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Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?

martinalderson.com

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

#511

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

benjiro wrote: post #481
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, because no self interested decision maker in any company of size is going to ever trust their business to an unknown company run by a one person operation. And why would the benefits of being able to code faster accrue to a small independent developer over a large company that already has an established reputation and a customer base? “No one ever got fired for buying Salesforce”. I once had influence over the…

He never said that companies will trust a one man shop. His point was clearly that people and companies will make products designed for themselves, using LLMs. Why pay for a piece of software that you really only use 5% of all the features, and still may need customizations for. Vs just internally have somebody code a custom solution for your company. The only benefit of a outside solution is that you can blame a out…

We have seen this before with home grown VB apps, excel spreadsheets with VBScript, FoxPro etc. How has that turned out every single time as requirements changed and the number of people dependent on it grew?

I think in a couple of years we are going to same type of mess. We are already seeing a bunch of shitty AI companies getting funded with no technical cofounders. Look at a few of the YC companies

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

#512

Post by zinodaur »

Jean-Papoulos wrote: post #486
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…

I have the opposite experience. Claude can't get it all in the context window and make changes that will completely break something on the other side of the program. Granted that's because the program is incredibly poorly written, but still, context window will stay a huge barrier for quite some time.

I don’t put all the source in context either - if you let Claude run the compiler (or even tests) it can avoid these issues

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

#514

Post by adam_patarino »

I feel like people who write articles like this have never worked at big companies.

My wife works at Shutterstock, first as a SWE, now as a product manager. Most of their tasks involve small changes in 5 different systems. Sometimes in places like Salesforce. A simple ask can be profoundly complicated.

AI has certainly made grokking, and code changes easier. But the real cost of building has not been reduced 90%. Not even close.

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

#515

Post by adriand »

r_lee wrote: post #507
tangotaylor wrote: post #498

> 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…

> Like, is there truly an agentic way to go 10x or is there some catch?

Yes. I think it’s practice. I know this sounds ridiculous, but I feel like I have reached a kind of mind meld state with my AI tooling, specifically Claude Code. I am not really consciously aware of having learned anything related to these processes, but I have been all in on this since ChatGPT, and I honestly think my brain has been rewired in a way that I don’t truly perceive except in terms of the rate of software production.

There was a period of several months a while ago where I felt exhausted all the time. I was getting a lot done, but there was something about the experience that was incredibly draining. Now I am past that and I have gone to this new plateau of ridiculous productivity, and a kind of addictive joy in the work. A marvellous pleasure at the orchestration of complex tasks and seeing the results play out. It’s pure magic.

Yes, I know this sounds ridiculous and over-the-top. But I haven’t had this much fun writing software since my 20s.

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

#516

Post by cindyllm »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #511
benjiro wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He never said that companies will trust a one man shop. His point was clearly that people and companies will make products designed for themselves, using LLMs. Why pay for a piece of software that you really only use 5% of all the features, and still may need customizations for. Vs just internally have somebody code a custom solution for your company. The only benefit of a outside solution is that you can blame a out…

We have seen this before with home grown VB apps, excel spreadsheets with VBScript, FoxPro etc. How has that turned out every single time as requirements changed and the number of people dependent on it grew? I think in a couple of years we are going to same type of mess. We are already seeing a bunch of shitty AI companies getting funded with no technical cofounders. Look at a few of the YC companies

[dead]

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

#517

Post by nullbound »

citizenpaul wrote: post #305
ryandrake wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>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…

Well, that part is bound to add a level of tension to the process. Our leadership has AI training, where the user is responsible for checking its output, but the same leadership also outright stated it now sees individual user of AI as having 7 employees under them ( so should be 7x more productive ). Honestly, its maddening. None of it is how it works at all.

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

#518

Post by mrsubletbot »

theshrike79 wrote: post #503
liampulles wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Maintaining a quality code base is more than just having tests and linters. It's about organization, right-sized abstractions, architecture and choosing the right patterns. There is no real way to automate the verification of these things. If an agent farts out a 2,000 LOC feature in a day but bifurcates the code base, duplicates functions or makes awful abstractions, it WILL eventually turn into a big ball of mud.

All that being said, if wielded correctly an LLM can contribute to a healthy repository, but it requires much of the same thought and planning that development pre-LLMs did. I promise you, if you stick with the same code base long enough using your approach and little consideration to its health, it will become a hellish place to build in.

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

#519

Post by lionkor »

r_lee wrote: post #507
tangotaylor wrote: post #498

> 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 have a feeling that people who are genuinely impressed by long term vibe coding on a single project are only impressed because they don't know any better.

Take writing a book, or blog post; writing a good blog post, or a chapter of a book, takes lots of skill and practice. The results are very satisfying and usually add value to both the writer's life as well as the reader's. When someone who has done that uses AI and sees the slop it generates, he's not impressed, probably even frustrated.

However, someone who can barely write a couple coherent sentences, would be baffled at how well AIs can put together sentences, paragraphs, and have a somewhat coherent train of thought through the entire text. People who struggled in school with writing an introduction and a conclusion will be amazed at AIs writing. They would maybe even assume that "those paragraphs actually add no meaning and are purely fluff" is a totally normal part of writing and not an AI artifact.

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

#520

Post by r_lee »

adriand wrote: post #515
r_lee wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Like, is there truly an agentic way to go 10x or is there some catch? Yes. I think it’s practice. I know this sounds ridiculous, but I feel like I have reached a kind of mind meld state with my AI tooling, specifically Claude Code. I am not really consciously aware of having learned anything related to these processes, but I have been all in on this since ChatGPT, and I honestly think my brain has been rewired in a…

That's really interesting.

May I ask what kinds of projects, stack and any kind of markdown magic you use?

And any specific workflow? And are there times when you have to step in manually?

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