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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%?

#641

Post by rbalicki »

groby_b wrote: post #552
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…

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…

A git bisect where you can't easily check whether the feature is broken (because the testing step isn't easily described as code) would be killer

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

#642

Post by newsoftheday »

Jean-Papoulos wrote: post #486
loandbehold wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. I find Claude Code in particular is great at grokking old code bases and making changes to it. I work on one of those old code bases and my productivity increased 10x mostly due to Claude Code's ability to research large code bases, make sense of it, answer questions and making careful…

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.

I want to voice the same bad experience, tried Claude and several more actually. I could get AI to understand some things but it quickly went of the rails trying to comprehend larger complexities and its suggested changes would have been between worse to detrimental had I allowed them to be committed.

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

#643

Post by adammarples »

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…

One thing I've noticed is that Claude is so good at doing things that I've asked for, that later on I realise that I shouldn't have even been doing them because they're stupid or unnecessary but Claude was just cheerleading me on and emoji spamming tick marks so that I didn't realise there was very little purpose to the feature.

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

#644

Post by dlisboa »

jf22 wrote: post #639
dlisboa wrote: post #621

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A fancy CRUD app is still a CRUD app.

Yes, like a guided missile is a fancy firecracker.

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

#645

Post by skapadia »

Lich wrote: post #580
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…

Feeling the same. I’m guessing the folks getting good results are literally writing extremely detailed pseudocode by hand?! Like: Write a class Person who has members (int) age, (string) first name, (string) last name… But if you can write that detailed…don’t you know the code you want to write and how you should write it? Writing plain pseudo code feels more verbose.

But the AI coding agent can then ask you follow up questions, consider angles you may not have, and generate other artifacts like documentation, data generation and migration scripts, tests, CRUD APIs, all in context. If you can reliably do all that from plain pseudo code, that's way less verbose than having to write out every different representation of the same underlying concept, by hand.

Sure, some of that, like CRUD APIs, you can generate via templates as well. Heck, you can even have the coding agent generate the templates and the code that will process/compile them, or generate the code that generates the templates given a set of parameters.

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

#646

Post by ponector »

jonfw wrote: post #635
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…

For those surveys to mean anything (for or against AI), we'd have to have an effective measure of developer productivity

In my experience the productivity measured in created merge requests increased massively.

More merge requests because now the same senior developers are creating more bugs, 4x comparing to 2025. Same developers, same codebase but now with Cursor!

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

#647

Post by fauigerzigerk »

bonesss wrote: post #606
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…

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 notori…

I think you have to make a distinction between indvidual experience and claims about general truths.

If I know someone as an honest and serious professional, and they tell me that some tool has made them 5x or 10x more productive, then I'm willing to believe that the tool really did make a big difference for them and their specific work. I would be far more sceptical if they told me that a tool has made them 10% more productive.

I might have some questions about how much technical debt was accumulated in the process and how much learning did not happen that might be needed down the road. How much of that productivity gain was borrowed from the future?

But I wouldn't dismiss the immediate claims out of hand. I think this experience is relevant as a starting point for the science that's needed to make more general claims.

Also, let's not forget that almost none of the choices we make as software engineers are based on solid empirical science. I have looked at quite a few studies about productivity and defect rates in software engineering projects. The methodology is almost always dodgy and the conclusions seem anything but robust to me.

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

#648

Post by TemptedMuse »

dlisboa wrote: post #621
jf22 wrote: post #616

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That is just CRUD with buzzword soup around it.

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

#649

Post by [deleted] »

nine_k wrote: post #35

Had the cost of building custom software dropped 90%, we would be seeing a flurry of low-cost, decent-quality SaaS offering all over the marketplace, possibly undercutting some established players. From where I sit, right now, this does not seem to be the case. This is as if writing down the code is not the biggest problem, or the biggest time sink, of building software.

[deleted]

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

#650

Post by on_the_train »

margorczynski wrote: post #175
on_the_train wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You are in a sea of people telling you that they are developing software much quicker which ticks the required boxes But that's exactly not the case. Everyone is wondering what tf this is supposed to be for. People are vehemently against this tech, and yet it gets shoved down our throats although it's prohibitively expensive. Coding should be among the easiest problems to tackle, yet none of the big models can writ…

> Coding should be among the easiest problems to tackle, yet none of the big models can write basic "real" code. They break when things get more complex than pong. And they can't even write a single proper function with modern c++ templating stuff for example. This is simply false and ignorant

It's not, I tried just a week ago with all the popular models. When things get non trivial with fold expressions etc, they fail completely
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