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Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?

(martinalderson.com)
413 points martinald | 9 comments | 08 Dec 25 19:00 UTC | HN request time: 0.011s | source | bottom
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JohnMakin ◴[08 Dec 25 20:04 UTC] No.46196917[source]▶
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.
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1. bdangubic ◴[08 Dec 25 20:10 UTC] No.46196999[source]▶
one year in, AI slop > Human-written slop
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2. JohnMakin ◴[08 Dec 25 20:12 UTC] No.46197029[source]▶
I am highly skeptical of this claim.
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3. bdangubic ◴[08 Dec 25 20:15 UTC] No.46197052[source]▶
personal experience, not general claim. I am 30-years in the industry and have seen a lot of human-written code…
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4. bdangubic ◴[08 Dec 25 20:21 UTC] No.46197129{3}[source]▶
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
5. martinald ◴[08 Dec 25 20:23 UTC] No.46197154{3}[source]▶
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.

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6. jimbokun ◴[08 Dec 25 20:29 UTC] No.46197227[source]▶
Does this mean the AI slop is higher quality or that there's more of it?
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7. bdangubic ◴[08 Dec 25 23:00 UTC] No.46198868[source]▶
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 :)

8. blibble ◴[08 Dec 25 23:26 UTC] No.46199110{4}[source]▶
> 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?

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9. bdangubic ◴[09 Dec 25 01:45 UTC] No.46200346{5}[source]▶
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