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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%?

#721

Post by theshrike79 »

locknitpicker wrote: post #710
theshrike79 wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So a project that's still using Java 1.6 and has perfect test coverage and some poor developer is paid to maintain it (but NOT upgrade it!) is not "legacy" in your book? Then we disagree on the definition. "Legacy" projects to me are those that should've went through at least two generational refactorings but haven't because of some unfathomable reason. These are the ones that eventually end up being rewritten from s…

> So a project that's still using Java 1.6 and has perfect test coverage and some poor developer is paid to maintain it (but NOT upgrade it!) is not "legacy" in your book? If a project is perfectly maintainable and developer teams are confident they can roll out any change they see fit with total confidence without having to risk nasty regressions or work around any pain points, then obviously it is not a legacy proj…

If someone maintaining a project that's 25 years old and hasn't had a complete overhaul is "confident" about anything, they must be the one who originally wrote it =)

At least that's my experience. Anyone else brought in during the last 5 years is usually terrified of changing anything because there are so many obscure corners and dependencies nobody can predict before stuff just breaks down.

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

#722

Post by locknitpicker »

theshrike79 wrote: post #721
locknitpicker wrote: post #710

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So a project that's still using Java 1.6 and has perfect test coverage and some poor developer is paid to maintain it (but NOT upgrade it!) is not "legacy" in your book? If a project is perfectly maintainable and developer teams are confident they can roll out any change they see fit with total confidence without having to risk nasty regressions or work around any pain points, then obviously it is not a legacy proj…

If someone maintaining a project that's 25 years old and hasn't had a complete overhaul is "confident" about anything, they must be the one who originally wrote it =) At least that's my experience. Anyone else brought in during the last 5 years is usually terrified of changing anything because there are so many obscure corners and dependencies nobody can predict before stuff just breaks down.

> If someone maintaining a project that's 25 years old and hasn't had a complete overhaul is "confident" about anything, they must be the one who originally wrote it =)

You are failing to understand that the key factor even in your example is maintenance, not age. You can and often do have legacy projects that use the latest and greatest frameworks. That's not the differentiating factor.

> At least that's my experience. Anyone else brought in during the last 5 years is usually terrified of changing anything because there are so many obscure corners and dependencies nobody can predict before stuff just breaks down.

The obscure corners and dependencies are the output of lack of maintenance, not age. That's why you can and often have brand new projects that are unmaintainable, and dismissed as legacy.

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

#723

Post by aswegs8 »

BigHatLogan wrote: post #30
embedding-shape wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't chase specific technologies, especially not ones driven by for-profit companies. Chase ideas, become great in one slice of the industry, and the very least you can always fall back on that. Once established within a domain, you can always try to branch out, and feel a lot more comfortable doing so. Ultimately, software is for doing something , and that something can be a whole range of things. If you become rea…

Thanks for the response. When you say "one slice of the industry", is the suggestion to understand the core business of whatever I'm building instead of being the "specs to code" person? I guess this is where the advice starts to become fuzzy and vague for me.

I would say that could be domain knowledge in your business, but as you said you do frontend it could be mobile, UI/UX, security, ...

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

#724

Post by davidjytang »

jjice wrote: post #572
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…

> or just a "can you quickly make this boring func here that does xyz" "also add this" or for bash scripts etc. I still write most of the interesting code myself, but when it comes to boring, tedious work (that's usually fairly repetitive, but can't be well abstracted any more), that's when I've found gen AI to be a huge win. It's not 10x, because a lot of the time, I'm still writing code normally. For very specific,…

3X means what you got done in 30 days now only takes 10 days, yeah?

66.7% time saving just by having AI doing boring stuff.

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

#725

Post by saikia81 »

DrewADesign wrote: post #693
saikia81 wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Most companies have more than enough of those, and these problems are already solved every day. In the end everything is vulnerable and the internet is dangerous, a vibe coder is no more dangerous than an average junior software engineer.

