Has the cost of building software dropped 90%? • Hacker News Board

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

#421

Post by Madmallard » Tue, Dec 09, 2025, 8:40 AM UTC

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.

barrier to entry is more problematic than anything else

make something decent in the same space as an existing mega-corporation's tool? prepare to get sued and they also steal your good ideas and implement them themselves because you don't have the money to fight them in court

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

#422

Post by 9rx » Tue, Dec 09, 2025, 8:49 AM UTC

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #372

crabmusket wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they saved money, as they said it did, then... yes?

Saved money in the short term. But maintenance costs money. Amazon has all of the money in the world and could easily duplicate everything Salesforce does. Yet they use Salesforce internally.

All the money in the world would not be sufficient to cover the cost of seeing human developers duplicate Salesforce on any reasonable time scale. There are simply not enough developers in existence to see that happen, driving the cost towards infinity.

The idea here, however, is that machine developers are changing the calculus. If you need more machine developers it takes, what, a few days to produce the necessary hardware? Instead of 20+ years to produce the legacy human hardware. Meaning, for all intents and purposes, there is no observable limit to how much software machine can create, driving the cost towards zero.

Yeah, sure, the tech still isn't anywhere near capable enough to reproduce something like Salesforce in its entirety. But it is claimed that it is already there for the most trivial of services. Not all SaaS services are Salesforce-like behemoths. Think something more like patio11's bingo card creator. It is conceivable, however, that technology advancement will continue such that someday even Salesforce becomes equally trivial to reproduce.

Maintenance is not a meaningful cost unless you also want to continually have the software do more and more. That could tip the favour towards SaaS — but only if the SaaS service is in alignment with the same future you wish for. If you have to start paying them for bespoke modifications... Have fun with that. You'll be wishing you were paying for maintenance of your own product instead. Especially when said machines drive the cost of that maintenance to near-zero all the same.

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

#423

Post by conductr » Tue, Dec 09, 2025, 8:50 AM UTC

manquer wrote: post #295

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.

Yes, but for experienced engineers that is still a huge huge change . Even 12 months ago simplifying tasks alone was insufficient, you still needed a large group engineers to actually write, review and maintain a typical product for solid startup offering. This came with the associated overhead of hiring and running mid sized teams. A lot of skilled people (y)our age/experience are forced into doing people management…

The funny thing is a lot of that was never really necessary per se. Tons of stories about great projects coming out of tiny teams. They’re not likely geniuses, they just had focus and clarity and a drive to GSD without excessive unproductive activity. I’ve long been a proponent of offshore developers for cost savings. You have to manage the process and people differently, but the output per dollar (pre AI) was phenomenal and when managing them I could put my brand of low touch management in place. Usually consisting of one weekly 1 hour meeting for everyone, then emphasizing nobody spins their wheels ever for more than an hour during the week without asking for help, then just making sure everyone was crystal clear on what we were working on and the priorities. I’ve never been a fan of sprints or really any unit of time block as a milestone because I don’t think it incentivizes people to finish early. I’m also not a perfectionist. If it’s spaghetti code and it works, great, we can clean it up on the next pass (within reason of course, but spirit is build, test, operationalize, then if it’s useful and has some staying power then refactor later. For all this, hiring cheap labor overseas has always made much more sense than hiring locally (in US) based on cost but also based one working style/culture. Somehow as labor rates shot up here in last couple of decades, people found excuses not to offshore. Some of it valid if you can’t manage the project correctly as it is different, but for me the solution has been to adapt my management style versus crying about it being difficult and hiring locally to be lazy. It always struck me as odd that startups and investors hadn’t leveraged the labor rate arbitrage opportunity that exists.

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

#424

Post by eru » Tue, Dec 09, 2025, 8:51 AM UTC

robot-wrangler wrote: post #361

eru wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And someone who isn't interested in sharing productivity gains with coworkers is basically engaged in sabotage. Who says they aren't interested in sharing? To give a less emotionally charged example: I think my specific use pattern of Git makes me (a bit) more productive. And I'm happy to chew anyone's ear off about it who's willing to listen. But the willingness and ability of my coworkers to engage in git-related…

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…

> You're saying the third option is.. people just like working 8 hours while this guy works 1?

