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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%?

#591

Post by timeon »

WesleyJohnson wrote: post #571
adriand wrote: post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 th…

Not to pick apart your analogy, but asserting that atheists haven't tried religion is misinformed.

Brain-rot can be associated with heavy LLM usage.

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

#592

Post by IshKebab »

mrwrong wrote: post #566
IshKebab wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but on the other hand there are plenty of human programmers that are bad at understanding complexity, make dumb mistakes, and write terrible code. Is there something fundamentally different about their brains to mine? I don't think so. They just aren't as good - not enough experience, or not enough neurons in the right places or whatever it is that makes some humans better at things than others. So maybe there i…

this whole analogy is so tired. "LLMs are stupid, but some humans are stupid too, therefore LLMs can be smart as well". let's put aside the obvious bad logic and think for one second about WHY some people are better than others at certain tasks. it is always because they have lots of practice and learned from their experiences. something LLM categorically cannot do

Wow so much wrong in such a short comment.

> LLMs are stupid, but some humans are stupid too, therefore LLMs can be smart as well

Not what I said. The correct logic is "LLMs are stupid, but that doesn't prove that they MUST ALWAYS be stupid, in the same way that the existence of stupid people doesn't prove that ALL people are stupid".

> let's put aside the obvious bad logic

Please.

> WHY some people are better than others at certain tasks. it is always because they have lots of practice and learned from their experiences.

What? No it isn't. It's partly because they have lots of practice and learned from experience. But it's also partly natural talent.

> something LLM categorically cannot do

There's literally a step called "training". What do you think that is?

The difference is that LLMs have a distinct off-line training step and can't learn after that. Kind of like the Memento guy. Does that completely rule out smart LLMs? Too early to tell I think.

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

#593

Post by TemptedMuse »

WesleyJohnson wrote: post #575
jf22 wrote: post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you've accepted a big drop in quality. Right, but you do it in a 10th of the time.

So you're openly saying you're fine with quantity over quality.... in software engineering? That's fine for a MVP, maybe, but nothing beyond on that IMHO unless they're throw away scripts. "Houston, we have a problem." "Yeah, but we did it in a 10th of the time"

Here is the thing, most software engineers are not designing rockets, they are making basic CRUD apps. If there is a minor defect it can be caught and corrected without much issue. Our jobs are a lot less "critical infrastructure" than a lot of software engineers will allow their egos to accept.

Sure if you are making some medical surgery robot do it right, but if you are making a website the recommends wine pairings who cares if one of the buttons has a weird animation bug that doesn't even get noticed for a couple of years.

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

#594

Post by timeon »

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…

Why do you need to use Tailwind if the code is generated? Can't there be something more efficient?

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

#595

Post by y0eswddl »

KallDrexx wrote: post #564
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…

EVERY DX survey that comes out (surveying over 20k developers) says the exact same thing. Staff engineers get the most time savings out of AI tools, and their weekly time savings is 4.4 hours for heavy AI users. That's a little more than 10% productivity, so not anywhere close to 10x. What's more telling about the survey results is they are also consistent in their findings between heavy and light users of AI. Staff…

do you have a link to the latest survey? my google-fu is failing me at the moment

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

#596

Post by Ologn »

I am on the free tier of Gemini 3. With some intervention on my part, I got it to build, in Emacs Lisp, a primitive-recursive function for determining if a number is prime (by mu-recursive I mean a function built from the building blocks of a constant, successor and projection function, as well as a primitive recursive function and compositional function/macro). I was impressed, as previous models (including Anthropic and OpenAI) could not do this.

For the past few days I asked it to built a mu-recursive Ackermann function in Emacs Lisp (built on the primitive-recursive functions/operators, plus an extra operator - minimization). I said that the prime detector function it already built should be able to use the same functions/operators, and to rewrite code if necessary.

So far it has been unable to do this. If I thought it could but was stumbling over Emacs Lisp I might ask it to try in Scheme or Common Lisp or some other language. It's possible I'll get it to work in the time I have allotted from my daily free tier, but I have had no success so far. I am also starting with inputs to the Ackermann function of 0,0 - 0,1 - 1,0 - 1,1 to not overburden the system but it can't even handle 0, 0. Also it tries to redefine the Emacs Lisp keyword "and", which Emacs hiccups on.

