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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%?

#661

Post by a_rana »

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…

Hard disagree! Review is still an important part but more and more, I find myself agreeing with the LLM generated changes ~90% of the time.

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

#662

Post by pdimitar »

klank4 wrote: post #554
mrwrong wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

What's worked best with Gemini such I made a DSL that transpiles to C with CUDA support to train small models in about 3 hours... (all programs must run against an image data set, must only generate embeddings) Do not; vibe code from top down (ex. Make me a UI with React, with these buttons and these behaviors to each button) Do not; chat casually with it. (ex. I think it would look better if the button was green) Do…

Awesome comment, thank you. No idea why it was flagged as dead. Vouched for it to not be.

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

#663

Post by HDThoreaun »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #372
crabmusket wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they saved money, as they said it did, then... yes?

Saved money in the short term. But maintenance costs money. Amazon has all of the money in the world and could easily duplicate everything Salesforce does. Yet they use Salesforce internally.

SAAS costs money too. Simple software is now 90% cheaper to build, so it makes less sense to outsource all your software needs.

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

#664

Post by TemptedMuse »

instig007 wrote: post #659
TemptedMuse wrote: post #651

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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:…

Banking software is critical, but guess what, most software engineers are not writing banking software. I never said no software engineers write critical code. Heck I'd argue most at some point in their career will write something that needs to be as bug free as possible... at some point in their careers.

My point is that for most software engineering getting a product out is more important that a super high quality bar that slows everything down.

If you are writing banking software or flight control systems please do it with care, if you are making some React based recipe website or something I don't really care (99% of software engineering falls into this latter category in my opinion).

Software engineers need to get over themselves a bit, AI really exposed how many were just getting by making repetitive junk and thinking they were special.

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

#665

Post by instig007 »

TemptedMuse wrote: post #664
instig007 wrote: post #659

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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:…

Banking software is critical, but guess what, most software engineers are not writing banking software. I never said no software engineers write critical code. Heck I'd argue most at some point in their career will write something that needs to be as bug free as possible... at some point in their careers. My point is that for most software engineering getting a product out is more important that a super high quality…

> most software engineers are not writing banking software

Many software engineers write software for people who won't like the idea that their request/case can be ignored/failed/lost, when expressed openly on the front page of your business offering. Are bookings important enough? Are gifts for significant events important? Maybe you're okay with losing my code commits every once in a while, I don't know. And I'm not sure why you think it's okay to spread this bad management idea of "not valuable or critical enough" among engineers who should know better and who should keep sources of bad ideas at bay when it comes to software quality in general.

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

#666

Post by welshwelsh »

jf22 wrote: post #618
bagacrap wrote: post #602

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I don't know why you'd think that. 200 decent unit tests are better than zero unit tests.

The main benefit of writing tests is that is forces the developer to think about what they just wrote and what it is supposed to do. I often will find bugs while writing tests.

I've worked on projects with 2,000+ unit tests that are essentially useless, often fail when nothing is wrong, and rarely detect actual bugs. It is absolutely worse than having 0 tests. This is common when developers write tests to satisfy code coverage metrics, instead of in an effort to make sure their code works properly.

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

#667

Post by loandbehold »

curiousgal wrote: post #484
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 honestly don't know what code bases you guys are working with, for me I tried it with a large quant library (C++ 97) in an effort to modernize it and so far it's been nothing hit a waste of time. Similarly for a medium sized python quant codebase (3.6) trying to port it to 3.12, and it's also been a headache.

Email me loandbehold0 at proton.me with details of what you are trying to do. I don't have quantitative finance experience but I can give it a shot.

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

#668

Post by thfuran »

nasmorn wrote: post #657
mrwrong wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

That's not a very convincing argument. Even if you can do 10x the work, that doesn't necessarily mean you can easily find customers ready to pay 5x the hourly rate.

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

#669

Post by loandbehold »

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.

If you like I can try to help you getting Claude Code to handle your incredibly poorly written program. loandbehold0 at proton.me

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

#670

Post by welshwelsh »

stocksinsmocks wrote: post #598
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 a…

Neither. Tests should be written by developers only when it saves them time. The cost of writing them should be negative.

Instead of writing hundreds of useless tests so that the code coverage report shows high numbers, it is better to write a couple dozen tests based on business needs and code complexity.

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