Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?

martinalderson.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 744 posts

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

#211

Post by tobyjsullivan »

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).

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

#212

Post by RajT88 »

mattgreenrocks wrote: post #179
phantasmish wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something weird happened to software after the 90s or so. You had all these small-by-modern-standards teams (though sometimes in large companies) putting out desktop applications, sometimes on multiple platforms, with shitloads of features. On fairly tight schedules. To address markets that are itty-bitty by modern standards. Now people are like “We’ll need (3x the personnel) and (2x the time) and you can forget abou…

Yep. Software construction was branded a team sport. Hence, social coding, tool quality being considered more important (good thing for sure), and, arguably, less emphasis on individual skill and agency. This was in service of a time when tech was the great equalizer, powered by ZIRP. It also dovetailed perfectly with middle managers needing more reports in fast growing tech companies. Perhaps the pendulum is swingin…

I would make the case as well that software underwent demographic shift as the demand skyrocketed and the barriers to entering the profession with languages and tooling dropped.

80's/90's dev teams were more weird nerds with very high dedication to their craft. Today devs are much more regular people, but there are a lot more of them.

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

#213

Post by RajT88 »

klntsky wrote: post #100
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.

People vibe one-off solutions for themselves all the time. They just don't have the desire to productionalize them. Frankly, product knowledge is something LLMs are not that good at

Low code solutions like PowerApps I bang out stuff like this all the time. If your use case is limited enough, it makes lazy developers very productive.

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

#214

Post by kolinko »

devin wrote: post #163
kenjackson wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've hit this in little bursts, but one thing I've found is that LLMs are really good at reasoning about their own code and helping me understand how to diagnose and make fixes. I recently found some assembly source for some old C64 games and used an LLM to walk me through it (purely recreational). It was so good at it. If I was teaching a software engineering class, I'd have students use LLMs to do analysis of large…

Does that mean you don't think you learned anything valuable through the experience of working through this complexity yourself? I'm not advocating for everyone to do all of their math on paper or something, but when I look back on the times I learned the most, it involved a level of focus and dedication that LLMs simply do not require. In fact, I think their default settings may unfortunately lead you toward shallow…

I'd say this is similar to working with assembly vs c++ vs python. Programming in python you learn less about low level architecture trivia than in assembly, but you learn way more in terms of high level understanding of issues.

When I had to deal with/patch complex c/c++ code, I rarely ever got a deep understanding of what the code did exactly - just barely enough to patch what was needed and move on. With help of LLMs it's easier to understand what the whole codebase is about.

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

#215

Post by RajT88 »

zqna wrote: post #195
CobrastanJorji wrote: post #181

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!

In 2018 We had kubernetes, which improved the development speed another 300%!

Kubernetes with production workloads allowed companies to finally realize the "fail fast" ethos.

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

#216

Post by dleeftink »

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…

Although many tools exist, there still seems to a large context gap here: we need better tools to orient ourselves and to navigate large (legacy) codebases. While not strictly a a source graph or the like, I do think Enso like interface may prove successful here[0].

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

#217

Post by kenjackson »

devin wrote: post #163
kenjackson wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've hit this in little bursts, but one thing I've found is that LLMs are really good at reasoning about their own code and helping me understand how to diagnose and make fixes. I recently found some assembly source for some old C64 games and used an LLM to walk me through it (purely recreational). It was so good at it. If I was teaching a software engineering class, I'd have students use LLMs to do analysis of large…

Does that mean you don't think you learned anything valuable through the experience of working through this complexity yourself? I'm not advocating for everyone to do all of their math on paper or something, but when I look back on the times I learned the most, it involved a level of focus and dedication that LLMs simply do not require. In fact, I think their default settings may unfortunately lead you toward shallow…

I wouldn't say there is no value to it, but I do feel like I learned more using LLMs as a companion than trying to figure everything out myself. And note, using an LLM doesn't mean that I don't think. It helps provide context and information that often would be time consuming to figure out, and I'm not sure if the time spent is proportional to the learning I'd get from it. Seeing that these memory locations mapped to sprites that then get mapped to those memory locations, which map to the video display -- are an example of things that might take a minute to explore to learn, but the LLM can tell me instantly.

So a combination of both is useful.

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

#218

Post by almosthere »

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.

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

#219

Post by almosthere »

codegeek wrote: post #94
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.

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 (…

llms do all that too

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

#220

Post by ed_elliott_asc »

Im really liking it for writing boring code.

As an example I wanted a plugin for visual studio. In the past I would have spent hours on it or just not bothered but I used Claude code to write it, it isn’t beautiful or interesting code, it lacks tests but it works and saves me time. It isn’t worth anything, won’t ever be deployed into production, I’ll likely share it but won’t try to monetise it, it is boring ugly code but more than good enough for its purpose.

Writing little utility apps has never been simpler and these are probably 90% cheaper

Post reply on HN