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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%?

#381

Post by visarga »

mountainriver wrote: post #178
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.

I’ve found they are able to compose well, let it build small components and stitch them together

That is a good approach, bottom up, manage complexity. But the general picture is - you set the direction and hold the model responsible, it does the actual work. Think of it as your work is the negative of the AI work, it writes the code, you ensure it tests that code. The better test harness you create, the better the AI works. The real task is to constrain the AI into a narrow channel of valid work.

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

#382

Post by baxtr »

socketcluster wrote: post #198
codegeek wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The keyword is "building". Yes costs may have dropped 90% just to build software. But there are 1000 other things that comes after it to run a successful software for months let alone years. - Maintenance, Security - Upgrades and patches - Hosting and ability to maintain uptime with traffic - Support and dealing with customer complexities - New requirements/features - Most importantly, ability to blame someone else (…

Good points but this list is missing the most critical problem which AI does not solve; exposure. What you've listed are the easy parts that are within people's control. You didn't list the most critical part, the actual bottleneck which is not within people's control. The market is now essentially controlled by algorithms. I predict there will be amazing software... Which will end up ignored by the markets completel…

Agreed. What you call exposure others might call distribution or attention.

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

#383

Post by aeonfox »

tobyjsullivan wrote: post #211
blauditore wrote: post #115

These kind of future prediction posts keep coming, and I'm tired of them. Reality is always more boring, less extreme, and slower at changing, because there are too many factors involved, and the authors never account for everything. Maybe we should collect all of these predictions, then go back in 5-10 years and see if anyone was actually right.

Despite a couple forward-looking statements, I didn’t read this as a prediction. It seems more of a subjective/anecdotal assessment of where things are in December 2025. (Yes, with some conjecture about the implications for next year.) Overall, it echos my experience with Claude Opus 4.5 in particular. We’ve passed a threshold (one of several, no doubt).

Just to test out the OP articles theory, I was about to write some unit tests. I decided to let Opus 4.5 have a go. It did a pretty good job, but I spent probably as much time parsing what it had done as I would have writing the code from scratch. I still needed to clean it up, and of course, unsurprisingly, it had made a few tests that only really exercised the mocking it had made. A kind of mistake I wouldn't be caught dead sending in for peer review.

I'm glad the OP feels fine just letting Opus do whatever it wants without a pause to look under the covers, and perhaps we all have to learn to stop worrying and love the LLM? But I think really, here and now, we're witness to just another hype article written by a professional blogger and speaker, who's highly motivated to write engagement bait like this.

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

#384

Post by nurettin »

For me, the cost of motivating myself dropped significantly. I now feel like working on little things that have been pending tasks for ages. A db synch script here , an unearthed project from 12 years ago there , migrating project package versions , finding and fixing incomplete/missing data , refactoring legacy code to be suitable for unit testing , installing a bunch of cron jobs all in a day's work.

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

#385

Post by shigawire »

almosthere wrote: post #218
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 code is simple, the fact that large complex systems are layers of simple code on top of itself, like garbage heaps at the dump, makes it complex. Sticking with the garbage analogy, the LLM is like upgrading from one shovel to an crew of 10 people with excavators to look for a lost Bitcoin hard drive. Your project is still going to fail, but it will fail faster with the 10 excavators.

Sometimes you just need to move trash around with low accuracy... In that case the excavator swarm is good enough.

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

#386

Post by hello12343214 »

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…

this was really interesting to read.

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

#387

Post by saxenaabhi »

bccdee wrote: post #378
saxenaabhi wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

These aren't 6 different way.

You are talking about something like network layers in graphql. That's on our roadmap for other reasons(switching api endpoints to digital ocean when our main cloudflare worker is having an outage), however even with that you'll need some custom logic since this is doing at least two api calls in succession, and that's not easy to abstract via a transaction abstraction in a network layer(you'll have handle it durably in the network layer like how temporal does).

Despite the obvious downsides we actually moved it from durable workflow(cf's take of temporal) server side to client since on workflows it had horrible and variable latencies(sometimes 9s v/s consistent I think it just boils down to what you are aiming. AI is great for shipping bugfixes and features fast. At a company level I think it also shows in product velocity. However I'm sure very soon our competitors will catch up when AI skepticism flatters.

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

#388

Post by cyberpunk »

loandbehold wrote: post #367
robot-wrangler wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something that is advertised as 10x improvement in productivity isn't like your personal preferences for git or a few dinky bash aliases or whatever. It's more like a secret personal project test-suite, or a whole data pipeline you're keeping private while everyone else is laboriously doing things manually. Assuming 10x is real, then again the question: why would anyone do that? The only answers I can come up with ar…

The reason is because we are a Microsoft shop and our company doesn't have Claude account. I'm using my personal Claude Max account. My manager does know that I use Claude Code and I requested the person responsible for AI tooling in our company to use Claude Code but he just said that management already decided to go with GitHub copilot. He thinks that using Claude model in Copilot is same as using Claude Code. Anot…

There are methods of connecting the claude code cli tools to copilot’s api — look at litellm or something along those lines, it’s a pip pkg and translates the calls code makes

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

#389

Post by claytongulick »

kenjackson wrote: post #135
jazzyjackson wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I haven't looked at my own code in 6 months it might as well have been written by someone else.

The most brilliant programmer I know is me three years ago. I look at code I wrote and I'm literally wondering "how did I figure out how to do that -- that makes no sense, but exactly what is needed!"

I had a funny example of that.

I had a question about how to do something in Django, and after googling found a good SO answer.

I read through it thinking about how much I appreciated the author's detailed explanation and answer.

When I looked at the author it was me from two years ago.

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

#390

Post by [deleted] »

aeonfox wrote: post #383
tobyjsullivan wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Despite a couple forward-looking statements, I didn’t read this as a prediction. It seems more of a subjective/anecdotal assessment of where things are in December 2025. (Yes, with some conjecture about the implications for next year.) Overall, it echos my experience with Claude Opus 4.5 in particular. We’ve passed a threshold (one of several, no doubt).

Just to test out the OP articles theory, I was about to write some unit tests. I decided to let Opus 4.5 have a go. It did a pretty good job, but I spent probably as much time parsing what it had done as I would have writing the code from scratch. I still needed to clean it up, and of course, unsurprisingly, it had made a few tests that only really exercised the mocking it had made. A kind of mistake I wouldn't be ca…

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