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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%?

#581

Post by mrwrong »

stocksinsmocks wrote: post #577
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

Nobody had a robust, empirical metric of programmer productivity. Nobody. Ticket count, function points, LoC, and others tell you nothing about the fitness of the product. It’s all feels.

ok, but there's a spectrum between fully reproducible empirical evidence and divine revelation. I'm not convinced it's impossible to measure productivity in a meaningful way, even if it isn't perfect. it at least seems better to try than... whatever this is

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

#582

Post by no_wizard »

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…

If your work maps exceedingly well to the technology it is true, it goes much faster. Doubly so when you have enough experience and understanding of things to find its errors or suboptimal approaches and adjust it that much faster.

The second you get to a place where the mapping isn’t there though, it goes off rails quickly.

Not everyone programs in such a way that they may ever experience this but I have, as a Staff engineer at a large firm, run into this again and again.

It’s great for greenfield projects that follow CRUD patterns though.

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

#583

Post by coderatlarge »

mrwrong wrote: post #569
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…

this is just not a very interesting way to talk about technology. I'm glad it feels like a religious experience to you, I don't care about that. I care about reality

it seems to me if these things were real and repeatable there would be published traces that show the exact interactions that led to a specific output and the cost in time and money to get there.

do such things exist?

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

#584

Post by [deleted] »

digitalsushi wrote: post #570
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…

does anyone remember that episode of star trek tng where the kid is given a little laser engraver that carves a dolphin from a block of wood? and the kid is like "i didn't make this" and the teacher (who abducted him, ew) is like "yeah but it's what you wanted to make, the tool just guided you" so in 2026 we're going to get in trouble doing code "the old way", the pleasurable way, the way an artist connects with the…

[deleted]

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

#585

Post by MLgulabio »

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…

[dead]

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

#586

Post by piperswe »

kllrnohj wrote: post #553
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…

I’ve seen agents produce plenty of those tests, but recently I’ve seen them generate some actually decent unit tests that I wouldn’t have thought of myself. It’s a bit of a crapshoot

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

#587

Post by Espressosaurus »

jollyllama wrote: post #544
Jean-Papoulos wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 st…

Yeah. I've got some EE coworkers that are vibe coding their way through everything and nothing in the codebase is understandable.

We're going to have to go through another quality hangover I suspect.

But since people that have never coded are now coding and think it's the best thing ever the only way out is through.

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

#588

Post by stocksinsmocks »

lionkor wrote: post #519
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…

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…

I’m impressed by getting the output of at least a mediocre developer at less than 1% of the cost. Brute force is an underrated strategy. I’ve been having a great experience.

That developers in the Hacker News comment bin report experiences that align with their personal financial interests doesn’t really dissuade me.

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

#589

Post by overfeed »

robot-wrangler wrote: post #299
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…

Claims about agentic workflows are the new version of "works on my machine" and should be treated with skepticism if they cannot be committed to a repository and used by other people. Maybe parent is a galaxy-brained genius, or.. maybe they are just leaving work early and creating a huge mess for coworkers who now must stay late. Hard to say. But someone who isn't interested in automating/encoding processes for their…

> And someone who isn't interested in sharing productivity gains with coworkers is basically engaged in sabotage.

I'll have to vigorously dissent on this notion: we sell our labor to employers - not our souls. Our individual labor, contracts and remuneration are personalized. Our labor. Not some promise to maximize productivity - that's a job for middle and upper management.

Your employer sure as hell won't directly share 8x productivity gains with employees. The best they can offer is a once-off, 3-15% annual bonus (based on your subjective performance, not the aggregate), alternatively, if you have RSU/options, gains on your miniscule ownership fraction.

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

#590

Post by lomase »

efields wrote: post #545
adriand wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Can we see any of this software created by this amazing LLMs?
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