Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?

martinalderson.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

441–450 of 744 posts

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

#441

Post by hnfong »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #237
jcelerier wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't read this as when open-source was invented, but when it happened for the corporate world. In 2002 it was a very reasonable choice for $BIG_COMPANY to use a proprietary web server, e.g. IIS. In 2008 that would have been really be weird.

But why did that make development cheaper? An enterprise copy of Windows with IIS cost maybe a thousand bucks, right? Maybe there were more costs, my knowledge is, y'know, 23 years out of date.

You decide you need a web server. Ask management chain for approval. Ask IT dept for approval. Ask finance for approval for the expense. Contact Microsoft sales. Buy it.

Now you can start developing on it…

With open source it’s not just the cost of software you save, but also potentially all the other bureaucracy that you save due to not having to pay money to do something. You also get a lot of transparency on the technical side about the products you may choose to use.

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

#442

Post by jakubmazanec »

overfeed wrote: post #274
loandbehold wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, as a remote developer, it means I'm able to finish my work in 1 hour instead of 8 hours. So I'm able to capture "extra value" in the form of time. In our team everyone uses GitHub Copilot and I use Claude Code. My teammates' productivity increased slightly but my productivity increased a lot. This is because 1. Claude Code is just a better coding agent 2. I invested time to get good at agentic coding. Eventua…

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…

Exactly what I experience. I don't need AI to generate complex algorithm, I need e.g. a lot of code for a UI library that is clean and maintainable - but it's can't ever generate such code and it can't be prompted, because training data has much less excellent code than good and ok code. Therefore I can't use AI for high-level design task, ony low-level code, which I then have to check and clean line by line, and that isn't an enjoyable work.

I don't need LLMs, I need some kind mind reading device :D

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

#443

Post by drcxd »

o999 wrote: post #439

Some 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.

> I believe the AI agentic coders will threat tech giants more than it - collectively - threats software engineers.

Currently, I don't think so. Coding agents' performance generally depends on the quality of the model behind them. Running a powerful model is assets-dependent. Not everyone has the hardware and power to support Sonnet 4.5 or Gemini 3 even if they are open-source. So, before the top notch models can be deployed on personal computing devices, I would not say coding agents will threat any organization.

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

#445

Post by pdimitar »

swatcoder wrote: post #313
citizenpaul wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 specifical…

The adversarial tension was all that ever made any of it work. The "Perfectionist Engineer" without a "Pragmatic Executive" to press them into delivering something good enough would of course still been in their workshop, tinkering away, when the market had already closed. But the "Pragmatic Executive" without the "Perfectionist Engineer" around to temper their naive optimism would just as soon find themselves chased…

That's a nice balanced wholesome take, only the problem is that the "Pragmatic Executive" is more like "Career-driven frenzied 'ship it today at all costs' psychopath executive".

You are describing a push-and-pull / tug-of-war balanced relationship. In reality that's absolutely exactly never balanced. The engineer has 1% say, the other 99% go to the executive.

I so wish your take was universally applicable. In my 24 years of career, it was not.

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

#446

Post by coldtea »

eru wrote: post #349
zmmmmm wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've found this as well. 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" or "where would you look to resolve this bug" or "give me an overview of how this process works" is amazingly helpful.

> 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…

>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?

Isn't the answer on SO the result of a human intelligence writing it in the first place, and then voted by several human intelligencies to top place? If an LLM was merely an automated "equivalent" to that, that's already a good thing!

But in general, the LLM answer you appear to dismiss amounts to a lot more:

  Having an close-to-good-human-level programmer 
  understand your existing codebase
  answer questions about your existing codebase 
  answer questions about changes you want to make
  on demand (not confined to copying SO answers)
  interactively 
  and even being able to go in and make the changes
That amounts to "manually typing an SO answer" about as much as a pickup truck amounts to a horse carriage.

Or, to put it another way, isn't "the logical endpoint" of hiring another programmer and asking them to fix X "equivalent to printing out a Stackoverflow answer and manually typing it into their computer"?

>And I pick Stackoverflow deliberately: it's a great resources, but not reliable enough to use blindly. I feel we are in a similar situation with AI at the moment.

Well, we shouldn't be using either blindly anyway. Not even the input of another human programmer (that's way we do PR reviews).

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

#447

Post by sofixa »

thot_experiment wrote: post #53
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.

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.

With a SaaS, you have one platform that you fully control. Broken dependency? Need to update/rollback? It's all in your hands.

Local software has to target multiple OSes, multiple versions of those OSes, and then a million different combinations of environments that you as a developer have no control over. Windows update whatever broke your app, but the next one fixed it? Good luck getting your user base to update instead of being pissed at you

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

#448

Post by otikik »

The cost of writing code has gone down - I don't think by 90%. Maybe by 30%, with a big asterisk that says something like "as long as someone has put some similar code somewhere or is a very mechanical refactor".

The thing is, writing code is just the first step on building software. You are reviewing what your AI generates, right? You will still be held responsible when it doesn't work. And you will have to maintain and support that code. That is, in my mind, also "building software".

This reminds me of the (amazing) Vim experts that zip around a codebase with their arcane keystrokes. I'm a main Vim user and I can't mimic a fraction of their power. It's mesmerizing to watch them edit files, it's as if their thoughs get translated into words on the screen.

I also know that editing is just the first step. If you skip the rest, you are being misled by an industry with vested interests.

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

#449

Post by raxxorraxor »

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.

CRUD as a concept is flawed. It is more or less any computational system with input -> process -> output. Just as this abstract system can have any complexity, the same is true for any CRUD app.

You don't need Claude to write it. But you cannot generate solid web forms with the same speed. What usually would have taken you a few hours is now solved in much less time.

I doubt software will get cheaper though, requirements will adapt.

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

#450

Post by pdimitar »

robot-wrangler wrote: post #299
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…

Claims about agentic workflows are the new version of "works on my machine" and should be treated with skepticism if they cannot be committed to a repository and used by other people. Maybe parent is a galaxy-brained genius, or.. maybe they are just leaving work early and creating a huge mess for coworkers who now must stay late. Hard to say. But someone who isn't interested in automating/encoding processes for their…

It seems to me that the devs that managed to become sergeants of a small platoon of LLM agents to a crushing success deem their setup a competitive advantage and as such will never share it.

But them being humans, they do want to brag about it.

Post reply on HN