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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%?

#301

Post by DrewADesign »

As I said in a previous post:

I think the 90/90 rule comes into play. We all know Tom Cargill quote (even if we’ve never seen it attributed):

The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time.

It feels like a gigantic win when it carves through that first 90%… like, “wow, I’m almost done and I just started!” And it ‘is’ a genuine win! But for me it’s dramatically less useful after that. The things that trip up experienced developers really trip up LLMs and sometimes trying to break the task down into teeny weeny pieces and cajole it into doing the thing is worse than not having it.

So great with the backhoe tasks but mediocre-to-counterproductive with the shovel tasks. I have a feeling a lot of the impressiveness depends on which kind of tasks take up most of your dev time.

If your job is pumping out low-effort websites that are essentially marketing tools for small businesses, it must feel like magic. I think the more magical it feels for your use case, the less likely your use case will be earning you a living 2 years from now.

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

#302

Post by tjr »

viraptor wrote: post #235
klntsky wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Same. I hate doing mobile coding, but just in the last few months I AI-coded 3 apps specifically for my needs. They'll never get released publicly, because they'd need polish and features that I don't care about personally. They potentially replace some SaaS too.

In context, it sounds like you are saying you used AI to make these three applications?

Why can't AI add the polish and features also?

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

#303

Post by viraptor »

tjr wrote: post #302
viraptor wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same. I hate doing mobile coding, but just in the last few months I AI-coded 3 apps specifically for my needs. They'll never get released publicly, because they'd need polish and features that I don't care about personally. They potentially replace some SaaS too.

In context, it sounds like you are saying you used AI to make these three applications? Why can't AI add the polish and features also?

It can. It's just not needed for my own apps. It would be needed for a public release and I'm just... not interested in that enough. It would cost me time and likely never get enough return.

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

#304

Post by an0malous »

neom wrote: post #174
sdoering wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I happily got rid of a legacy application (lost the pitch, another agency now must deal with the shit) I inherited as a somewhat technically savvy person about a year ago. It was built by real people. Not a single line of AI slop in it. It was the most fragile crap I had ever the misfortune to witness. Even in my wildest vibe coding a prototype moments I was not able to get the AI to produce that amount of anti patte…

DigitalOcean version 1 was a duck taped together mash of bash, chron jobs and perl, 2 people out of 12 understood it, 1 knew how to operate it. It worked, but it was insane, like really, really insane. 0% chance the original chatgpt would have written something as bad as DO v1.

Are you suggesting the original ChatGPT could build DigitalOcean?

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

#305

Post by citizenpaul »

ryandrake wrote: post #297
overfeed wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm really curious on what your role is, and which industry are you in? I'm awed by these productivity gains others report, but I feel like AI helps in such a small part of my job (implementing specific changes as I direct). Agentic workflows for me results in bloated code, which is fine when I'm willing to hand over an subsystem to the agent, such as a frontend on a side project and have it vibe code the entire thin…

I've come to the same conclusion: If you just want a huge volume of code written as fast as possible, and don't care about 1. how big it is, 2. how fast it runs, 3. how buggy it is, 4. how maintainable or understandable it is, or 5. the overall craftsmanship and artistry of it, then you're probably seeing huge productivity gains! And this is fine for a lot of people and for a lot of companies: Quality really doesn't…

>shitting out mediocre code as fast as possible.

This really is what businesses want and always have wanted. I've seen countless broken systems spitting out wrong info that was actively used by the businesses in my career, before AI. They literally did not want it fixed when I brought it up because dealing with errors was part of the process now in pretty much all cases. I don't even try anymore unless I'm specifically brought on to fix a legacy system.

>that I would be willing to sign my name to.

This right here is what mgmt thinks is the big "problem" that AI solves. They have always wanted us to magically know what parts are "good enough" and what parts can slide but for us to bear the burden of blame. The real problem is same as always bad spec. AI won't solve that but it will in their eyes remove a layer in their poor communication. Obviously no SWE is going to build a system that spit out wrong info and just say "hire people to always double check the work" or add it to so-so's job duties to check, but that really is the solution most places seem to go with by lack of decision.

Perhaps there is some sort of failure of SWE's to understand that businesses don't care. Accounting will catch the expensive errors anyway. Then Execs will bull whip middle managers and it will go away.

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

#306

Post by [deleted] »

saxenaabhi wrote: post #294
overfeed wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm really curious on what your role is, and which industry are you in? I'm awed by these productivity gains others report, but I feel like AI helps in such a small part of my job (implementing specific changes as I direct). Agentic workflows for me results in bloated code, which is fine when I'm willing to hand over an subsystem to the agent, such as a frontend on a side project and have it vibe code the entire thin…

Not the OP but we use LLMs to build a restaurant pos system with reservations, loyalty, webshop etc. Almost at feature parity with bigwigs like lightspeed/toast. > I find having a back-end-forth with an agent exhausting, probably because I have to build and discard multiple mental models of the proposed solution, since the approach can vary wildly between prompts Just right now I had it improve QR payments on POS. Th…

[deleted]

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

#307

Post by janalsncm »

DrewADesign wrote: post #301

As I said in a previous post: I think the 90/90 rule comes into play. We all know Tom Cargill quote (even if we’ve never seen it attributed): The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time. It feels like a gigantic win when it carves through that first 90%… like, “wow, I’m almost…

Yeah, I think the more your job demands correctness in novel scenarios the less impressed you are with these shiny demos. I encourage anyone to pause the demo once the thing is generated and stare at what it did. Is it genuinely correct and impressive? Are you impressed because it made a thing generally shaped like what you expected, or because it would be genuinely impressive (or even adequate) if a person did it?

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

#309

Post by the_overseer »

rprend wrote: post #263
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.

Yeah yeah there is this guy with a weird moustache with some crazy ideas that we are being held down by these other group of people. We should definitely follow him. He sounds crazy but he seems so convincing. And look at the cool insignia and symbols! Did you know this salute was back from the Romans? - You circa 1920.

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

#310

Post by neom »

an0malous wrote: post #304
neom wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DigitalOcean version 1 was a duck taped together mash of bash, chron jobs and perl, 2 people out of 12 understood it, 1 knew how to operate it. It worked, but it was insane, like really, really insane. 0% chance the original chatgpt would have written something as bad as DO v1.

Are you suggesting the original ChatGPT could build DigitalOcean?

To me, built and written are not the same. Built: OK, maybe that's an exaggeration. But could an early "this is pretty good at code" llm have written digitalocean v1? I think it could, yes (no offense Jeff). In terms of volume of code and size of architecture, yeah it was big and complex, but it was literally a bunch of relatively simple cron, bash and perl, and the whole thing was very...sloppy (because we were moving very quickly) - DigitalOcean as I last knew of it (a very long time ago), transformed to a very well written modern go shop. (Source: I am part of the "founding team" or whatever.)
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