Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?

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.

Something weird happened to software after the 90s or so.

You had all these small-by-modern-standards teams (though sometimes in large companies) putting out desktop applications, sometimes on multiple platforms, with shitloads of features. On fairly tight schedules. To address markets that are itty-bitty by modern standards.

Now people are like “We’ll need (3x the personnel) and (2x the time) and you can forget about native, it’s webshit or else you can double those figures… for one platform. What’s that? Your TAM is only (the size of the entire home PC market circa 1995)? Oh forget about it then, you’ll never get funded”

It seems like we’ve gotten far less efficient.

I’m skeptical this problem has to do with code-writing, and so am skeptical that LLMs are going to even get us back to our former baseline.

Yep. Software construction was branded a team sport. Hence, social coding, tool quality being considered more important (good thing for sure), and, arguably, less emphasis on individual skill and agency.

This was in service of a time when tech was the great equalizer, powered by ZIRP. It also dovetailed perfectly with middle managers needing more reports in fast growing tech companies. Perhaps the pendulum is swinging back from the overly collective focus we had during the 2010s.