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Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?

(martinalderson.com)
413 points martinald | 6 comments | 08 Dec 25 19:00 UTC | HN request time: 0s | 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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bdangubic ◴[08 Dec 25 20:10 UTC] No.46196999[source]▶
one year in, AI slop > Human-written slop
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1. JohnMakin ◴[08 Dec 25 20:12 UTC] No.46197029[source]▶
I am highly skeptical of this claim.
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2. 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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3. bdangubic ◴[08 Dec 25 20:21 UTC] No.46197129[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
4. martinald ◴[08 Dec 25 20:23 UTC] No.46197154[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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5. blibble ◴[08 Dec 25 23:26 UTC] No.46199110{3}[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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6. bdangubic ◴[09 Dec 25 01:45 UTC] No.46200346{4}[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