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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%?

#221

Post by dghlsakjg »

phantasmish wrote: post #160
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.

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…

> Something weird happened to software after the 90s or so.

Counterpoint: What might have happened is that we expect software to do a lot more than we did in the 90s, and we really don't expect our software features to be static after purchase.

I agree that we sometimes make things incredibly complex for no purpose in SE, but also think that we do a rose-colored thing where we forget how shitty things were in the 1990s.

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

#222

Post by dabockster »

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.

And not everyone wants to use a cloud AI either. Remember that when tons of cash is on the table, things like license agreements become less enforceable and more of a "don't get caught in the cookie jar" thing. All it would take is something similar to what's going on with book authors/publishers - a major AI provider exposed as using other firms' proprietary code without even considering to get a license - to totally blow up the "safety" of cloud based coding agents.

Local models are becoming more and more capable but the tooling still needs to get better for those.

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

#223

Post by Spooky23 »

renewiltord wrote: post #167
martinald wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is happening though internally in businesses I've worked with. A few of them are starting to replace SaaS tools with custom built internal tooling. I suspect this pattern is happening everywhere to a varying level. Often these SaaS tools are expensive, aren't actually that complicated (or if they are complicated, the bit they need isn't) and have limitations. For example, a company I know recently got told their v…

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 powerapps and have zero new opex.

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

#224

Post by mikewarot »

This wouldn't be the first time that the cost of software radically dropped. It happened back during the early 1960s for the first time when IBM introduced the System 360, which included backward compatibility for the 1401. Prior to this point, the maximum lifespan of software was tied to that of the computer in question. The software would be re-written for the next architecture, every time a new computer was purchased.

The advent of the PC, and the appearance of Turbo Pascal, Visual Basic, and spreadsheets that could be automated made it possible for almost anyone to write useful applications.

If it gets cheaper to write code, we'll just find more uses for it.

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

#225

Post by loandbehold »

nuclearnicer wrote: post #206
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…

This is great. Asking questions of library code is a big pattern of mine too. Here's an example I saw on twitter. Asking an LLM to document a protocol from the codebase: https://ampcode.com/threads/T-f02e59f8-e474-493d-9558-11fddf... Do you think you will be able to capture any of this extra value? I think I'm faster at coding, but the overall corporate project timeline feels about the same. I feel more relaxed and c…

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. Eventually Copilot will catch up and management will realize that now 1 developer can do what previously would take a whole team.

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

#226

Post by almosthere »

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.

LLMs, long term, have killed most SaaS.

Most SaaS used to be killed by bespoke software engineers that would build some custom thing, and it was integrated perfectly into the legacy system.

Then all those people decided to be managers and go on "i dont care" autopilot mode and hired a bunch of teens that still do care, to some extent. But those teens suck at it, and the old guys just don't really care anymore.

Now with agentic code, instead of "buy splunk" or "buy jira" or whatever thing they are trying to do, they have one of those "teens now in their mid twenties" that are SUPER excited about Agentic flows, either write an agentic tool or simply use an agentic tool to code up the 300 lines of code that would replace their need for a Jira or a Splunk or whatever. Since most people only use 5% of the total features of any product, there's no reason to buy tools anymore, just build it for a fraction of the cost.

I don't know if the above is where we're at right now, but it's coming.

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

#227

Post by Spooky23 »

dismantlethesun wrote: post #131
lossolo wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is happening though internally in businesses I've worked with How many samples do you have? Which industries are they from? Which SaaS products were they using, exactly and which features? > ...a company I know recently got told their v1 API they relied on on some back office SaaS tool was being deprecated. V2 of the API didn't have the same features ... dev spends a week or two rebuilding that tool Was that Saa…

I'm not the OP, but I do have an annectote. We've got an backend pipeline that does image processing. At every step of the pipeline, it would make copies of small (less than 10MB) files from an S3 storage source, do a task, then copy the results back up to the storage source. Originally, it was using AWS but years ago it was decided that AWS was not cost effective so we turned to another partner OVH and Backblaze. Un…

I ran a shared services org in a Fortune 50. Enterprise costs don’t scale down well, and things that are absolutely essential to supporting 100k people sound insane for 100 people. Our senior leaders would sometimes demand we try and the CFO and I would just eyeroll.

Nobody would hire the JP Morgan IT team to run a dentist practice IT workload. Likewise, AWS can save you money at scale, but if your business can run on 3 2U servers, it should.

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

#228

Post by nsxwolf »

mountainriver wrote: post #176
vb-8448 wrote: post #101

It's not just about "building" ... who is going to maintain all this new sub-par code pushed to production every day? Who is going to patch all bugs, edge cases and security vulnerabilities?

I hear this argument all the time but it seems to leave out code reviews

In teams of high performers who have built a lot of mutual trust, code reviews are mostly a formality and a stop gap against the big, obvious accidental blunders. "LGTM!"

I do not know or trust the agents that are putting out all this code, and the code review process is very different.

Watching the Copilot code review plugin complain about Agent code on top of it all has been quite an experience.

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

#229

Post by paulddraper »

BobbyJo wrote: post #85
paulddraper wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. NODS HEAD VIGOROUSLY Last 12 months: Docusign down 37%, Adobe down 38%, Atlassian down 41%, Asana down 41%, Monday.com down 44%, Hubspot down 49%. Eventbrite being bought for pennies. They are being replaced by newer, sm…

Stock prices down or revenue down? The former would do very little to support your point.

Stock prices.

The latter would do very little to support my point, as it doesn't consider future growth trends.

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

#230

Post by tehjoker »

krupan wrote: post #207
tehjoker wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And why did we abandon this model? Also, computer games existed at the same time as consoles. People were playing games loaded from floppy disks on computers back in the early 1980's

I'm not saying that this model is profitable in the current environment, but it did exist in a real world environment at one point, making the point that certain processes are compatible with useful products, but maybe not leading edge competitive products that need to make a profit currently.
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