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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%?

#551

Post by adriand »

beepbooptheory wrote: post #546
adriand wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "woul…

> They are probably wading through a bunch of stuff right now, but given the context you have given us, its probably not "scrum meetings"..

This made me laugh. Fair enough. ;)

In terms of the time estimations: if your point is that I don't have hard data to back up my assertions, you're absolutely correct. I was always terrible at estimating how long something would take. I'm still terrible at it. But I agree with the OP. I think the labour required is down 90%.

It does feel to me that we're getting into religious believer territory. There are those who have firsthand experience and are all-in (the believers), there are those who have firsthand experience and don't get it (the faithless), and there are those who haven't tried it (the atheists). It's hard to communicate across those divides, and each group's view of the others is essentially, "I don't understand you".

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

#552

Post by groby_b »

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…

You can go faster once you understand the domain reasonably well that you could have written it yourself. This allows you to write better designs, and steer LLMs in the right direction.

"Vibe coding" though is moving an ever growing pile of nonunderstanding and complexity in front of you, until you get stuck. (But it does work until you've amassed a big enough pile, so it's good for smaller tasks - and then suddenly extremely frustrating once you reach that threshold)

Can you go 10x? Depends. I haven't tried any really large project yet, but I can compress fairly large things that would've taken a week or two pre-LLM into a single lazy Sunday.

For larger projects, it's definitely useful for some tasks. ("Ingest the last 10k commits, tell me which ones are most likely to have broken this particular feature") - the trick is finding tasks where the win from the right answer is large, and the loss from the wrong one is small. It's more like running algorithmic trading on a decent edge than it is like coding :)

It definitely struggles to do successfully do fully agentic work on very large code bases. But... I've also not tried too much in that space yet, so take that with a grain of salt.

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

#553

Post by kllrnohj »

Volundr wrote: post #550

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 communic…

Anecdotes etc etc but the AI tests I've been sent to review have been absolute shit. Stuff like that just calling a function doesn't crash the program. No assertions other than "end of test method reached"

Yes sometimes those tests are necessary, but it seemed to just do it everywhere because it made the code coverage percentage go up. Even though it was useless.

I have also had great experiences with AI cranking out straightforward boilerplate or asking C++ template metaprogramming questions. It's not all negative. But net-net it feels like it takes more work in total to use AI as you have to learn to recognize when it just won't handle the task, which can happen a lot. And you need to keep up with what it did enough to be able to take over. And reading code is harder than writing it.

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

#554

Post by klank4 »

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

What's worked best with Gemini such I made a DSL that transpiles to C with CUDA support to train small models in about 3 hours... (all programs must run against an image data set, must only generate embeddings)

Do not; vibe code from top down (ex. Make me a UI with React, with these buttons and these behaviors to each button)

Do not; chat casually with it. (ex. I think it would look better if the button was green)

Do; constrain phrasing to the next data transform goal (ex. You must add a function to change all words that start with lowercase to start with uppercase)

Do; vibe code bottom up (ex. You must generate a file with a function to open a plaintext file and appropriate tests; now you must add a function to count all words that begin with "f")

Do; stick to must/should/may (ex. You must extend the code with this next function)

Do; constrain it to mathematical abstractions (ex. sys prompt: You must not use loops, you must only use recursion and functional paradigms. You must not make up abstractions and stick to mathematical objects and known algorithms)

Do; constrain it to one file per type and function. This makes it quick to review, regenerate only what needs to change.

Using those patterns, Gemini 2.5 and 3 have cranked out banging code with little wandering off in the weeds and hallucinating.

Programming has been mired in made up semantics of the individual coder for the luls, to create mystique and obfuscate the truth to ensure job security; end of the day it's matrix math and state sync between memory and display.

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

#555

Post by JeremyNT »

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? At this point while I'm not thrilled about the idea of just "vibe coding" all the time, I'm fine with facing reality.

Below is based on my experience using (currently) mostly GPT-5 with open source code assistants.

For a new project with straightforward functionality? I think you (and "you" being "basically anybody who can code at all") can probably manage to go 10x the pace of a junior engineer of yesteryear.

Things get a lot trickier when you have complex business logic to express and backwards compatibility to maintain in an existing codebase. Writing out these kinds of requirements in natural language is its own skillset (which can be developed), and this process takes time in and of itself.

The more confusing the requirements, the more error prone the process becomes though. The model can do things "correctly" but oops maybe you forgot something in your description, and now the whole thing will be wrong. And the fact that you didn't write the code means that you missed out on your opportunity to fix / think about stuff in the first pass of implementation (i.e. you need to seriously review stuff, which also slow you down).

Sometimes iterating over English instructions will take longer than just writing/expressing things in code from the start. But sometimes it will be a lot faster too.

Basically the easy stuff is way easier but the more complex stuff is still going to require a lot of hand holding and a lot of manual review.

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

#556

Post by rkozik1989 »

Volundr wrote: post #550

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 communic…

The benefit of having a team of QA engineers create tests is their differing perspectives, so with LLMs being trained to act like affirmation engines you have to wonder how that impacts the test cases it creates. Its the problem of LLMs being miserable at critiques manifesting itself in a different way.

However, in saying that, I am by no means an AI hater, but rather I just want models to be better than they currently are. I am tired of the tech demos and benchmark stats that don't really mean much aside from impressing someone who's not in a critical thinking mindset.

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

#557

Post by thingortwo »

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…

I'm not dismissive of AI but I still do the whole "copy and paste" into chatbot approach simply because I use it as a boilerplate or research tool where the intent or workflows are already established and is targeted so it doesn't really matter how it writes since I can "parse" it's output quickly kind like an advance version of vscode saved snippet templates. I never use it do software design for me since this actually requires you understanding the problem but I can still use it to research existing stuff which is pretty cool.

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

#558

Post by jf22 »

Volundr wrote: post #550

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 communic…

> you've accepted a big drop in quality.

Right, but you do it in a 10th of the time.

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

#559

Post by coffeefirst »

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…

That's my finding as well. The smaller the chunk, the better, and it saves me 5m here and an hour there. These really add up.

This is cool. It's extra cool on annoying things like "fix my types" or "find the syntax error" or "give me the flags for ffmpeg to do exactly this."

If I ever meet someone who drank the koolaid and wants to show me their process, I'm happy to see it. But I've tried enough to believe my own eyes, and when I see open source contributors I respect demo their methods, they spend enough time and energy either waiting on the machine and trying to keep it on the rails that, yes this is harder, but it does not appear to be faster.

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

#560

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

pdimitar wrote: post #470
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…

Did he agree?

Yep and he agreed to let us verify that the code he installed on our servers were built from source and the same code was in escrow at Green Mountain.

The terms weren’t as onerous as it sounds. It was basically if he stopped supporting it or got hit by a bus, we would get access.

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