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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%?

#731

Post by andupotorac »

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…

When they say skill issue, they mean it. Have you spent at least 4-5 hours on specs (mermaid, markdown)?

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

#733

Post by Anamon »

chasd00 wrote: post #39
tonyarkles wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counterpoint: if a small part of the process is getting tweaked, how responsive can the team responsible for these apps be? That’s the killer feature of spreadsheets for business processes: the accountants can change the accounting spreadsheets, the shipping and receiving people can change theirs, and there’s no team in the way to act as a bottleneck. That’s also the reason that so-called “Shadow IT” exists. Teams wi…

i've seen many attempts to turn a widely used spreadsheet into a webapp. Eventually, it becomes an attempt to re-implement spreadsheets. The first time something changes and the user says "well in Excel i would just do this..." the dev team is off chasing existing features of excel for eternity and the users are pissed because it takes so long and is buggy, meanwhile, excel is right there ready and waiting.

Also, any software implemented to do a task which knowledge workers previously used a spreadsheet for, will inevitably get this feature request from users sooner or later:

* Excel import/export

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

#734

Post by Anamon »

bdangubic wrote: post #209
jimbokun wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does this mean the AI slop is higher quality or that there's more of it?

certainly not more of it now, we have decades and decades of human-written code if I am understanding the question correctly. all's I am saying is that "anti-AI" HN crowd literally glorifies human-written code every second of every day here, "AI slop this, AI code unmaintainable that..." I have been a contractor for many years now and usually brought on to fix shit and human-written code is in vast majority of cases…

From my own experience (having maintained legacy human codebases and now and then toying around with LLM coding) there's a quite fundamental difference between the types of slop, though.

Bad human code often has antipatterns, missing sanity checks, terrible data structures, bad naming, convoluted flows, etc. but you can usually deduce the intent behind the code. It's pretty obvious where it's bad and why. And if you can get to the mental model that guided the development, you can figure out how to rewrite it.

LLM code has all of those problems, but on top of that, there's no underlying mental model to deduce, much less a consistent one. This, in my experience, makes the slop go from horrible but possible to fix and refactor, to beyond repair and in need of not just a complete rewrite, but an entire new architecture from scratch.

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

#735

Post by Anamon »

bitwize wrote: post #241
marcosdumay wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That. I was expecting some overview of the last couple of decades in a "There's no Silver Bullet" fashion. Instead it's some guy that claims it takes a team to make CI/CD for something he can vibe-code in a day, and that agentic code totally solves the complexity problems caused by too much React.

Even if that were true, so we've made development needlessly more complicated, only to gain back the time lost by running numberwang across enough datacenters to fill a small country? You haven't abstracted anything away, Morty, just created another layer of shit. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22601623

Love that Numberwang reference! A pretty apt description of how this stuff feels sometimes.

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

#736

Post by Anamon »

azov wrote: post #70

If the cost of building software dropped so much - where is that software?.. Was there an explosion of useful features in any software product you use? A jump in quality? Anything tangible an end user can see?..

This is also one of my arguments. I'm exaggerating, of course, but to me it feels like major software products and services haven't been adding new features for years now. What we get with updates these days are new restrictions on use, and "streamlining", i.e. the removal of features. Usually with the justification that the effort to maintain them was too high.

I used to look at release notes excited about what new features I might get. Now I read them with some level of anxiety. I hope none of the inevitably removed features are ones I used.

The AI evangelist talks to me about 10×. Meanwhile, all the software I use is becoming less functional, less configurable, less powerful, less secure, less stable, and in general crappier by the day.

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

#737

Post by Anamon »

dvh wrote: post #455
harishpanwar9 wrote: post #434

This is a fascinating perspective — and honestly, it feels like one of those shifts we’ll only fully recognize in hindsight. The idea that software development could transition from months of coordination and engineering overhead to rapid iteration with small, high-leverage teams is both exciting and a little uncomfortable. The 90% cost reduction isn’t just about efficiency — it’s about access. If the barrier to ship…

> emdashes > isn’t just How do you do fellow human

Fair indicators, although I'd say the fresh user account and the lack of any concrete meanings in the statements are even more telling.

Saying this partly in self-defense – as a human who likes using en dashes and ellipses in my manual writing…

Besides, I wonder why people do this. What's the motivation? Is there some way of financially profiting from writing comments on HN that I'm unaware of?

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

#738

Post by [deleted] »

Anamon wrote: post #737
dvh wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> emdashes > isn’t just How do you do fellow human

Fair indicators, although I'd say the fresh user account and the lack of any concrete meanings in the statements are even more telling. Saying this partly in self-defense – as a human who likes using en dashes and ellipses in my manual writing… Besides, I wonder why people do this. What's the motivation? Is there some way of financially profiting from writing comments on HN that I'm unaware of?

[deleted]

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

#739

Post by citizenpaul »

pdimitar wrote: post #445
swatcoder wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The adversarial tension was all that ever made any of it work. The "Perfectionist Engineer" without a "Pragmatic Executive" to press them into delivering something good enough would of course still been in their workshop, tinkering away, when the market had already closed. But the "Pragmatic Executive" without the "Perfectionist Engineer" around to temper their naive optimism would just as soon find themselves chased…

That's a nice balanced wholesome take, only the problem is that the "Pragmatic Executive" is more like "Career-driven frenzied 'ship it today at all costs' psychopath executive". You are describing a push-and-pull / tug-of-war balanced relationship. In reality that's absolutely exactly never balanced. The engineer has 1% say, the other 99% go to the executive. I so wish your take was universally applicable. In my 24…

>The engineer has 1% say, the other 99% go to the executive.

This has also been my experience. Not to mention "fighting back" usually comes at personal cost in various ways from reputation to creating more unpaid work for yourself, including the time you spend on trying to make things right that now means you are behind on your "real work".

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

#740

Post by pdimitar »

citizenpaul wrote: post #739
pdimitar wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a nice balanced wholesome take, only the problem is that the "Pragmatic Executive" is more like "Career-driven frenzied 'ship it today at all costs' psychopath executive". You are describing a push-and-pull / tug-of-war balanced relationship. In reality that's absolutely exactly never balanced. The engineer has 1% say, the other 99% go to the executive. I so wish your take was universally applicable. In my 24…

>The engineer has 1% say, the other 99% go to the executive. This has also been my experience. Not to mention "fighting back" usually comes at personal cost in various ways from reputation to creating more unpaid work for yourself, including the time you spend on trying to make things right that now means you are behind on your "real work".

Don't forget you "no longer work well with others" if you start standing up to mediocrity that everyone else is either too stupid to notice, or too afraid to fight back against because they don't want to harm their career.

I am mostly starting to make my peace with all this and learning when is a good time to really fight (hint: almost never).

And I don't quite buy HN's group-think of "find a better job, duh". The market has been difficult in the last years and also the "better jobs" are nowhere nearly as accessible as privileged people believe.

Best way to handle things, I have found, is to dress the decisions in money and time. Position yourself as a realist who speaks numbers and if you are lucky -- meaning you don't get contested by other techies who simply want to shine in front of the boss -- then you will have at least the product people on your side.

All that being said, of course at one point you should leave. In no form of relationship, work, friends, intimate, should you let yourself be walked all over for a long time. Start fighting the good fight in the company... and start polishing your resume and go do interviews.

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