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

#726

Post by nasmorn »

agent281 wrote: post #718
thfuran wrote: post #668

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I understood their comment as going from $100 / hour * 100 hours to $100 / hour * 500 hours not to $500 / hour * 100 hours

Yeah the last one. The others would require 5x deal flow which LLMs might not help deliver at all. But the last one should exist for people if 10x is true. Not every client can have already fully price in LLM improvements, people have contracts negotiated pre LLM. I have not heard of this though so I have to remain sceptical

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

#727

Post by bagacrap »

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.

I don't think zero unit tests is the right answer either. And if you actually take the time to read all 300 and cull the useless or overlapping ones, you've invested much more than 10% of the time it would have taken you.

Having a zillion unit tests (of questionable quality) is a huge pita when you try to refactor.

When I am writing unit tests (or other tests), I'm thinking about all the time I'll save by catching bugs early -- either as I write the test or in the future as regressions crop up. So to place too much importance on the amount of time invested now is missing the point, and makes me think that person is just going through the motions. Of course if I'm writing throwaway code or a POC, I'll probably skip writing tests at all.

In order to add coverage for scenarios that I haven't even thought of, I prefer fuzz testing. Then I get a lot more than 2-300 tests and I don't even pretend to spend time reviewing the tests until they fail.

If you want to use an LLM to help expedite the typing of tests you have thought of, fine. If you just tell it to write the suite for itself, that's equivalent to hiring a (mediocre to bad) new grad and forcing them to write tests for you. If that's as good of an outcome as doing it yourself, I can only assume you are brand new to software engineering.

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

#728

Post by adam_patarino »

jjav wrote: post #708
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…

IME vibe coding works spectacularly for simple one-off scripts that do a fairly simple thing. I can describe the work in ~10 minutes and save 2-4 hours of scripting. Just last weekend I wanted a script to process a csv file and produce some reports and graphs out of that. I think it would've taken me the 2-4 hours to write it myself. Instead, I had cursor write it while waiting for boarding at the airport, probably n…

Yeah, that matches my experience: LLMs are amazing “script interns” and shaky “systems engineers.” One trick that helps on bigger stuff: force it into a tight loop of (1) write a failing test for a single behavior, (2) implement smallest change, (3) run tests, (4) refactor. When you make the unit of work “one green test,” the model’s tendency to wander gets way less destructive.

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

#729

Post by DrewADesign »

saikia81 wrote: post #725
DrewADesign wrote: post #693

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Most companies have more than enough of those, and these problems are already solved every day. In the end everything is vulnerable and the internet is dangerous, a vibe coder is no more dangerous than an average junior software engineer.

No. Just because there’s a lot of something doesn’t mean it can’t get catastrophically worse. A town might experience regular, damaging street flooding from poor municipal drainage, but that’s still a whole lot better than the large dam upstream failing.

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

#730

Post by jjav »

adam_patarino wrote: post #728
jjav wrote: post #708

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IME vibe coding works spectacularly for simple one-off scripts that do a fairly simple thing. I can describe the work in ~10 minutes and save 2-4 hours of scripting. Just last weekend I wanted a script to process a csv file and produce some reports and graphs out of that. I think it would've taken me the 2-4 hours to write it myself. Instead, I had cursor write it while waiting for boarding at the airport, probably n…

Yeah, that matches my experience: LLMs are amazing “script interns” and shaky “systems engineers.” One trick that helps on bigger stuff: force it into a tight loop of (1) write a failing test for a single behavior, (2) implement smallest change, (3) run tests, (4) refactor. When you make the unit of work “one green test,” the model’s tendency to wander gets way less destructive.

> write a failing test for a single behavior,

Outside of work I've been running a pure vibe-coding experiment where I don't look at the code at all, ever. I'm using this approach of telling it a specific scenario has to work in a certain way (the software relates to financial and tax planning).

The AI bot is very creative at creating a mess even with such tight guardrails. Many days into it I discovered that it had implemented four completely separate tax computation routines. All of them buggy in different ways. All of them addressed specific scenarios I had specified as part of the spec. But it never occurred to the bot to have a single centralized tax function! It is very good at satisfying specific scenarios I give, but absolutely terrible at any kind of system-wide planning.

(I'm using cursor for this experiment)

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