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Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?

martinalderson.com

411–420 of 744 posts

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

#411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. But am I supposed to still understand that code at some point? Am I supposed to ask other team members to review and approve that code as if I had written it? I'm still trying to ship quality work by the same standards I had 3 or 5 years ago.

when compiler appeared assembly programmers would complain all day how ugly and inneficient the generated code was if you want to get the productivity gain you need to figure out how to solve the code review problem

I think there might be something here! a core of truth about what the future might hold. I cant take this approach right now though. Its not a good approach today.

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

#412
post #19

> I'm sure every organisation has hundreds if not thousands of Excel sheets tracking important business processes that would be far better off as a SaaS app. Far better off for who? People constantly dismiss spreadsheets, but in many cases, they are more powerful, more easily used by the people who have the domain knowledge required to properly implement calculations or workflow, and are more or less universally acce…

Spreadsheets are an incredible tool. They were a key innovation in the history of applications. I love them and use them. But it's very hard to have a large conventional cell-formula spreadsheet that is correct. The programming model / UI are closely coupled, so it's hard to see what's going on once your sheet is above some fairly low complexity. And many workplaces have monstrous sheets that run important things, cu…

This happened not so many years ago, in a certain small European nation, where official government housing valuation numbers were incorrect for some years due to a flaw in a spreadsheet.

I remember my apartment got a ~10% bump in value one year due to this flaw being fixed (fix didn't apply to all housing, just those who were on floors 5 or above).

I don't think though that a SaaS would have solved anything here.

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

#413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something that is advertised as 10x improvement in productivity isn't like your personal preferences for git or a few dinky bash aliases or whatever. It's more like a secret personal project test-suite, or a whole data pipeline you're keeping private while everyone else is laboriously doing things manually. Assuming 10x is real, then again the question: why would anyone do that? The only answers I can come up with ar…

The reason is because we are a Microsoft shop and our company doesn't have Claude account. I'm using my personal Claude Max account. My manager does know that I use Claude Code and I requested the person responsible for AI tooling in our company to use Claude Code but he just said that management already decided to go with GitHub copilot. He thinks that using Claude model in Copilot is same as using Claude Code. Anot…

Business and Enterprise plans have a no-training-on-your-data clause.

I’m not sure personal Claude has that. My account has the typical bullshit verbiage with opt-outs where nobody can really know whether they’re enforceable.

Using a personal account is akin to sharing the company code and could get one in serious trouble IMO.

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

#414
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.

Your comment contradicts itself

You are saying there aren't more low cost alternatives coming out

You also say writing code isn't the big problem (which I agree with)

But both can be true and in fact the reason is because the second is true! You aren't seeing the alternate because marketing is hard. People generally don't care about new products and aren't willing to save a little bit of money risking their time on something new

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

#416
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.

[deleted]

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

#417

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).

Yeah nah.

People posting stuff like this are clearly not doing it; they’re reading LinkedIn posts, toying with the tech and projecting what it looks like at scale.

That’s fair; but it’s also misguided.

Either try it yourself, or go and watch people (eg. @ArminRonacher) doing this at a reasonable scale and you can ground yourself in reality, instead of hype.

The tldr is: currently it doesn’t scale.

Not personally. Not at Microsoft. Not at $AI company.

Currently, as the “don’t change existing behaviour” constraint list goes up, the unsupervised agent capability goes down, and since most companies / individual devs don’t appreciate “help” that does something while breaking something else, this causes a significant hole in the “everyone can 10x” bed time story.

As mentioned in other threads; the cost and effort to produce new code is down, but the cost of producing usable code is, I guess, moderately on par with existing scaffolding tools.

Some domains where the constraints are more relaxed like image generation (no hands? Who cares?) and front end code (wrong styles? Not consistent? Who cares?) are genuinely experiencing a revolution like the OP was talking about.

…but generalising it to “all coding” appears to be like the self driving car problem.

Solvable? Probably.

…but a bit harder than people who don’t understands or haven’t tried to solve it themselves thought, or blogged about or speculated about.

Probably, there’s a much smaller set of problems that are much easier to solve… but it’s not happening in 2026; certainly not at the scale and rate the OP was describing.

You’ll notice, neither of us have self driving cars yet.

(Despite some companies providing cars that do drive themselves into things from time to time, but that’s always “user error” as I understand it…)

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

#418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

poorly

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

#419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wi…

This is "people will 3D print cars in their garage, manufacturing is over!" level of hype

More like "people will 3D print self-driving cars in their garage" level.

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

#420
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…

> 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.

That's not the definition of legacy. Being there for a long time and getting lots of use is not what makes a legacy project "legacy".

Legacy projects are characterized by not being maintained and having little to no test coverage. The term "legacy" means "I'm afraid to touch it because it might break and I doubt I can put it back together". Legacy means resistance to change.

You can and do have legacy projects created a year or two ago. Most vibecoded apps fit the definition of legacy code.

That is why legacy projects are a challenge to agentic coding. Agents already output huge volumes of code changes that developers struggle to review, let alone assert it's correctness. On legacy projects that are in production, this is disastrous.

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