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Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?

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

#371

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

eru wrote: post #349
zmmmmm wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lib…

> 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?

Not in my case (I never used SO like that, anyway). I use it almost exactly like SO, except much more quickly and interactively (and without the inference that I’m “lazy,” or “stupid,” for not already knowing the answer).

I have found that ChatGPT gives me better code than Claude (I write Swift); even learning my coding and documentation style.

I still need to review all the code it gives me, and I have yet to use it verbatim, but it’s getting close.

The most valuable thing, is I get an error, and I can ask it “Here’s the symptoms and the code. What do you think is going on?”. It usually gives me a good starting point.

I could definitely figure it out on my own, but it might take half an hour. ChatGPT will give me a solid lead in about half a minute.

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

#372

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

crabmusket wrote: post #369
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If they saved money, as they said it did, then... yes?

Saved money in the short term. But maintenance costs money. Amazon has all of the money in the world and could easily duplicate everything Salesforce does. Yet they use Salesforce internally.

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

#373

Post by re-thc »

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…

> This really is what businesses want and always have wanted.

There's a difference between what they really want and executives knowing what they want. You make it sound like every business makes optimal decisions to get optimal earnings.

> They literally did not want it fixed when I brought it up because

Because they thought they knew what earns them profits. The key here they thought they knew.

The real problem behind the scenes is a lot of management is short term. Of course they don't care. They roll out their shiny features, get their promotions and leave. The issues after that are not theirs. It is THE business' problem.

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

#375

Post by [deleted] »

crubier wrote: post #34
nesarkvechnep wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m yet to see a spreadsheet workflow successfully replaced by something else.

Streamlit apps or similar are doing a great job at this where I'm at. As simple to build and deploy as Excel, but with the right data types, the right UI, the right access and version control, the right programming language that LLMs understand, the right SW ecosystem and packages, etc.

[deleted]

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

#376

Post by sothatsit »

trollbridge wrote: post #363
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.

Well said. The cost of building a CRUD has dropped 90%. The open question is why people needed fancy AI tools like Claude to write CRUDs in the first place. These kind of tasks ought to be have been automated a long time ago.

> These kind of tasks ought to be have been automated a long time ago.

It’s much easier to write business logic in code. The entire value of CRUD apps is in their business logic. Therefore, it makes sense to write CRUD apps in code and not some app builder.

And coding assistants can finally help with writing that business logic, in a way that frameworks cannot.

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

#377

Post by analog31 »

rcxdude wrote: post #324
analog31 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

That's quite possible. I've done a certain amount of it myself. A couple of programs that I wrote for the factory 15+ years ago are being used continually for critical adjustment and testing of subassemblies. All told it's a few thousand lines of Visual Basic. Not "clean code" but carefully documented with a complete theory of operation that could be used as a spec for a professionally written version.

My view is that it's not a failing, any more than "software development can't be estimated" is, but a fact of life. Every complex organization faces the dilemma of big versus little projects, and ends up having to draw the line somewhere. It makes the most sense for the business, and for developer careers, to focus on the biggest, most visible projects.

The little projects get conducted in shadow mode. Perhaps a benefit of Excel is a kind of social compromise, where it signals that you're not trying to do IT work, and IT accepts that it's not threatening.

There's a risk, but I think it's minimal. Risk is probability times impact, measured in dollars. The biggest risks come from the biggest projects, just because the potential impact is big. Virtually all of the project failures that threaten businesses come from big projects that are carried out by good engineers using all of the proper methods.

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

#378

Post by bccdee »

saxenaabhi wrote: post #294
overfeed wrote: post #274

Earlier 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…

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. Th…

I don't know if that example is real, but if it is, that's exactly the reason I find AI tools irritating. You do not need six different ways to handle the connection being down, and if you do, you should really factor that out into a connection management layer.

One of my big issues with LLM coding assistants is that they make it easy to write lots & lots of code. Meanwhile, code is a liability, and you should want less of it.

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

#379

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

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…

Well for me, all of my actual implementation work has been green field from “git init” and mostly coding around the AWS SDK in the target language and infrastructure as code since AI coding has gotten decent.

I haven’t had to write a line of code in a year. First ChatGPT and more recently Claude Code.

I don’t do “agentic coding”. I keep my hands on the steering wheel and build my abstractions and modules up step by step. I make sure every line of code looks like something I would write.

I’m a staff consultant (cloud + app dev) and always lead projects, discovery and design and depending on the size of the project, do all of the actual hands on work myself.

I would have had to staff at least one maybe two less senior consultants to do the actual hands on work before. It’s actually easier for me to do the work then having to have really detailed requirements and coordinating work (the whole “Mythical Man Month” thing).

FWIW: before the pearl clutching starts, I started coding in assembly in 1986 on an Apple //e and have been delivering production level code since 1996.

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

#380

Post by bccdee »

hurturue wrote: post #240
jdmoreira wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. But am I supposed to still understand that code at some point? Am I supposed to ask other team members to review and approve that code as if I had written it? I'm still trying to ship quality work by the same standards I had 3 or 5 years ago.

when compiler appeared assembly programmers would complain all day how ugly and inneficient the generated code was if you want to get the productivity gain you need to figure out how to solve the code review problem

Your solution is, "just ship worse code, it's probably fine"?

I think it's your standards that have fallen 90%…

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