I love the hand drawn chart. Apparently "Open Source" was invented around 2005, which significantly reduced development cost, then AWS was invented in 2011 or so and made development even cheaper, but then, oh no, in 2018 "complexity" happened and development became harder!
Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?
181–190 of 744 posts
Re: Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?
#182This article mentions cost to ship, but ignores that the largest cost of any software project isn't consumed by how long it takes to get to market, but by maintenance and addition of new features. How is agentic coding doing there? I've only seen huge, unmaintainable messes so far.
While this is true, I think some fields like game development may not always have this problem. If your goal is to release a non-upgradable game - fps, arcade, single-player titles, maintenance may be much less important than shipping. edit: typos
Nobody wants to ship that! They want perpetually upgraded live service games instead, because that's recurring revenue.
Re: Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?
#183The 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 surgical changes to it. It also helps with testing and debugging which is huge productivity boost. It's not about its ability to churn out lots of code quickly: it's an extra set of eyes/brain that works much faster that human developer.
Re: Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?
#184Man, that's a big title. I can't wait to see the data on how the cost has dropped so far. > AI Agents however in my mind massively reduce... Nevermind. It's a vibe 90%.
That. I was expecting some overview of the last couple of decades in a "There's no Silver Bullet" fashion.
Instead it's some guy that claims it takes a team to make CI/CD for something he can vibe-code in a day, and that agentic code totally solves the complexity problems caused by too much React.
Re: Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
I read these sort of comments every so often and I do not understand them. You are in a sea of people telling you that they are developing software much quicker which ticks the required boxes. I understand that for some reason this isn't the case for your work flow, but obviously it has a lot more value for others. If you are a chairmaker and everyone gains access to a machine that can spit out all the chair componen…
> You are in a sea of people telling you that they are developing software much quicker which ticks the required boxes But that's exactly not the case. Everyone is wondering what tf this is supposed to be for. People are vehemently against this tech, and yet it gets shoved down our throats although it's prohibitively expensive. Coding should be among the easiest problems to tackle, yet none of the big models can writ…
> And they can't even write a single proper function with modern c++ templating stuff for example.
That's just not true. ChatGPT 4 could explain template concepts lucidly but would always bungle the implementation. Recent models are generally very strong at generating templated code, even if its fairly complex.
If you really get out into the weeds with things like ADL edge cases or static initialization issues they'll still go off the rails and start suggesting nonsense though.
Re: Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?
#186The cost of building "something" has dropped 90%.
The cost of building "something good" has maybe dropped 30%.
The gap between a demo and a product is still enormous.
Re: Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?
#187pretty decent article - but what it misses is most of these agents are trained on bad code - which is open source. so what does this mean in practice? for people working on proprietary systems (cost will never go down) - the code is not on github, maybe hosted on an internal VCS - bitbucket etc. the agents were never trained on that code - yeah they might help with docs (but are they using the latest docs?) for other…
> these agents are trained on bad code - which is open source.
This is doubtful and not what I've seen in over 30 years in the industry. People who are ashamed of their source code don't make it Open Source. In general, Open Source will be higher quality than closed source.
Sure, these days you will need to avoid github repositories made by students for their homework assignments. I don't think that's a problem.
Re: Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?
#188[dead]
Re: Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?
#189The 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%.
Need to add, “…and what ‘simple’ means is getting broader by the day.”
Re: Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
While this is true, I think some fields like game development may not always have this problem. If your goal is to release a non-upgradable game - fps, arcade, single-player titles, maintenance may be much less important than shipping. edit: typos
I'm trying to understand where this kind of thinking comes from. I'm not trying to belittle you, I sincerely want to know: Are you aware that everyone writing software has the goal of releasing software so perfect it never needs an upgrade? Are you aware that we've all learned that that's impossible?
this was basically true until consoles started getting an online element. the up-front testing was more serious compared to the complexity of the games. there were still bugs, but there was no way to upgrade short of a recall.