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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%?

#261

Post by phantasmish »

dghlsakjg wrote: post #221
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…

> 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 199…

> 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.

Outside the specific case of Apple's "magical" cross-device interoperability, I can't think of many areas where this is true. When I step outside the Apple ecosystem, stuff feels pretty much the same as it did in 2005 or so, except it's all using 5-20x the resources (and is a fully enshittified ad-filled disjointed mess of an OS in Windows' case)...

> 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.

... aside from that everything crashes way, way less now than in the '90s, but a ton of that's down to OS and driver improvements. Our tools are supposed to be handling most of the rest. If that improved stability is imposing high costs on development of user-facing software, something's gone very wrong.

You're right that all the instability used to be truly awful, but I'm not sure it's better now because software delivery slowed way down (in general—maybe for operating systems and drivers)

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

#262

Post by marcosdumay »

bitwize wrote: post #241
marcosdumay wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Even if that were true, so we've made development needlessly more complicated, only to gain back the time lost by running numberwang across enough datacenters to fill a small country? You haven't abstracted anything away, Morty, just created another layer of shit. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22601623

Oh, if LLMs did actually solve the problem of too much React, that would by itself drop the cost of doing the software the author cares about by close to 90%.

And yes, it's a completely self-imposed problem that many people don't have at all. But LLMs make it worse, and the author is celebrating that it's worse now.

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

#263

Post by rprend »

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.

In your heart you either believe something or you don’t. I am happy to live in a world where so many people follow the courage of their convictions, even if they sound insane or uncomfortable.

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

#264

Post by freedomben »

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.

Completely agree. In the past 12 months, I've had five or six use cases that I would not have bothered scripting or automating before, but I've cranked out scripts or even small web services in under an hour that get the job done using AI. It has really revolutionized the super small bite-sized issues

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

#265

Post by bigstrat2003 »

paulddraper wrote: post #229
BobbyJo wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The former does far less to support your point, because it's only indicative of what people expect to happen. It is not actually evidence that their predictions will come true.

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

#266

Post by bsder »

layer8 wrote: post #193
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.

We should also get a flurry of low-cost, decent-quality native local-first software, but I’m not seeing any.

Why should you see a flurry of software?

What LLMs demonstrate is that the problem is dealing with people, not software. Look at the number of open source maintainers who are hanging it up.

Unless you have a path to monetization, writing software for anybody but yourself is a fool's errand.

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

#267

Post by tormeh »

nrhrjrjrjtntbt wrote: post #258
RajT88 wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

With Kubernetes this hated it must be boring enough to safely start using!

It's boring, alright. You're gonna curse this moment when you realize you've become a yaml engineer.

Actually, I bet AI is pretty good at creating those damn manifests. It's mostly regurgitation after all.

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

#268

Post by anonymars »

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…

Some thoughts:

1. Personally I find writing software for the web far more difficult/tedious than desktop. We sure settled on the lowest common denominator

1a. Perhaps part of that is that the web doesn't really afford the same level of WYSIWYG?

2. Is it perhaps more difficult (superlinear) to write one cloud SaaS product that can scale to the whole world, rather than apps for which each installation only needed to scale to one client? Oh and make sure to retain perfect separation between clients

2a. To make everything scale, it's super distributed, but having everything so distributed has a huge cost

3. Some level of DLL hell, but something different (update hell?) I barely do any programming in my free time anymore because I would end up spending almost the whole time needing to deal with some barrage of updates, to the IDE, to the framework, to the libraries, to the build infrastructure

3a. There's always a cost to shipping, to the development team and/or the users. With releases so frequent, that cost is paid constantly and/or unpredictably (from the development or user perspective)

3b. Is there any mental sense of completion/accomplishment anymore or just a never-ending always-accelerating treadmill?

3c. I wish I could find the source but there was some joke that said "software developers are arrogant or naïve enough to think that if you take a marathon and just break it up into smaller parts you can 'sprint' the whole way"

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

#269

Post by dubeye »

it has for me. I'm probably paying less than 10%, saving on seas, occasional contract fees for custom integrations, and zapier fees linking them together.

I've no idea what's going on in the enterprise space, but in the small 1-10 employee space, absolutely

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

#270

Post by djmips »

rmnclmnt wrote: post #121

Can we also take into account the mental cost associates with building software? Because how I see it, managing output from agents is way more exhausting than doing it ourself. And obviously the cost of not upskilling in intricate technical details as much as before (aka staying at the high level perspective) will have to be paid at some point

It is pretty hard work huh! I was surprised. In my case, I was doing a personal project but in the end I felt a little crispy although the result was succesful.
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