Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?

This article mentions cost to ship, but ignores that the largest cost of any software project isn't consumed by how long it takes to get to market, but by maintenance and addition of new features. How is agentic coding doing there? I've only seen huge, unmaintainable messes so far.

one year in, AI slop > Human-written slop

I am highly skeptical of this claim.

personal experience, not general claim. I am 30-years in the industry and have seen a lot of human-written code…

While this is true, I think some fields like game development may not always have this problem. If your goal is to release a non-upgradable game - fps, arcade, single-player titles, maintenance may be much less important than shipping.

edit: typos

there are many millions of people writing code… that’s way too many to get any good quality. you might get lucky and get involved with codebase which does not make you dizzy (or outright sick) but most of us are not that lucky

Agreed. I think a core problem is many developers (on HN) don't realise how "bad" so much human written code is.

I've seen unbelievably complex logistics logic coded in... WordPress templates and plugins to take a random example. Actually virtually impossible to figure out - but AI can actually extract all the logic pretty well now.

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

I think that is an applicable domain, but the problem is that every gamer I know who is not in the tech industry is vehemently opposed to AI.

Well, they just love complaining. You won't find many who profess to like DLC, yet that sells.

I'm trying to understand where this kind of thinking comes from. I'm not trying to belittle you, I sincerely want to know: Are you aware that everyone writing software has the goal of releasing software so perfect it never needs an upgrade? Are you aware that we've all learned that that's impossible?

Nobody wants to ship that! They want perpetually upgraded live service games instead, because that's recurring revenue.

this was basically true until consoles started getting an online element. the up-front testing was more serious compared to the complexity of the games. there were still bugs, but there was no way to upgrade short of a recall.

> I'm trying to understand where this kind of thinking comes from.

I used to be a game developer.

And why did we abandon this model?

Also, computer games existed at the same time as consoles. People were playing games loaded from floppy disks on computers back in the early 1980's

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 much worse compared to AI generated code. the sample size of the latter is smaller but my general argument remains. I think people that write these "AI slop" comments should pick their favorite language/framework/... and then go to github and browse through codebases, written by humans (ignore commits before xxxxxx) and then see if they like what they see :)

I'm not saying that this model is profitable in the current environment, but it did exist in a real world environment at one point, making the point that certain processes are compatible with useful products, but maybe not leading edge competitive products that need to make a profit currently.

> Agreed. I think a core problem is many developers (on HN) don't realise how "bad" so much human written code is.

what do you think "AI" is trained on exactly?

finally the right question! I would upvote you 1,000 times if I could!

this is why they need a senior/seasoned developer behind them. for things that can simply be learned directly (e.g. from man/docs) it rocks, without guidance. for other things it needs guidance