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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%?

#621

Post by dlisboa »

jf22 wrote: post #616
dlisboa wrote: post #600

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What kind of apps do you work on?

Regular SaaS products of different kinds, cloud software, hosting software, etc. Really representative of most of the Web-enabled software out there.

For every one of them there has been an almost negligible amount of CRUD code, the meat of every one of those apps was very specific business logic. Some were also heavy on the frontend with equal amount of complexity on the backend. As a senior/staff level engineer you also have dive into other things like platform enablement, internal tooling, background jobs and data wrangling, distributed architectures, etc. which are even farther from CRUD.

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

#622

Post by arduinomancer »

adam_patarino wrote: post #514

I feel like people who write articles like this have never worked at big companies. My wife works at Shutterstock, first as a SWE, now as a product manager. Most of their tasks involve small changes in 5 different systems. Sometimes in places like Salesforce. A simple ask can be profoundly complicated. AI has certainly made grokking, and code changes easier. But the real cost of building has not been reduced 90%. Not…

These articles act like creating new demo apps or isolated tools is what software development is all about

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

#623

Post by trollbridge »

rsynnott wrote: post #466
trollbridge wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well said. The cost of building a CRUD has dropped 90%. The open question is why people needed fancy AI tools like Claude to write CRUDs in the first place. These kind of tasks ought to be have been automated a long time ago.

> These kind of tasks ought to be have been automated a long time ago They have been, repeatedly, since the 70s. See dBase, Clipper, Microsoft Access, Hypercard, Ruby on Rails, stretching Wordpress to within an inch of its life, all manner of "no-code" things... And, honestly, Excel. People do all manner of terrifying things with Excel, and it is unquestionably the most successful, and arguably the _only_ successful,…

Excel and Google Sheets are indeed where most non-programmers frequently come the closest to programming and actually create useful apps for themselves.

So what’s interesting is that Copilot is basically useless for this task, as is Gemini. How is Microsoft messing up this badly?

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

#624

Post by onraglanroad »

turtletontine wrote: post #315
kalx wrote: post #308

Let’s say you’re right. Do we still want to, though? I mean. At some point we will no longer have the skill to babysit the AI agent.

When the LLM code bases are too complex for the humans on deck to understand and debug… that sounds like the turning point when companies go back to real developers IMO. Any serious mission critical code needs knowledgeable humans on deck who can leap into again when s** hits the fan, put out fires and patch critical bugs.

Not if you can have the AI rewrite your entire stack in 5 minutes and you just deploy that. CR/CD ftw! (continuous rewrite/continuous deployment)

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

#625

Post by arduinomancer »

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…

Not everyone is building web apps/web services

The more niche the thing you’re working on the worse results I’ve found these tools to give

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

#626

Post by arduinomancer »

urxvtcd wrote: post #567

If AI is such a competitive advantage, why are AI companies even trying to sell it? Wouldn't it bring more money to use a bleeding edge internal model and just vibe a couple of facebooks at the fraction of the cost and profit like crazy?

Every time I see an article like this I ask the same question: show me the money?

If it’s so good why hasn’t it made you rich?

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

#627

Post by ewoodrich »

DrewADesign wrote: post #301

As I said in a previous post: I think the 90/90 rule comes into play. We all know Tom Cargill quote (even if we’ve never seen it attributed): The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time. It feels like a gigantic win when it carves through that first 90%… like, “wow, I’m almost…

Fully agreed, aligns perfectly with my experience hitting the 95% done wall on a solo contract project recently. I still do the majority of work using agentic tools but the multiplier effect feeling evaporated at a certain point as the accumulated tech debt, complexity and scope creep enabled by how “easy” features felt with Claude Code/Codex early on finally caught up to me.

I (probably) still would have used CC heavily with benefit of hindsight but with a view that every seemingly “trivial” feature CC adds in the greenfield stage to be radioactive tech debt as the pile grows over time. Until reaching the point where CC starts being unable to comprehend its own work and I have to plan out tedious large scale refactors to get the codebase into a state approaching long term maintainability.

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

#628

Post by newsoftheday »

> 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.

What was the value add of those tests, when I tried this, AI would often re-write the code to make match its poorly written test.

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

#629

Post by trollbridge »

raxxorraxor wrote: post #449
trollbridge wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well said. The cost of building a CRUD has dropped 90%. The open question is why people needed fancy AI tools like Claude to write CRUDs in the first place. These kind of tasks ought to be have been automated a long time ago.

CRUD as a concept is flawed. It is more or less any computational system with input -> process -> output. Just as this abstract system can have any complexity, the same is true for any CRUD app. You don't need Claude to write it. But you cannot generate solid web forms with the same speed. What usually would have taken you a few hours is now solved in much less time. I doubt software will get cheaper though, requirem…

If I wanted to make a crud, I’d whip up my own little framework first (a few hours) and then cranking out forms would be almost trivial.

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

#630

Post by misja111 »

> I've had Claude Code write an entire unit/integration test suite in a few hours (300+ tests) for a fairly complex internal tool.

And what do you have then? 300 tests that test the behavior that's exposed by the implementations of the api. Are they useful? Probably some are, probably some are not. The ones that are not will just be clutter and maintenance overhead. Plus, there will be lots of use-cases for which you need to look a little deeper than just the api implementation, which are now not covered. And those kind of tests, tests that test real business use cases, are by far the most useful ones if you want to catch regressions.

So if your goal is to display some nice test coverage metrics on SonarQube or whatever, making your CTO happy, yes AI will help you enormously. But if your goal is to speed up development of useful test cases, less so. You will still gain from AI, but nowhere near 90%.

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