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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%?

#601

Post by jakebasile »

adriand wrote: post #551
beepbooptheory wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

So, you say that AI has made you "ridiculously faster", but then admit you've always been terrible at estimating how long something would take?

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

#602

Post by bagacrap »

jf22 wrote: post #558
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.

I mean, just say you view unit testing as nothing more than a checkbox.

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

#603

Post by onraglanroad »

dboreham wrote: post #139
torben-friis wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you noticed how it's never "I got this awesome code!"? It's always "I got good code, trust me". People say their prompts are good, awesome code is being generated, it solved a month's worth of work in a minute. Nobody comes with receipts.

I keep seeing posts like this so I decided to video record all my LLM coding sessions and post them on YouTube. Early days, I only had the idea on Saturday.

Possibly it would have been a good idea to include a link to the channel?

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

#605

Post by jatora »

y0eswddl wrote: post #595
KallDrexx wrote: post #564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

your google-fu isnt failing. there's simply only a couple large studies on this, and of those, zero that have a useful methodology.

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

#606

Post by bonesss »

adriand wrote: post #551
beepbooptheory wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

Religions are about faith, faith is belief in the absence of evidence. Engineering output is tangible and measurable, objectively verifiable and readily quantifiable (both locally and in terms of profits). Full evidence, testable assertions, no faith required.

Here we have claims of objective results, but also admissions we’re not even tracking estimations and are terrible at making them when we do. People are notoriously bad at estimating actual time spent versus output, particularly when dealing with unwanted work. We’re missing the fundamental criteria of assessment, and there are known biases unaccounted for.

Output in LOC has never been the issue, copy and paste handles that just fine. TCO and holistic velocity after a few years is a separate matter. Masterful orchestration of agents could include estimation and tracking tasks with minimal overhead. That’s not what we’re seeing though…

Someone who has even a 20% better method for deck construction is gonna show me some timetables, some billed projects, and a very fancy new car. If accepting Mothra as my lord and saviour is a prerequisite to pierce an otherwise impenetrable veil of ontological obfuscation in order to see the unseeable? That deck might not be as cheap as it sounds, one way or the other.

I’m getting a nice learning and productivity bump from LLMs, there are incredible capabilities available. But premature optimization is still premature, and claims of silver bullets are yet to be demonstrated.

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

#607

Post by jollyllama »

Espressosaurus wrote: post #587
jollyllama wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It has ever been thus. There are multi-million dollar businesses propped up by .NET applications on a foundation of shunted-around files, and at best, SQL used as APIs/queues. "Working" code is, in the long run, a liability outside the hands of those doing real engineering.

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

#608

Post by bagacrap »

mountainriver wrote: post #176
vb-8448 wrote: post #101

It's not just about "building" ... who is going to maintain all this new sub-par code pushed to production every day? Who is going to patch all bugs, edge cases and security vulnerabilities?

I hear this argument all the time but it seems to leave out code reviews

like a vibe coder knows what a code review is, or an LLM knows how to take feedback

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

#609

Post by jonfw »

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…

If you have not started working on a new codebase while adopting AI, it may be harder to realize the gains.

I switched jobs somewhat recently. At my previous job, where I was on the codebase for years, I knew where the changes should be and what they should look like. So I tried to jump directly to implementation with the AI because I didn't need much help planning and the AI got confused and did an awful job.

In a new codebase, where I had no idea how things are structured, I started the process by using AI to understand where the relevant code is, the call hierarchies and side effects, etc.

I have found by using the AI to conduct the initial investigation, it was then very easy to get the AI to generate an effective spec, and then it was relatively easy to get the AI to generate the code to that spec. That flow works much better than trying to one shot implementation

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

#610

Post by Deegy »

timeon wrote: post #594
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…

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

Extensive tailwind training data in the models. Sure there's something more efficient but it's just safer to let the model leverage what it was trained on.
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