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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%?

#491

Post by theshrike79 »

devin wrote: post #163
kenjackson wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've hit this in little bursts, but one thing I've found is that LLMs are really good at reasoning about their own code and helping me understand how to diagnose and make fixes. I recently found some assembly source for some old C64 games and used an LLM to walk me through it (purely recreational). It was so good at it. If I was teaching a software engineering class, I'd have students use LLMs to do analysis of large…

Does that mean you don't think you learned anything valuable through the experience of working through this complexity yourself? I'm not advocating for everyone to do all of their math on paper or something, but when I look back on the times I learned the most, it involved a level of focus and dedication that LLMs simply do not require. In fact, I think their default settings may unfortunately lead you toward shallow…

Learning things the hardest way possible isn't always the best way to learn.

In a language context: Immersion learning where you "live" the language, all media you consume is in that language and you just "get" it at some point, you get a feel for how the language flows and can interact using it.

vs. sitting in a class, going through all the weird ways French words conjugate and their completely bonkers number system. Then you get tested if you know the specific rule on how future tenses work.

Both will end up in the same place, but which one is better depends a lot on the end goal. Do you want to be able to manage day-to-day things in French or know the rules of the language and maybe speak it a bit?

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

#492

Post by danmaz74 »

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.

I wouldn't say that the distinction is so much about code being "simple", but about code being made of patterns common enough in online examples. Claude Code and similar can write even very complex code, as long as it's something they have been trained on.

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

#493

Post by benjiro »

anonymars wrote: post #268
phantasmish wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something weird happened to software after the 90s or so. You had all these small-by-modern-standards teams (though sometimes in large companies) putting out desktop applications, sometimes on multiple platforms, with shitloads of features. On fairly tight schedules. To address markets that are itty-bitty by modern standards. Now people are like “We’ll need (3x the personnel) and (2x the time) and you can forget abou…

Some thoughts: 1. Personally I find writing software for the web far more difficult/tedious than desktop. We sure settled on the lowest common denominator 1a. Perhaps part of that is that the web doesn't really afford the same level of WYSIWYG? 2. Is it perhaps more difficult (superlinear) to write one cloud SaaS product that can scale to the whole world, rather than apps for which each installation only needed to sc…

> To make everything scale, it's super distributed, but having everything so distributed has a huge cost

Its more then a huge cost, its often insane... We are not talking 10x but easily 100x to a 1000x. Its like when i see some known database makers that scale, write how they can do a million writes per second. Ignoring that they rented a 1000 servers for that, each costing $500 per month. That same software is also 10x to 100x more slower, then a single postgresql database in reads.

So you ask yourself, how many companies do a million writes per second. Few ... How much of those writes may have been reduced by using smarter caching / batching? Probably a factor of 10 to 100x...

The thing i like about scalable solution, is that its way easier to just add a few nodes, vs needing to deal with postgres replication / master setup, when the master node got moved / need to upgraded.

For fun, i wrote my own ART database, and a LSM database using LLMs ... Things do 400 a 500k inserts / second on basic cheap hardware. So wait, why are some companies advertising that they do a million inserts/s, on 500k/month hardware? Some companies may need this ability to scale, as they will not run a 1000 server but maybe 10.000, or more. But 99% of the companies will never even smell close to a 100k inserts/second, let alone a million.

People forget that network latency is a huge thing, but the moment you want consistency and need something like raft, that means now your doing not just 1x the network latency of a write but 4x (send write, verify receive, send commit, verify commit, confirm).

Even something as basic like sqlite vs postgres on the same server, can mean a difference of 3x performance, simply because of then network overhead vs in-function. And that network overhead is just local on the same machine.

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

#494

Post by theshrike79 »

aeonfox wrote: post #383
tobyjsullivan wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Despite a couple forward-looking statements, I didn’t read this as a prediction. It seems more of a subjective/anecdotal assessment of where things are in December 2025. (Yes, with some conjecture about the implications for next year.) Overall, it echos my experience with Claude Opus 4.5 in particular. We’ve passed a threshold (one of several, no doubt).

Just to test out the OP articles theory, I was about to write some unit tests. I decided to let Opus 4.5 have a go. It did a pretty good job, but I spent probably as much time parsing what it had done as I would have writing the code from scratch. I still needed to clean it up, and of course, unsurprisingly, it had made a few tests that only really exercised the mocking it had made. A kind of mistake I wouldn't be ca…

This is only true if the code it wrote is something you can just sit down and write without any reference.

Now do something like I did: An application that can get your IMDB/Letterboxd/Goodreads/Steam libraries and store them locally (own your data). Also use OMDB/TMDB to enrich the movie and TV show data.

If you can write all that code faster than read what Claude did, I salute you and will subscribe to your Substack and Youtube channels :)

Oh btw, neither Goodreads, IMDB nor Letterboxd have proper export APIs so you need to have a playwright-style browser automation do it. Just debugging that mess by writing all the code yourself is going to be hours and hours.

