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Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?

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

#451

Post by saikia81 »

janalsncm wrote: post #307
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?

you are right, but the inverse doesn't have to be. There is a factor that could make the work so cheap, that people don't care about the quality anymore.

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

#452

Post by j45 »

Software becoming easier to build will mean it's possible to build far deeper into solving problems with software.

Cost is a funny misnomer. The best code that's written is the code that doesn't need to be written, and doesn't have to be supported.

Being able to build different approaches to solving a problem quickly may turn out to be a lot more helpful than saving 90%.

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

#453

Post by locknitpicker »

tarsinge wrote: post #427
locknitpicker wrote: post #420

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. 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…

> 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.

No, not necessarily. Business decisions are one of the many factors in creating legacy code,but they are by no means the single cause. A bigger factor is developers mismanaging a project to the point they became a unmaintainable mess. I personally went through a couple of projects which were legacy code the minute they hit production. One of them was even a proof of concept that a principal engineer, one of those infamous 10x types, decided to push as-is to production and leave two teams of engineers to sort out the mess left in his wake.

I recommend reading "Working Effectively with Legacy Code" by Michael Feathers. It will certainly be eye-opening to some, as it dispels the myth that legacy code is a function of age.

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

#455

Post by dvh »

harishpanwar9 wrote: post #434

This 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 ship…

> emdashes

> isn’t just

How do you do fellow human

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

#456

Post by bryanrasmussen »

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?

when AI works well it is superior to Stack Overflow because what it replaces is not "Look up answer on SO, copy paste" but rather, look up several different things on SO that relate to your problem that you are trying to solve but which there is no exact definite solution posted anywhere, and copy those things together into a bit of code that you will probably just refactor a bit with a shorter time than doing all the SO look up yourself. When it works it can turn 2 hours of research into 2 minutes.

The problems are:

AI also sometimes replicates the following process - dev not understanding all parts of solution or requirements copies bits of code together from various answers making something that sort of works but is inefficient and has underlying problems.

Even with the working correctly solution your developer does not get in that 2 minutes what they used to get in the two hours before, an understanding of the problem space and how these parts of the solution hang together. This is the reason why it is more useful for seniors than juniors, because part of the looking through SO for what you want is light education.

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

#457

Post by tgv »

debo_ wrote: 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…

Let's not forget: it's pretty unlikely that two orgs come up with the same administration/data-analyis for which they use those spreadsheets, so most of those proposed SaaS applications would have just one customer.

There is of course SAP for common problems.

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

#458

Post by codyswann »

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.

Code isn't the moat and it hasn't been for quite some time. Data is the moat.

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

#459

Post by zkmon »

Building the software is only a small part of the overall cost. For any significant production deployment, the cost goes into change management and support.

Only a miniscule part of the work is green-field development. Everything else is managing a mess.

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

#460

Post by o999 »

drcxd wrote: post #443
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…

You don't have to self host, $100/engineer/mo is enough for many usecases.
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