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.

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.

But in the past, you knew the codebase very well, and it was trivial to implement a fix and upgrade the software. Can the same be done with LLMs ? Well from what I see, it depends on your luck. But if the LLMs can't help you, then you gotta read the whole codebase that you've never read before and you quickly lose the initial benefits. I don't doubt someday we'll get there though.

If I haven't looked at my own code in 6 months it might as well have been written by someone else.

The most brilliant programmer I know is me three years ago. I look at code I wrote and I'm literally wondering "how did I figure out how to do that -- that makes no sense, but exactly what is needed!"