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Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?

(martinalderson.com)
413 points martinald | 2 comments | 08 Dec 25 19:00 UTC | HN request time: 0.03s | source
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nine_k ◴[08 Dec 25 20:15 UTC] No.46197061[source]▶
Had the cost of building custom software dropped 90%, we would be seeing a flurry of low-cost, decent-quality SaaS offering all over the marketplace, possibly undercutting some established players.

From where I sit, right now, this does not seem to be the case.

This is as if writing down the code is not the biggest problem, or the biggest time sink, of building software.

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kenjackson ◴[08 Dec 25 21:49 UTC] No.46198132[source]▶
It has dropped by maybe MORE than 90%. My sons school recently asked me to build some tools for them -- I did this over a decade ago for them, for free. I did it again using AI tools (different problem though) and I had it mostly done in 30 minutes (after I got the credentials set up properly -- that took up more time than the main coding part). This was probably several days of work for me in the past.
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1. bloppe ◴[08 Dec 25 22:42 UTC] No.46198663[source]▶
"Building software" is a bit too general, though. I believe "Building little web apps for my son's school" has gotten at least 10x easier. But the needle has not moved much on building something like Notion, or Superhuman, or Vercel, or <insert name of any non-trivial project with more than 1000 man-hours of dev work>.

Even with perfect prompt engineering, context rot catches up to you eventually. Maybe a fundamental architecture breakthrough will change this, but I'm not holding my breath.

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2. lisbbb ◴[09 Dec 25 03:13 UTC] No.46200857[source]▶
Yeah, that's not a comparison to the kinds of highly complex internal systems I worked with the Fortune 1xx companies, particularly the regulated ones (healthcare). The whole "my son's school" thing is very nice, and it's cool you can knock that out so fast, but it's nothing at all like the environments I worked in, particularly the politics.