Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?

martinalderson.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

651–660 of 744 posts

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

#651

Post by TemptedMuse »

dlisboa wrote: post #644
jf22 wrote: post #639

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A fancy CRUD app is still a CRUD app.

Yes, like a guided missile is a fancy firecracker.

Not to call you out but this is exactly what I meant when I said software engineers have egos that will not let them accept that they are not designing critical stuff.

Comparing your cloud based CRUD app to a missile is a perfect illustration. There is no dishonor in admitting that our stuff isn't going to kill anyone if there is a bug. Don't write bad code, but also sometimes just getting something out the door is much better than perfect quality (bird in the hand and all that).

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

#652

Post by dlisboa »

TemptedMuse wrote: post #651
dlisboa wrote: post #644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, like a guided missile is a fancy firecracker.

Not to call you out but this is exactly what I meant when I said software engineers have egos that will not let them accept that they are not designing critical stuff. Comparing your cloud based CRUD app to a missile is a perfect illustration. There is no dishonor in admitting that our stuff isn't going to kill anyone if there is a bug. Don't write bad code, but also sometimes just getting something out the door is m…

Not to call you out either but it seems you have really no idea what a basic CRUD app is. Which is fine, I guess not everyone likes to reads the base definitions of these things. It's clear I replied to the wrong person as we don't have a shared understanding of complexity.

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

#653

Post by beepbooptheory »

adriand wrote: post #640
bonesss wrote: post #606

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Here's an example from this morning. At 10:00 am, a colleague created a ticket with an idea for the music plugin I'm working on: wouldn't it be cool if we could use nod detection (head tracking) to trigger recording? That way, musicians who use our app wouldn't need a foot switch (as a musician, you often have your hands occupied). Yes, that would be cool. An hour later, I shipped a release build with that feature fu…

Just having a 'count-in' type feature for recording would be much much more useful. Head nodding is something I do all the time anyway as a musician :).

I don't know what your user makeup is like, but shipping a CV feature same day sounds so potentially disastrous.. There are so many things I would think you would at least want to test, or even just consider with the kind of user emapthy we all should practice.

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

#654

Post by camdenreslink »

Deegy wrote: post #610
timeon wrote: post #594

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Surely there is an order of magnitude more training data on plain CSS than tailwind, right?

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

#655

Post by colechristensen »

impjohn wrote: post #474
colechristensen wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>not reliable enough to use blindly I've been building things with Claude while looking at say less than 5% of the code it produces. What I've built are tools I want to use myself and... well they work. So somebody can say that I can't do it, but on the other hand I've wanted to build several kinds of ducks and what I've built look like ducks and quack like ducks so... I've found it's a lot better at evaluating code…

>then tell it to give you the top 10 things wrong with the code, then tell it to fix the five of them that are valid and important. I would be cautious of this. I've tried this multiple times and often it produces very subtle bugs. Sometimes the code is not bad enough to have 5 defects with it, but it will comply, and change things that don't need to. You will find out in prod at some point.

To be clear, I'm instructing it to generate a list of issues for me. I then decide if anything on that list is worth fixing (or is an issue at all, etc.)

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

#656

Post by Izkata »

ponector wrote: post #646
jonfw wrote: post #635

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Lines of code changed would be a high one as well, though that's already well-known as a bad measure.

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

#657

Post by nasmorn »

mrwrong wrote: post #521
adriand wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Like, is there truly an agentic way to go 10x or is there some catch? Yes. I think it’s practice. I know this sounds ridiculous, but I feel like I have reached a kind of mind meld state with my AI tooling, specifically Claude Code. I am not really consciously aware of having learned anything related to these processes, but I have been all in on this since ChatGPT, and I honestly think my brain has been rewired in a…

> 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

Just as an aside I also think I am way more productive now but a really convincing datapoint would be someone who does project work and now has 5x the hourly rate they had last year. If there are not plenty of people like this, it cannot be 10x

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

#658

Post by [deleted] »

theshrike79 wrote: post #503
liampulles wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the working world, a lot of the time what matters is getting results, not writing 'perfect' code the way software engineers would like to. But you do recognize that one's ability to speedily implement features is dependent on the present quality of a codebase, right? Being a serious practitioner here means balancing active feature development with active tending to the codebase to keep it in a reasonable state,…

To be blunt and a bit nihilistic: I get paid to ship features. Client wants a feature EoW, they get it EoW, they're not paying for a week of extra work for the "quality codebase" feature. But the good thing is that we've had objective and automated tooling for quality checks for code. We used to use them for humans, but now we apply the same tools for AI. Good unit testing practices, exhaustive linters, .editorconfig…

[deleted]

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

#659

Post by instig007 »

TemptedMuse wrote: post #651
dlisboa wrote: post #644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, like a guided missile is a fancy firecracker.

Not to call you out but this is exactly what I meant when I said software engineers have egos that will not let them accept that they are not designing critical stuff. Comparing your cloud based CRUD app to a missile is a perfect illustration. There is no dishonor in admitting that our stuff isn't going to kill anyone if there is a bug. Don't write bad code, but also sometimes just getting something out the door is m…

> software engineers have egos that will not let them accept that they are not designing critical stuff

> Don't write bad code, but also sometimes just getting something out the door is much better than perfect quality (bird in the hand and all that).

Your bank account can be represented as a CR app, it's two letters short of CRUD, but it doesn't make it simple or simpler in any sense of the words.

Now the question: how much are you tolerant to bugs in your bank account? How often can they happen before you complain?

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

#660

Post by HDThoreaun »

dominotw wrote: post #619
jonfw wrote: post #609

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 n…

gp clearly said they use ai to lookup/explain stuff. they could do the same with local codebase. not sure what you are trying to say.

GP said they were doing vibe coding and trying to get the ai to do one shots. Thats the worst way to use these tools. AI coding agents work best when you generally know what you want the output to look like but dont want to waste time writing that output
Post reply on HN