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Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?

(martinalderson.com)
413 points martinald | 3 comments | 08 Dec 25 19:00 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | 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. neom ◴[08 Dec 25 22:43 UTC] No.46198668[source]▶
DigitalOcean version 1 was a duck taped together mash of bash, chron jobs and perl, 2 people out of 12 understood it, 1 knew how to operate it. It worked, but it was insane, like really, really insane. 0% chance the original chatgpt would have written something as bad as DO v1.
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2. an0malous ◴[09 Dec 25 01:04 UTC] No.46200046[source]▶
Are you suggesting the original ChatGPT could build DigitalOcean?
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3. neom ◴[09 Dec 25 01:21 UTC] No.46200166[source]▶
To me, built and written are not the same. Built: OK, maybe that's an exaggeration. But could an early "this is pretty good at code" llm have written digitalocean v1? I think it could, yes (no offense Jeff). In terms of volume of code and size of architecture, yeah it was big and complex, but it was literally a bunch of relatively simple cron, bash and perl, and the whole thing was very...sloppy (because we were moving very quickly) - DigitalOcean as I last knew of it (a very long time ago), transformed to a very well written modern go shop. (Source: I am part of the "founding team" or whatever.)