Nope, I don't say that at all.

I am saying that certain accommodations might feel like 10x to the person making them, but that doesn't mean they are portable.

Another personal example: I can claim with a straight face that using a standing desk and a Dvorak keyboard make me 10x more productive than otherwise. But that doesn't necessarily mean that other people will benefit from copying me, even if I'm happy to explain to anyone how to buy a standing desk from Ikea (or how to work company procurement to get one, in case you are working not-from-home).

In any case, the original commenter replied with a better explanation than our speculations here.

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

#425

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Dec 09, 2025, 8:55 AM UTC

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.

[deleted]

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

#426

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Dec 09, 2025, 8:57 AM UTC

colechristensen wrote: post #391

eru wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In some cases we aren't fully authorised to use the AI tools for actual coding but even just asking "how would you make this change" [...] Isn't the logical endpoint of this equivalent to printing out a Stackoverflow answer and manually typing it into your computer instead of copy-and-pasting? Nitpicks aside, I agree that contemporary AIs can be great for quickly getting up to speed with a code base. Both a new lib…

>not reliable enough to use blindly I've been building things with Claude while looking at say less than 5% of the code it produces. What I've built are tools I want to use myself and... well they work. So somebody can say that I can't do it, but on the other hand I've wanted to build several kinds of ducks and what I've built look like ducks and quack like ducks so... I've found it's a lot better at evaluating code…

[deleted]

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

#427

Post by tarsinge » Tue, Dec 09, 2025, 9:00 AM UTC

locknitpicker wrote: post #420

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…

> 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 becau…

What you list are common characteristics encountered in legacy systems, but what makes it legacy is a business decision of declaring it obsolete and in maintenance mode, and so that no money or time to be invested in it. Old systems that continues to evolve are not legacy, like say Linux, and yes like you say a project that is only one year old can be declared legacy. Resistance to change is only an economic variable that drives the decision. Vibecoded apps fits the definition because the developer is unlikely to want to invest more time in them for different reasons.

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

#428

Post by IshKebab » Tue, Dec 09, 2025, 9:04 AM UTC

trollbridge wrote: post #363

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.

Well said. The cost of building a CRUD has dropped 90%. The open question is why people needed fancy AI tools like Claude to write CRUDs in the first place. These kind of tasks ought to be have been automated a long time ago.

> These kind of tasks ought to be have been automated a long time ago.

People have been trying for literally decades. The problem is that there is just enough uniqueness to every CRUD app that you can't really have "the CRUD app".

I guess it's the sweet spot for AI at the moment because they're 95% all the same but with some fairly simple unique aspects.

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

#429

Post by loandbehold » Tue, Dec 09, 2025, 9:06 AM UTC

blub wrote: post #413

loandbehold wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can opt-out of having your code being trained on. When Claude Code first came out Anthropic wasn't using CC sessions for training. They started training on it starting from Claude Code 2 that came out with Sonnet 4.5. User is asked on first use whether to opt-in or out of training.

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

#430

Post by IshKebab » Tue, Dec 09, 2025, 9:10 AM UTC

dimal wrote: post #325

interstice wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I would love for this to be true for financial and egotistical reasons, I have a growing feeling that this might not be true for long unless progress really starts to stall.

I've actually gone in the other direction. A year ago, I had that feeling, but since then I've gotten more certain that LLMs are never going to be able to handle complexity. And complexity is still the real problem of developing software. We keep getting more cool features in the tools, but I don't see any indication that the models are getting any better at understanding or managing complexity. They still make dumb…

Yeah but on the other hand there are plenty of human programmers that are bad at understanding complexity, make dumb mistakes, and write terrible code. Is there something fundamentally different about their brains to mine? I don't think so. They just aren't as good - not enough experience, or not enough neurons in the right places or whatever it is that makes some humans better at things than others.

So maybe there isn't any fundamental change needed to LLMs to take it from junior to senior dev.

> They still "fix" things by removing functionality or adding a ts-ignore comment.

I've worked with many many people who "fix" things like that. Hell just this week, one of my colleagues "fixed" a failing test by adding delays.

I still think current AI is pretty crap at programming anything non-trivial, but I don't think it necessarily requires fundamental changes to improve.