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Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?
431–440 of 744 posts
Re: Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?
#432The 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 code is simple, the fact that large complex systems are layers of simple code on top of itself, like garbage heaps at the dump, makes it complex. Sticking with the garbage analogy, the LLM is like upgrading from one shovel to an crew of 10 people with excavators to look for a lost Bitcoin hard drive. Your project is still going to fail, but it will fail faster with the 10 excavators.
Every use case has necessary complexity. The only things simple are CRUD apps.
Re: Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?
#433The 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.
At the leafs of the branches I'm comfortable to just generate code (e.g. a popup dialog). But I want to have a good grasp of code that is central of the application.
Re: Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?
#434This is a fascinating perspective — and honestly, it feels like one of those shifts we’ll only fully recognize in hindsight. The idea that software development could transition from months of coordination and engineering overhead to rapid iteration with small, high-leverage teams is both exciting and a little uncomfortable.
The 90% cost reduction isn’t just about efficiency — it’s about access. If the barrier to shipping software drops this dramatically, we’re likely standing at the edge of a new wave of innovation driven not just by engineers, but by domain specialists who previously couldn’t justify the investment.
The most interesting takeaway here is that technical mastery may become less of the moat, while contextual and domain intelligence becomes the real differentiator. That flips the traditional power structure in tech.
2026 might really be the year where “build fast, throw away, rebuild smarter” becomes normal instead of reckless.
Curious to see how fast organizations adapt — and who gets left behind simply because they assumed disruption would arrive slower.
Re: Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?
#435Earlier 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…
> It's not about its ability to churn out lots of code quickly: it's an extra set of eyes/brain that works much faster that human developer. This is the key take right here. LLMs excel at parsing existing content, summarizing it, and use it to explore scenarios and hypotheticals. Even the best coding agents out there such as Claude Code or Gemini often fail to generate at the first try code that actually compiles, le…
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Re: Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?
#436> 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…
And often the are unmaintainable because the original author left the company and the users don’t really know what the spreadsheet does which leads to unrecognized bugs and errors especially in spreadsheets with lots of data
Re: Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?
#437I am shocked by the number of people who are dismissive of AI, or have stuck to the whole copy and paste into a chatbot approach to development.
I'm finding this stuff, when given proper guidance, can reproduce experiments I've run incredibly fast. Weeks of typing done in minutes of talking to Claude Code.
In the working world, a lot of the time what matters is getting results, not writing 'perfect' code the way software engineers would like to.
concerns: - security bugs - business logic errors that seem correct but are wrong
as long as you have domain experts, I suspect these will gradually go away. hopefully LLMs can be trained not to do insecure things in code.
Re: Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?
#438> AI Agents however in my mind massively reduce the labour cost of developing software.
So the claim of massive cost reduction is just something the author made up (or hallucinated to use the lingo of the field)?
Seems like Betteridges law applies here.
Re: Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?
#439Some indirect results to this might be:
- More engineers moving from employment to indie development.
- Less abandoned open source software.
- Indie developers, small teams, and open source software developers will be more able to catch up and better compete with tech giants.
I believe the AI agentic coders will threat tech giants more than it - collectively - threats software engineers.
Re: Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?
#440*90% so far.. I've only been working with AI for a couple of months, but IMHO it's over. The Internet Age which ran 30 years from roughly 1995-2025 has ended and we've entered the AI Age (maybe the last age). I know people with little programming experience who have already passed me in productivity, and I've been doing this since the 80s. And that trend is only going to accelerate and intensify. The main point that…
It’s over. I’ve been writing FUD manually since the 60’s. But people fresh out of FB troll boot camp are already rolling it out 99% faster than me.
Fudpocalypse is upon us. All is lost.