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Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?

(martinalderson.com)
413 points martinald | 1 comments | 08 Dec 25 19:00 UTC | HN request time: 0.255s | source
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vb-8448 ◴[08 Dec 25 22:05 UTC] No.46198283[source]▶
It's not just about "building" ... who is going to maintain all this new sub-par code pushed to production every day?

Who is going to patch all bugs, edge cases and security vulnerabilities?

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sdoering ◴[08 Dec 25 22:17 UTC] No.46198394[source]▶
I happily got rid of a legacy application (lost the pitch, another agency now must deal with the shit) I inherited as a somewhat technically savvy person about a year ago.

It was built by real people. Not a single line of AI slop in it. It was the most fragile crap I had ever the misfortune to witness. Even in my wildest vibe coding a prototype moments I was not able to get the AI to produce that amount of anti patterns, bad shit and code that would have had Hitchcock running.

I think we would be shocked to see what kind of human slop out there is running in production. The scale might change, but at least in this example, if I had rebuilt the app purely by vibe coding the code quality and the security of the code would actually have improved. Even with the lowest vibe coding effort thinkable.

I am not in any way condoning (is this the right word) bad practices, or shipping vibe code into prod without very, very thorough review. Far from it. I am just trying to provide a counter point to the narrative, that at least in the medium sized business I got to know in my time consulting/working in agencies, I have seen quite a metric ton of slop, that would make coding agents shiver.

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1. vb-8448 ◴[08 Dec 25 22:33 UTC] No.46198564[source]▶
AI doesn't overcome the limits of the one who is giving the input, like in pre-ai era SW, if the input sucks the output sucks.

What changed is the speed: AI and vibe coding just gave a turboboost to all you described. The amount of code will go parabolic (maybe it's already parabolic) and, in the mid-term, we will need even more swe/sre/devops/security/ecc to keep up.