The Steam API access Claude one-shotted (with Sonnet 3.7, this was a long time ago) as well as enriching the input data from different sources.

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

#495

Post by theshrike79 »

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.

Oracle has entered the chat.

If MySQL and Postgresql had been acceptables choices 25 years ago, our company at the time would've saved SO MUCH money that now went to fund Larry Ellison's yacht(s).

Both existed, but not in a way anyone could sell to a) customers b) C-staff making the final call.

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

#496

Post by liampulles »

blobbers wrote: post #437

I 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 soft…

> 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.

But you do recognize that one's ability to speedily implement features is dependent on the present quality of a codebase, right? Being a serious practitioner here means balancing active feature development with active tending to the codebase to keep it in a reasonable state, since its quality will tend ever downward otherwise.

In your experiments, do you find agents readily find this balance? I ask genuinely, I have only minimal experience with Cursor.

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

#497

Post by Dave_Wishengrad »

loandbehold wrote: post #335
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…

Senior Software Engineer. The system is a niche business software software for a specific industry. It doesn't do any fancy math, all straightforward business logic. > Trying to get clean code erases all/most of my productivity gains, and doesn't spark joy. I find having a back-end-forth with an agent exhausting, probably because I have to build and discard multiple mental models of the proposed solution, since the a…

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

#498

Post by tangotaylor »

> Engineers need to really lean in to the change in my opinion.

I tried leaning in. I really tried. I'm not a web developer or game developer (more robotics, embedded systems). I tried vibe coding web apps and games. They were pretty boring. I got frustrated that I couldn't change little things. I remember getting frustrated that my game character kept getting stuck on imaginary walls and kept asking Cursor to fix it and it just made more and more of a mess. I remember making a simple front-end + backend with a database app to analyze thousands of pull request comments and it got massively slow and I didn't know why. Cursor wasn't very helpful in fixing it. I felt dumber after the whole process.

The next time I made a web app I just taught myself Flask and some basic JS and I found myself moving way more quickly. Not in the initial development, but later on when I had to tweak things.

The AI helped me a ton with looking things up: documentation, error messages, etc. It's essentially a supercharged Google search and Stack Overflow replacement, but I did not find it useful letting it take the wheel.

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

#499

Post by gessha »

loandbehold wrote: post #367
robot-wrangler wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

Every time I hear “we are a Microsoft shop” makes me remember the scene with Jimmy O Yang and Windows auto updating in Space Force

https://youtu.be/xDLvUqhwHZc

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

#500

Post by theshrike79 »

BigHatLogan wrote: post #5

Good write-up. I don't disagree with any of his points, but does anybody here have practical suggestions on how to move forward and think about one's career? I've been a frontend (with a little full stack) for a few years now, and much of the modern landscape concerns me, specifically with how I should be positioning myself. I hear vague suggestions like "get better at the business domain" and other things like that.…

Use the best tools, the lowest tier of Claude Code is perfect for the stuff you do at home in the evenings and weekends. It's also by far the best at being a "pair coder" as it's chatty and tells you what it's doing and doesn't get confused if you hit ESC and tell it to do something else.

Build your own tools, need a small utility? Use an LLM to create it with you.

Create LLM-focused tools and adjust your workflows to be LLM-friendly.

I personally have a Taskfile setup that follows the same formula regardless of language. "task build" runs lint+test+build. Test and lint are kinda self-evident. All output is set to minimum, only errors are verbose (don't waste context on fancy output).

I also have tools for LLMs to use to find large code files, large and overly complex functions etc.

All project documentation lives in docs/ as markdown files with Mermaid charts.

This way I can just have the general "how to use a taskfile" instructions in my global WHATEVER.md and it'll work in every project.

Learn project management. Working with LLMs is exactly like project managing a bunch of smart and over eager junior coders who want to use every trick and pattern they learned at school for every tiny shell script.

Do a few test projects where you just pretend you're a non-techinical project lead and know WHAT you want but not HOW you want it done. Plan the project, split it into tasks (github tasks or beads[0] both work pretty well). Then have the LLM(s) tackle the tasks one by one and test the end result like a non-techical PM would do in a demo. Comment, critique and ask them to change stuff that doesn't work.

If you can afford it, bring in an outside consultant (Codex or Gemini), both of which are _really_ good at evaluating large codebases for duplication, test coverage, repetition, bad patterns etc. Give their responses verbatim to Claude and ask what it thinks about them.

Working with LLMs is a skill you just need to use to get a feel for it, it's not a science and more like an art. For example I can "feel" when Claude is doing its thing and being either overeager or trying to complete a task while ignoring the burning pile of unit tests it leaves behind and interrupt. it before it gets too far.

[0] https://github.com/steveyegge/beads

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