A year ago LLMs were stumbling over Leetcode and Project Euler functions I was asking it to make. They seem to have gotten a little better, and I'm impressed Gemini 3 can handle, with help, primitive recursive functions in Emacs Lisp. Doesn't seem to be able to handle mu-recursive functions with minimization yet though. The trivial, toy implementations of these things. Also as I said, it tried to redefine "and" as well, which Emacs Lisp fell over on.

So it's a helpful helper and tool, but definitely not ready to hand things over to. As the saying goes, the first 90% of the code takes 90% of the time, and the last 10% of the code takes the other 90% of the time. Or the other saying - it's harder to find bugs than write code, so if you're coding at peak mental capacity, finding bugs becomes impossible. It does have its uses though, and has been getting better.

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

#597

Post by klysm »

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…

Very similar experience here. I have not once managed to get an LLM to generate good tests, even for very simple code. It generally writes tautologies that will pass with high confidence.

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

#598

Post by stocksinsmocks »

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…

Which is the better value:

Hundreds of tests that were written basically for free in a few minutes even though a lot of them are kind of dumb?

Or hundreds of tests that were written for a five figure sum that took weeks or months, and only some of them are kind of dumb?

If you’re just thinking of code as the end in and of itself, then of course, the handcrafted artisanal product is better. If you think of code like an owner, an incidental expense towards solving a problem that has value, then cheap and disposable wins every time. We can throw our hands up about “quality“ and all that, but that baby was thrown out with the bathwater a very, very long time ago. The modern Web is slower than the older web. Desktop applications are just web browsers. Enterprise software barely works. Windows 11 happened. I don’t think anybody even bothers to scrutinize their dependency chains except for, I don’t know, like maybe missile guidance or something. And I just want to say Claude is not responsible for any of this. You humans are.

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

#599

Post by 9rx »

pdimitar wrote: post #477
9rx wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the money in the world would not be sufficient to cover the cost of seeing human developers duplicate Salesforce on any reasonable time scale. There are simply not enough developers in existence to see that happen, driving the cost towards infinity. The idea here, however, is that machine developers are changing the calculus. If you need more machine developers it takes, what, a few days to produce the necessary…

I like your analysis but it seems to imply that at one point we can produce near-infinite amount of software and that this will be welcome. It will not be. Even in this fairly broken state of affairs we are currently in, most non-technical people I spoke to already say that they have too much apps and too much machines with "intelligent" features. And IMO when we have machines that can crank out a complete-but-better…

> I like your analysis but it seems to imply that at one point we can produce near-infinite amount of software and that this will be welcome.

It implies that there will be no need to share libraries (which is said including things like networked SaaS services). You can have your legions of machine developers create all the code you need.

Let's face it, sharing code sucks for a long list of reasons. We accept it because it is a significantly better value proposition than putting human labor into duplicating efforts, but if that effort diminishes to almost nothing, things start to change in a lot of cases. There are still obvious exceptions, of course. You probably couldn't throw your machine developers at building a Stripe clone. It's far more about human relationships than code. But bingo card creator?

It says nothing about creating software nobody wants or needs.

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

#600

Post by dlisboa »

TemptedMuse wrote: post #593
WesleyJohnson wrote: post #575

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you're openly saying you're fine with quantity over quality.... in software engineering? That's fine for a MVP, maybe, but nothing beyond on that IMHO unless they're throw away scripts. "Houston, we have a problem." "Yeah, but we did it in a 10th of the time"

Here is the thing, most software engineers are not designing rockets, they are making basic CRUD apps. If there is a minor defect it can be caught and corrected without much issue. Our jobs are a lot less "critical infrastructure" than a lot of software engineers will allow their egos to accept. Sure if you are making some medical surgery robot do it right, but if you are making a website the recommends wine pairings…

I think I'm "most" engineers and I haven't ever worked on something that was "just" a CRUD app. Having a DB behind your web app doesn't make it "just" a CRUD.

It's really overestimated how many simple apps exist.

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