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

471–480 of 744 posts

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

#471

Post by matwood »

ryandrake wrote: post #297
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…

I've come to the same conclusion: If you just want a huge volume of code written as fast as possible, and don't care about 1. how big it is, 2. how fast it runs, 3. how buggy it is, 4. how maintainable or understandable it is, or 5. the overall craftsmanship and artistry of it, then you're probably seeing huge productivity gains! And this is fine for a lot of people and for a lot of companies: Quality really doesn't…

> Quality really doesn't matter.

It does matter, but it's one requirement among many. Engineers think quality metrics as you listed are the most important requirements, but that's not typically true.

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

#472

Post by theshrike79 »

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…

So a project that's still using Java 1.6 and has perfect test coverage and some poor developer is paid to maintain it (but NOT upgrade it!) is not "legacy" in your book?

Then we disagree on the definition.

"Legacy" projects to me are those that should've went through at least two generational refactorings but haven't because of some unfathomable reason. These are the ones that eventually end up being rewritten from scratch because it's faster than trying to upgrade the 25 year old turd.

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

#474

Post by impjohn »

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…

>then tell it to give you the top 10 things wrong with the code, then tell it to fix the five of them that are valid and important.

I would be cautious of this. I've tried this multiple times and often it produces very subtle bugs. Sometimes the code is not bad enough to have 5 defects with it, but it will comply, and change things that don't need to. You will find out in prod at some point.

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

#475

Post by theshrike79 »

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.

No no, that's not how it works.

The crap I build _replaces_ someone else's SaaS (or free open source) product.

They solve my exact problem and nothing else and they follow the ways I like to use my software, with no fancy Dockerised WebUIs etc.

I have exactly zero intention of putting any of that shit out there as any kind of service with user accounts and billing and all of the associated stress. A few of them might be something I could sell as a SaaS offering, but I'm not interested in it at all.

Most of them are on my Github though for anyone to get and use as they see fit, but then it's up to them if the vibe coded program does something it shouldn't :)

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

#476

Post by theshrike79 »

socketcluster wrote: post #198
codegeek wrote: post #94

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 (…

Good points but this list is missing the most critical problem which AI does not solve; exposure. What you've listed are the easy parts that are within people's control. You didn't list the most critical part, the actual bottleneck which is not within people's control. The market is now essentially controlled by algorithms. I predict there will be amazing software... Which will end up ignored by the markets completel…

> Good points but this list is missing the most critical problem which AI does not solve; exposure.

There are SO FUCKING MANY tools for marketing your shitty SaaS all over subreddits dedicated for people to advertise their new services and applications.

I had to unsubscribe from all of them because about a year ago they went from semi-interesting to 100 different "my SaaS AI tool will automatically advertise your AI SaaS tool on social media" solutions every week.

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

#477

Post by pdimitar »

9rx wrote: post #422
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I like your analysis but it seems to imply that at one point we can produce near-infinite amount of software and that this will be welcome.

It will not be. Even in this fairly broken state of affairs we are currently in, most non-technical people I spoke to already say that they have too much apps and too much machines with "intelligent" features.

And IMO when we have machines that can crank out a complete-but-better Salesforce, our civilization and race would be in an entirely another level and we would see such things as toys. Who needs that antiquated procurement and tracking expenses software, where's our 174th fusion reactor? What is even that in fact? Oh you mean that nail-sized addon we put on our main processing unit? Yeah we're not interested in ancient software history now. We need more juice to capture those gases around Jupiter for the wireless beaming of energy project! Our DAG-based workflow solver and the 5 AIs around it all said we can't do without it.

...So of course nobody wants to pay programmers. We've been viewed as expensive and unnecessary since the dawn of time. A necessary evil, more or less. But your last paragraph captures why many companies need them -- bespoke solutions. You can only add so many cloud services before your normal staff starts making mistakes on an hourly basis because they have to reconcile data between multiple systems whose vendors will always refuse to make integrations.

And even if many try to have their cake and eat it too -- i.e. have an IT friend they call only for those bespoke enhancements but only pay them during that time and not every month -- then this service will simply become more boutique and expensive, mostly compensating for the lack of salary. You'd do multiple stints for the year that would cover all your expenses and normal lifestyle, it would just not be through a monthly paycheck. Why? Because I think a lot of people will exit programming. So the law of supply and demand will ultimately triumph.

...Or we get a true general AI and it makes all of this redundant in 5 years.

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

#478

Post by lambdaone »

loandbehold wrote: post #183
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.

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…

Claude is insanely good at grunt-work maintenance coding, which is a fairly formulaic exercise that mostly requires RTFM and simple code changes that look a lot likw the surrounding code. Designing new things from scratch based on human specs is something which Claude still struggles with.

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

#479

Post by theshrike79 »

layer8 wrote: post #193
thot_experiment wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We should also get a flurry of low-cost, decent-quality native local-first software, but I’m not seeing any.

I've built so many of these just for myself over the last year or two. A good two dozen from a cursory count on my Github.

They all work decently enough for my personal use and are 80-100% Vibe coded but about 0% vibe designed.

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

#480

Post by matwood »

vidarh wrote: post #275
Terr_ wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The cost of writing simple code has dropped 90%. Plus there's a lot of simple code you shouldn't be writing either way , because it's in a library by now. By their nature, LLMs will do their best with things that could be plagiarized.

LLMs work great at identifying libraries I'd never have otherwise found and use them , as long as you ask them for solutions instead of micromanage how they should get things done.

I've noticed this also. Very useful.
Post reply on HN