We are in that era where most people don't know about software quality enough to have an influence that annihilates the hole market. This makes me think of the lemon market thing ; eg : if people are unable to know what product qualitative or bad - then everything collapses.
Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?
501–510 of 744 posts
Re: Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?
#502Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 in…
A single Go binary can cross-compile to multiple OS-versions with a simple Github Action. And if it's a free open source application, why would I care if someone can't run it on their specific brand of OS? I'm open to PRs. If the "user base" wants to update, they can come to the github page and download the latest binary. I'm not building an autoupdater for a free application.
But you're talking about a free open source application without guarantees, that's not comparable to a SaaS vs self-hosted "paid" software in model.
And even for the cases where you it is, even with a modern language like Go that makes it easy, you still have tons of OS specific complexity. Service definitions, filesystem operations, signal handling, autoupdates if you want them, etc etc.
Re: Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?
#503I 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,…
To be blunt and a bit nihilistic: I get paid to ship features.
Client wants a feature EoW, they get it EoW, they're not paying for a week of extra work for the "quality codebase" feature.
But the good thing is that we've had objective and automated tooling for quality checks for code. We used to use them for humans, but now we apply the same tools for AI.
Good unit testing practices, exhaustive linters, .editorconfig etc. force humans AND LLMs to produce code within specific parameters.
If your project doesn't have automated tests and linters, now is the time to add them. Maybe use an LLM to help you with it :)
Re: Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?
#504Had 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.
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…
This needs to be said more. Software used to be so much better, and so was tooling.
While it wasn't perfect, I'd argue software got much worse, and I blame SaaSification and the push for web-based centralization.
Take for example, Docker. Linux suffered from an issue of hosting servers in a standardized, and isolated manner.
The kernel already had all those features to make it work, all we needed was a nice userland to take advantage of it.
What was needed was a small loader program that set up the sandbox and then started executing the target software.
What we got was Docker, which somehow came with its own daemon (what about cron, systemd etc), way of doing IPC (we had that), package distribution format (why not leave stuff on the disk), weird shit (layers wtf), repository (we had that as well), and CLI (why).
All this stuff was wrapped into a nice package you have to pay monthly subscription fees for.
Duplicating and enshittifying standard system functions, what a way to go.
Re: Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?
#505Earlier 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…
That is the thing ... How long ago did we get Agent mode. Like in CoPilot that thing is only 7 months old.
Things evolve faster then people realize... Agent mode, then came mcp servers, sub agents, now its rag databases allowing the LLMs to get data directly.
The development of LLMS looks slow but with each iteration, things get improved. As yourself, what will have been the result of those same tests you ran, 21 months ago, with Claude 3.0? How about Claude 4.0, that is only 8 months ago.
Right now Opus 4.5 is darn functional. The issue is more often not the code that it write, but more often it get stuck on "its too complex, let me simplify it", with the biggest issue often being context capacity.
LLMs are still bad at deeper tasks, but compared to the last LLMs, the jumps have been enormous. What about a year from now? Two years? I have a hard time believing that Claude 3 was not even 2 years but just 21 month ago. And we considered that a massive jump up, useful for working on a single file... Now we are throwing it entire codebases and is darn good at debugging, editing etc.
Do i like the results? No, there are lots of times that the results are not what "i wanted", but that is often a result of my own prompting being too generic.
LLMs are never going to really replace experience programmers, but boy is the progress scary.
Re: Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?
#506Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure. But am I supposed to still understand that code at some point? Am I supposed to ask other team members to review and approve that code as if I had written it? I'm still trying to ship quality work by the same standards I had 3 or 5 years ago.
when compiler appeared assembly programmers would complain all day how ugly and inneficient the generated code was if you want to get the productivity gain you need to figure out how to solve the code review problem
But did the generated code do what you told it to do and was it deterministic? LLMs aren’t the same at all. That metaphor doesn’t work.
Re: Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?
#507> 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…
These posts like the one OP made is why I'm losing my mind.
Like, is there truly an agentic way to go 10x or is there some catch? At this point while I'm not thrilled about the idea of just "vibe coding" all the time, I'm fine with facing reality.
But I keep having the same experience as you, or rather leaning more on that supercharged Google/SO replacement
or just a "can you quickly make this boring func here that does xyz" "also add this" or for bash scripts etc.
And that's only when I've done most of the plumbing myself.
Re: Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?
#508> Previously, you'd have a small team of people working on setting up CI/CD... Nearly all of this can be done in a few hours with an agentic coding CLI
I've had a couple of contracts now, where I get to fix everything for teams who vibe-coded their infrastructure. I'm not saying it isn't a speed-up for teams who already have a wealth of infra experience - but it's not a substitute for the years of infra experience such a team already has.
Re: Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?
#509> 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…
Spreadsheets are powerful, but often abused. They are great for economics but horrible for logic.
Most medium to large complex spreadsheets are better implemented in a high level programming language.
Spreadsheets seem useful for people that are scared of programming syntax but quickly become so much less maintainable and janky that I believe its almost always easier to just start with learning to program already.
Especially excel is 100% jank.
Re: Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?
#510> 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…
These posts like the one OP made is why I'm losing my mind. Like, is there truly an agentic way to go 10x or is there some catch? At this point while I'm not thrilled about the idea of just "vibe coding" all the time, I'm fine with facing reality. But I keep having the same experience as you, or rather leaning more on that supercharged Google/SO replacement or just a "can you quickly make this boring func here that d…
I keep using this excel analogy. When excel came out everyone said accountants were dead. Now we have more accountants than ever.
The analogy carries to what you’re saying here. Accountants or folks who know excel deeply can get a lot more from it than folks who are novice to it.
AI coding can be really helpful for an engineer. Keep at it!