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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%?

#691

Post by DrewADesign »

adammarples wrote: post #643
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.

Yeah once you start working at the feature level, you’re into product design, and that’s an entirely different realm of working that, IMO, shouldn’t even involve code. Even higher-level software design —e.g. broad stroke architecture like figuring out your data model and how it will be accessed— is better off being done before any significant amount of code gets written. Claude, et al will happily walk you straight off a cliff if you ask it to, and not having that stuff sketched out ahead of time is a most efficient way of accidentally doing that.

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

#692

Post by DrewADesign »

ewoodrich wrote: post #627
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 hea…

It’s always tempting to start writing code before you really know what you’re going to build because it’s so satisfying and exciting to see an idea take shape. I know I’ve had more than one or two projects where I started writing before I understood the shape of the problem I was solving and ended up a few hours into the project with a useless pile of stupid. It seems like LLMs can lead you much further down that road because it just seems so magically productive.

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

#693

Post by DrewADesign »

saikia81 wrote: post #451
janalsncm wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I think the more your job demands correctness in novel scenarios the less impressed you are with these shiny demos. I encourage anyone to pause the demo once the thing is generated and stare at what it did. Is it genuinely correct and impressive? Are you impressed because it made a thing generally shaped like what you expected, or because it would be genuinely impressive (or even adequate) if a person did it?

you are right, but the inverse doesn't have to be. There is a factor that could make the work so cheap, that people don't care about the quality anymore.

The only way that state would be sustainable is if we suddenly solved code vulnerabilities, or the damage they cause.

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

#694

Post by maddmann »

jatora wrote: post #605
y0eswddl wrote: post #595

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think there is going to be 2-3 year lag in understanding how llms actually impact developer productivity. There are way too many balls in the air, and anyone claiming specific numbers on productivity increase is likely very very wrong.

For example citing staff engineers as an example will have a bias: they have years of traditional training and are obviously not representative of software engineers in general.

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

#695

Post by wilsonnb3 »

adriand wrote: post #541
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

Work that would have taken me 1-2 weeks to complete, I can now get done in 2-3 hours. That's not an exaggeration. I have another friend who is as all-in on this as me and he works in a company (I work for myself, as a solo contractor for clients), and he told me that he moved on to Q1 2026 projects because he'd completed all the work slated for 2025, weeks ahead of schedule. Meanwhile his colleagues are still wading…

Assuming 40 hours a week of work time, you’re claiming a ~25x speed up, which is laughably absurd to me.

It will take you 2.5 months to accomplish what would have taken you five years, that is the kind of productivity increase you’re describing.

It doesn’t pass the smell test. I’m not sure that going from assembly to python would even have such a ludicrous productivity enhancement.

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

#696

Post by burnerRhodov2 »

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.

from my perspective, this is exactly where we are. Have you ever watched starter story? There's hundreds of people with 5,6+ apps making 100k+ MRR. The VC model is broken because of it.

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

#697

Post by dent9 »

newsoftheday wrote: post #633
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. But I haven’t had this much fun writing software since my 20s. But...you're not writing it. The culmination of many sites, many people, Stack Overflow, etc. all wrote it through the filtering mechanism being called AI. You didn't write a damn thing.

Lol that's like saying that because you found the solution on stack overflow you didn't write the program

News flash buddy: YOU never wrote any code yourself either. Literally every single line of code you've ever committed to a repo was first written by someone else and you just copied it and modified it a little.

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

#698

Post by dent9 »

r_lee wrote: post #507
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…

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…

Agentic AI is a pretty huge scam. Every organization worth it's salt has so many IAM protections in place that an AI developer is useless because you can't give it SSO and OIDC credentials to access the company resources. And no IT team will ever let it. So all these folks trying to convince us that AI will ever deploy anything useful are lying their butts off; IT won't even let their own developers deploy anything why would an AI be treated any differently?

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

#699

Post by BobbyJo »

paulddraper wrote: post #229
BobbyJo wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stock prices down or revenue down? The former would do very little to support your point.

Stock prices. The latter would do very little to support my point, as it doesn't consider future growth trends.

Your point was that "they are being replaced by..." not "The market expects them to be replaced by...". The former would only be supported if their businesses were already actively being displaced (which may very well be the case), but the stock market only supports the latter.

All of that being said, I do think what you're describing is happening, or at least will happen. I just don't think people placing bets on it happening counts as evidence.

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

#700

Post by hattmall »

r_lee wrote: post #507
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…

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…

>Like, is there truly an agentic way to go 10x

Yes, absolutely.

>or is there some catch?

Yes, absolutely.

The catch is that to go 10x you have to either do a lot of work of the variety that AI excels at, mainly boilerplate and logical but tedious modifications. There's a lot of code I can write, but I will probably need to check the syntax and implementations for 10 or more functions / methods, but I know what they are and how I want the code to flow. AI never really nails it, but it gets close enough that I can fix it with considerable time savings. The major requirement here is that I, for the most part, already knew almost exactly what I wanted to do. This is the really fancy auto-complete that is actually a pretty reasonable assistant.

The other way is that you have to start from a position of 0.1x (or less) and go to !~1x.

There are a tremendous amount of people employed in tech roles, but outside of actual tech companies that have very very low throughput.

I've recently worked in a very large non-tech firm but one that is part of a major duopoly and is for the most part a household name worldwide. They employ 1000s of software developers whose primary function is to have a vague idea of who they should email about any question or change. The ratio of emails to lines of code is probably 25:1.

The idea that you could simply ask an AI to modify code, and it might do it correctly, in only a day is completely mind blowing to people whose primary development experience is from within one of these organizations.

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