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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%?

#341

Post by bdangubic »

nottorp wrote: post #72
bdangubic wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

90% more - nope. 35-55% more, just about on average. I am 30-year in though, not sure what these numbers are for junior devs

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/07/study-finds-ai-tools-made... They thought they were faster too. Yes, I know, AGI is just around the corner, we just need to wait more because "agents" are improving every day. In the mean time, LLMs are kinda useful instead of web searches, mostly because search is both full of spam and the search providers are toxic.

additional reading list

  - IntuitionLabs, “AI’s Impact on Graduate Jobs: A 2025 Data Analysis” (2025) -
https://intuitionlabs.ai/pdfs/ai-s-impact-on-graduate-jobs-a...

  - Demirci, O., Hannane, J., & Zhu, X., “Who Is AI Replacing? The Impact of Generative AI on Online Freelancing Platforms,” Management Science (2024) - https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/10.1287/mnsc.2024.05420%20PubsOnline

  - Indeed Hiring Lab, “AI at Work Report 2025: How GenAI is Rewiring the DNA of Jobs” (September 2025) - https://www.hiringlab.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Indeed-Hiring-Lab-AI-at-Work-Report-2025.pdf%20Indeed%20Hiring%20Lab

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

#342

Post by glouwbug »

devnull3 wrote: post #98

I think the cost of prototyping has definitely gone down. Developing production grade software which you want to people to rely on and pay for it is not gone down so much. The "weak" link is still human. Debugging complex production issues needs intimate knowledge of the code. Not gonna happen in next 3-4 years atleast.

These tools do two things:

1. Rob one’s understanding of the design and implementation

2. Give the unqualified enough confidence to contribute

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

#343

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#344

Post by tehjoker »

This is the kind of piece that becomes popular around the top of the hype cycle when people are trying to keep it going but can sense that perhaps Wiley E coyote has run off the cliff and is suspended in the air. Obviously, by any possible objective indicator, the cost of software development has barely budged and "AGI" is nowhere in the offing while luminary scientists appear to be drawn to whatever the next big thing is, having seen the limits of their (admittedly impressive) creation.

I'm sure that AI tools will be here to stay and will become more integrated and better. I wonder what the final result will be, -20% productivity as in the METR study? +20%? Anything like 90% is the kind of sensationalism reserved for r/WallStreetBets

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

#345

Post by glouwbug »

Agingcoder wrote: post #97

> One objection I hear a lot is that LLMs are only good at greenfield projects. I'd push back hard on this. I've spent plenty of time trying to understand 3-year-old+ codebases where everyone who wrote it has left. Where I am, 3 year old is greenfield, and old and large is 20 years old and has 8million lines of nasty c++. I’ll have to wait a bit more I think …

The argument is building anew is 90% cheaper.

I can’t see LLMs contributing to anything this size when they can’t remember what I said 4 messages ago

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

#346

Post by teknopaul »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #318
mewpmewp2 wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Bit harsh.

That was probably a node / npm thing, because they had no stdlib it was quite common to have many small libraries.

I consider it an absolute golden rule for coding to not write unnecessary code & don't write collections.

I still see a lot of C that ought not to have been written.

I'm a grey beard, and don't fear for my job. But not relying on AI if it's faster to write, is as silly as refusing a correct autocomplete and typing it by hand. The bytes don't come out better

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

#347

Post by cryptonector »

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, well, I think this makes that skill of problem reduction a very valuable skill.

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

#349

Post by eru »

zmmmmm wrote: post #312
loandbehold wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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" [...]

Isn't the logical endpoint of this equivalent to printing out a Stackoverflow answer and manually typing it into your computer instead of copy-and-pasting?

Nitpicks aside, I agree that contemporary AIs can be great for quickly getting up to speed with a code base. Both a new library or language you want to be using, and your own organisation's legacy code.

One of the biggest advantages of using established ecosystem was that stack-overflow had a robust repository of already answered questions (and you could also buy books on it). With AI you can immediately cook up your own Stackoverflow community equivalent that provides answers promptly instead of closing your question as off-topic.

And I pick Stackoverflow deliberately: it's a great resources, but not reliable enough to use blindly. I feel we are in a similar situation with AI at the moment. This will change gradually as the models become better. Just like Stackoverflow required less expertise to use than attending a university course. (And a university course requires less expertise than coming up with QuickSort in the first place.)

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