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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%?

#481

Post by benjiro »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #247
nine_k wrote: post #35

Had the cost of building custom software dropped 90%, we would be seeing a flurry of low-cost, decent-quality SaaS offering all over the marketplace, possibly undercutting some established players. From where I sit, right now, this does not seem to be the case. This is as if writing down the code is not the biggest problem, or the biggest time sink, of building software.

Well, because no self interested decision maker in any company of size is going to ever trust their business to an unknown company run by a one person operation. And why would the benefits of being able to code faster accrue to a small independent developer over a large company that already has an established reputation and a customer base? “No one ever got fired for buying Salesforce”. I once had influence over the…

He never said that companies will trust a one man shop. His point was clearly that people and companies will make products designed for themselves, using LLMs.

Why pay for a piece of software that you really only use 5% of all the features, and still may need customizations for. Vs just internally have somebody code a custom solution for your company.

The only benefit of a outside solution is that you can blame a outsider. Internal solution used to be bad because if the person with the knowledge of the codebase left, you ended up screwed. But with LLMs and "vibe" coding, there becomes a disconnect between the code and whoever wrote it. Making it easier to later make modifications on that same codebase, using ... LLMs.

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

#482

Post by matwood »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #127
TheRoque wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But in the past, you knew the codebase very well, and it was trivial to implement a fix and upgrade the software. Can the same be done with LLMs ? Well from what I see, it depends on your luck. But if the LLMs can't help you, then you gotta read the whole codebase that you've never read before and you quickly lose the initial benefits. I don't doubt someday we'll get there though.

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

I always check git blame before ripping on some code I find...9/10 times I wrote it :o

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

#483

Post by theshrike79 »

sofixa wrote: post #447
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.

With a SaaS, you have one platform that you fully control. Broken dependency? Need to update/rollback? It's all in your hands. Local software has to target multiple OSes, multiple versions of those OSes, and then a million different combinations of environments that you as a developer have no control over. Windows update whatever broke your app, but the next one fixed it? Good luck getting your user base to update in…

A single Go binary can cross-compile to multiple OS-versions with a simple Github Action.

And if it's a free open source application, why would I care if someone can't run it on their specific brand of OS? I'm open to PRs.

If the "user base" wants to update, they can come to the github page and download the latest binary. I'm not building an autoupdater for a free application.

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

#484

Post by curiousgal »

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…

I honestly don't know what code bases you guys are working with, for me I tried it with a large quant library (C++ 97) in an effort to modernize it and so far it's been nothing hit a waste of time. Similarly for a medium sized python quant codebase (3.6) trying to port it to 3.12, and it's also been a headache.

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

#485

Post by torginus »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #254
figers wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We were paying for Salesforce, then built the features we needed to do the same tracking into our interal tool and got rid of Salesforce to save money and simplify the data internally across departments

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?

We did the same. We replaced a proprietary build system with our own. The SaaS product we used was super expensive, had a very gougy licensing scheme, had a bunch of features that either didn't work for us, or were so overcomplicated, that we ended up not using them. Before the rewrite, we bypassed like 90% of the internal features, and relied on custom scripts to do everything.

Every SaaS feature in my experience ends up being a mess due to having to support a billion use cases, and figuring it out is more trouble than its worth, might not be able to do what you want, might be buggy.

But even if you do all that stuff, you end up with a mess that can be replaced with 5 lines of shell script. And many more people know shell scripting than figuring out the arcane BS that goes on inside that tool.

It's the eternal lowcode story.

> 'doesn’t make the beer taste better'

I'd say it did. Having a CI/CD pipeline where you don't have to wait for other people's builds, the build logic is identical to what's running on dev PCs, and everything is all-around faster, and more understandable (you can read the whole source) makes testing easier, and surprises less frequent.

All in all, making a hour-long CI/CD turnaround time into 5 minutes or less has been an incredible productivity boost.

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

#486

Post by Jean-Papoulos »

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…

I have the opposite experience. Claude can't get it all in the context window and make changes that will completely break something on the other side of the program.

Granted that's because the program is incredibly poorly written, but still, context window will stay a huge barrier for quite some time.

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

#487

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#488

Post by aswegs8 »

baxtr wrote: post #382
socketcluster wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Marketing.

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

#489

Post by pdimitar »

Spooky23 wrote: post #223
renewiltord wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know of at least two multi-billion corps that are moving to internal ETL tools instead of 5tran now because the cost to maintain internally is much lower and you can customize for cheap. SaaS as a model is at risk without something tying someone down.

The greed/“capture all of the value” mindset of SaaS kills it, because you can infer the cost of delivery in many cases and beat it. For anything that is billed by the human, O365 is the benchmark. I’m not paying some stupid company $30/mo for some basic process, I use our scale to justify hiring a couple of contractors to build 80% of what they do for $400-600k in a few months. Half the time I can have them build on…

Yeah true, the downfall of most SaaS services I used was that they were too careful trying to build too much moat and sabotage any competing efforts.

If they were a little more chill then I'd think they could make much more money. I personally would pay a few services, even as an individual, right now, if I knew I could always get a good database / JSON dump of everything at a 5-minute notice, and build my own thing on top of it.

They don't get this psychological aspect at all.

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

#490

Post by mcny »

lambdaone wrote: post #478
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…

Claude is insanely good at grunt-work maintenance coding, which is a fairly formulaic exercise that mostly requires RTFM and simple code changes that look a lot likw the surrounding code. Designing new things from scratch based on human specs is something which Claude still struggles with.

The problem is that it often doesn't get it right the first time. You have to sort of have a conversation and it eventually gets there but if you have no idea what the destination should be like, you can't guide it there.
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