The only cost that's dropped by 90% is writing unoriginal blog posts
Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?
351–360 of 744 posts
Re: Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?
#352Good write-up. I don't disagree with any of his points, but does anybody here have practical suggestions on how to move forward and think about one's career? I've been a frontend (with a little full stack) for a few years now, and much of the modern landscape concerns me, specifically with how I should be positioning myself. I hear vague suggestions like "get better at the business domain" and other things like that.…
Author here, thanks for your kind words! I think it's about looking at what you're building and proactively suggesting/prototyping what else could be useful for the business. This does get tricky in large corps where things are often quite siloed, but can you think "one step ahead" of the product requirements and build that as well? I think regardless if you build it, it's a good exercise to run on any project - what…
ARE you the author? Or did you prompt AI to get this?
Re: Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?
#353Earlier quoted context omitted.
It has dropped by maybe MORE than 90%. My sons school recently asked me to build some tools for them -- I did this over a decade ago for them, for free. I did it again using AI tools (different problem though) and I had it mostly done in 30 minutes (after I got the credentials set up properly -- that took up more time than the main coding part). This was probably several days of work for me in the past.
"Building software" is a bit too general, though. I believe "Building little web apps for my son's school" has gotten at least 10x easier. But the needle has not moved much on building something like Notion, or Superhuman, or Vercel, or . Even with perfect prompt engineering, context rot catches up to you eventually. Maybe a fundamental architecture breakthrough will change this, but I'm not holding my breath.
Yeah, that's not a comparison to the kinds of highly complex internal systems I worked with the Fortune 1xx companies, particularly the regulated ones (healthcare). The whole "my son's school" thing is very nice, and it's cool you can knock that out so fast, but it's nothing at all like the environments I worked in, particularly the politics.
Re: Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?
#354The 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%.
The cost of writing code has dropped 90%. The cost of maintaining code, which has always been the hardest part, has grown 90% ; )
Re: Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?
#355Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> And someone who isn't interested in sharing productivity gains with coworkers is basically engaged in sabotage.
Who says they aren't interested in sharing? To give a less emotionally charged example: I think my specific use pattern of Git makes me (a bit) more productive. And I'm happy to chew anyone's ear off about it who's willing to listen.
But the willingness and ability of my coworkers to engage in git-related lectures, while greater than zero, is very definitely finite.
Re: Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?
#356> I've had Claude Code write an entire unit/integration test suite in a few hours (300+ tests) for a fairly complex internal tool. This would take me, or many developers I know and respect, days to write by hand.
I should have stopped reading here. People who think that the time it takes to write some code is the only metric that matters are only marginally better than people who rank employees by lines of code.
Re: Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?
#357Alternate take: The cost of building software will remain the same but software will need to be 10x as feature-rich to remain competitive.
If you can build it in a weekend so can I. So you're going to have to figure out bigger things to build.
Re: Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?
#358I'll believe that when I see it.
Re: Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?
#359Alternate take: The cost of building software will remain the same but software will need to be 10x as feature-rich to remain competitive. If you can build it in a weekend so can I. So you're going to have to figure out bigger things to build.
We might actually get all the software we actually need. We won’t have to listen to antiquated DMV/IRS/health systems not being updated because the projects designed to replace them failed.
Re: Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?
#360> Jevons Paradox says that when something becomes cheaper to produce, we don't just do the same amount for less money. Take electric lighting for example; while sales of candles and gas lamps fell, overall far more artificial light was generated.
Can’t wait to debug all that stuff.