain that LLMs are never going to be able to handle complexity. And complexity is still the real problem of developing software.

We keep getting more cool features in the tools, but I don't see any indication that the models are getting any better at understanding or managing complexity. They still make dumb mistakes. They still write terrible code if you don't give them lots of guardrails. They still "fix" things by removing functionality or adding a ts-ignore comment. If they were making progress, I might be convinced that eventually they'll get there, but they're not.

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

#326

Post by m0llusk »

It will be interesting how this goes moving forward. Agents learn from massive scraping. With the newest tools and frameworks there is nothing but documentation and initial examples to scrape. And now that agent output is flooding everything it can be expected there will be a lot of feedback with automated learning early in development cycles.

Lots of applications have a simple structure of collecting and operating data with fairly well documented business logic tying everything together. Coding outside of that is going to be more tricky.

And if agentic coding is so great then why are there so still so many awful spreadsheets that can't compete with Excel? Something isn't adding up quite as well as some seem to expect.

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

#327

Post by Havoc »

vb-8448 wrote: post #101

It's not just about "building" ... who is going to maintain all this new sub-par code pushed to production every day? Who is going to patch all bugs, edge cases and security vulnerabilities?

Nobody.

In fact looking at the vibecoders enthusiasm for serverless I’m expecting a sharp spike in surprise cloud bills never mind thinking about edge case

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

#328

Post by Havoc »

liampulles wrote: post #144

I contracted briefly on a post-LLM-boom Excel modernization project (which ended up being consulting mainly, because I had to spend all my time explaining key considerations for a long-running software project that would fit their domain). The company had already tried to push 2 poor data analysts who kind of new Python into the role of vibe coding a Python desktop application that they would then distribute to users…

> post-LLM-boom Excel modernization project

Well there is a terrifying thought

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

#329

Post by fraud »

cloogshicer wrote: post #105

> I've had Claude Code write an entire unit/integration test suite in a few hours (300+ tests) I'd love to see someone do this, or a similar task, live on stream. I always feel like an idiot when I read things like this because despite using Claude Code a lot I've never been able to get anything of that magnitude out of it that wasn't slop/completely unusable, to the point where I started to question if I hadn't been…

100% agreed. I use Claude Code to write 90% of my code at this point, but have found that it is genuinely worse than a junior at writing meaningful test cases. Most of the time it will make up interfaces or mock things incorrectly etc to the point where I just give up and write them myself. The bulk of the “tests” it writes test things which are meaningless (does the interface exist etc). This is with typescript + vitest with opus 4.5.

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

#330

Post by bdangubic »

blibble wrote: post #239
martinald wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. I think a core problem is many developers (on HN) don't realise how "bad" so much human written code is. I've seen unbelievably complex logistics logic coded in... WordPress templates and plugins to take a random example. Actually virtually impossible to figure out - but AI can actually extract all the logic pretty well now.

> Agreed. I think a core problem is many developers (on HN) don't realise how "bad" so much human written code is. what do you think "AI" is trained on exactly?

finally the right question! I would upvote you 1,000 times if I could!

this is why they need a senior/seasoned developer behind them. for things that can simply be learned directly (e.g. from man/docs) it rocks, without guidance. for other things it needs guidance

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