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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%?

#541

Post by adriand »

mrwrong wrote: post #521
adriand wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Yes, I know this sounds ridiculous and over-the-top. in that case you should come with more data. tell us how you measured your productivity improvement. all you've said here is that it makes you feel good

Work that would have taken me 1-2 weeks to complete, I can now get done in 2-3 hours. That's not an exaggeration. I have another friend who is as all-in on this as me and he works in a company (I work for myself, as a solo contractor for clients), and he told me that he moved on to Q1 2026 projects because he'd completed all the work slated for 2025, weeks ahead of schedule. Meanwhile his colleagues are still wading through scrum meetings.

I realize that this all sounds kind of religious: you don't know what you're missing until you actually accept Jesus's love, or something along those lines. But you do have to kinda just go all-in to have this experience. I don't know what else to say about it.

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

#542

Post by rmnclmnt »

djmips wrote: post #270
rmnclmnt wrote: post #121

Can we also take into account the mental cost associates with building software? Because how I see it, managing output from agents is way more exhausting than doing it ourself. And obviously the cost of not upskilling in intricate technical details as much as before (aka staying at the high level perspective) will have to be paid at some point

It is pretty hard work huh! I was surprised. In my case, I was doing a personal project but in the end I felt a little crispy although the result was succesful.

Honestly now I only use agents for very narrow surgical scopes to avoid feeling numbed. It removed the fun of actually dreaming and building things

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

#543

Post by KellyCriterion »

9rx wrote: post #419
heavyset_go wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is "people will 3D print cars in their garage, manufacturing is over!" level of hype

More like "people will 3D print self-driving cars in their garage" level.

++1

LOL

Same as with "everybody will build their own custom apps for everything now" :-D

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

#544

Post by jollyllama »

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.

Between yours and GP's comments, I find echoes of my experience:

> 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.

> Granted that's because the program is incredibly poorly written

LLMs can't fix big, shitty legacy codebases. That is where most maintenance work (in terms of hours) is, and where it will remain.

I would take it one step further and argue that LLMs and vibe-coding will compound into more big, shitty legacy codebases over time, and therefore, in the long arc, nothing will really change.

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

#545

Post by efields »

adriand wrote: post #530
r_lee wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Currently three main projects. Two are Rails back-ends and React front-ends, so they are all Ruby, Typescript, Tailwind, etc. The third is more recent, it's an audio plugin built using the JUCE framework, it is all C++. This is the one that has been blowing my mind the most because I am an expert web developer, but the last time I wrote a line of C++ was 20 years ago, and I have zero DSP or math skills. What blows my…

I maintain a few rails apps and Claude Code has written 95% of the code for the last 4 months. I deploy regularly.

I make my own PRs then have Copilot review them. Sometimes it finds criticisms, and I copy and paste that chunk of critique into Claude Code, and it fixes it.

Treat the LLMs like junior devs that can lookup answers supernaturally fast. You still need to be mindful of their work. Doubtful even. Test, test, test.

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

#546

Post by beepbooptheory »

adriand wrote: post #541
mrwrong wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, I know this sounds ridiculous and over-the-top. in that case you should come with more data. tell us how you measured your productivity improvement. all you've said here is that it makes you feel good

Work that would have taken me 1-2 weeks to complete, I can now get done in 2-3 hours. That's not an exaggeration. I have another friend who is as all-in on this as me and he works in a company (I work for myself, as a solo contractor for clients), and he told me that he moved on to Q1 2026 projects because he'd completed all the work slated for 2025, weeks ahead of schedule. Meanwhile his colleagues are still wading…

My sympathies go out to the friend's coworkers. They are probably wading through a bunch of stuff right now, but given the context you have given us, its probably not "scrum meetings"..

I don't even care about the llm, I just want the confidence you have to assess that any given thing will take N weeks. You say 1-2 weeks.. thats like a big range! Something that "would" take 1 week takes ~2 hours, something that "would" take 2 weeks also takes ~2 hours. How does that even make sense? I wonder how long something that would of taken three weeks would take?

Do you still charge your clients the same?

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

#547

Post by kachapopopow »

honestly, my usage of AI is constantly evolving and sometimes I have days where I just don't use it at all, but it also allows me to do things I could never make myself do like realigning icons for 400+ models and also allows me to understand just enough of a subject to leave it behind and continue on my own.

AI has also probably saved me 100 hours of repetitive work at this point and completely elimitated the need to rely on other people working on time consuming configuration tasks and back-and-forward which used to stall work for me since I am the kind of person who will work for 20 hours until something is finished without losing that much in productivity.

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

#548

Post by KellyCriterion »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #284

I think the whole software industry has tried to obscure the fact that most companies who hire software engineers are writing exactly the same code as every other company . How many people here have written the same goddamn webapp at the last 3 companies they've been to? Anyone ever wonder why nobody just publishes blueprints to software and licenses that blueprint to a single engineer to customize? Because there's a…

>> infrastructure, monitoring, logging, metrics, VCS hosting, security scanning, QA Well, arent these the topics for what we have AI-managed infrastructure now? :-D LOL

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

#549

Post by jgeada »

Articles like this seem to keep highlighting a fundamental disconnect between what software teams really do vs what the people "managing" software teams a couple of layers above think those teams actually do.

The people up in the clouds think they have a full understanding of what the software is supposed to be, that they "own" the entire intent and specification in a few ambiguously worded requirements and some loose constraints and, being generous, a very incomplete understanding of the system dependencies. They see software teams as an expensive cost center, not as true the source of all their wealth and power.

The art of turning that into an actual software product is what good software teams do; I haven't yet seen anything that can automate that process away or even help all that much.

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

#550

Post by Volundr »

FTA

> I've had Claude Code write an entire unit/integration test suite in a few hours (300+ tests) for a fairly complex internal tool. This would take me, or many developers I know and respect, days to write by hand.

I have no problem believing that Claude generated 300 passing tests. I have a very hard time believing those tests were all well thought out, consise, actually testing the desired behavior while communicating to the next person or agent how the system under test is supposed to work. I'd give very good odds at least some of those tests are subtly testing themselves (ex mocking a function, calling said function, then asserting the mock was called). Many of them are probably also testing implementation details that were never intended to be part of the contract.

I'm not anti-AI, I use it regularly, but all of these articles about how crazy productive it is skip over the crazy amount of supervision it needs. Yes, it can spit out code fast, but unless your prepared to spend a significant chunk of that 'saved" time CAREFULLY (more carefully than with a human) reviewing code, you've accepted a big drop in quality.

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