Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?

These kind of future prediction posts keep coming, and I'm tired of them. Reality is always more boring, less extreme, and slower at changing, because there are too many factors involved, and the authors never account for everything.

Maybe we should collect all of these predictions, then go back in 5-10 years and see if anyone was actually right.

Despite a couple forward-looking statements, I didn’t read this as a prediction. It seems more of a subjective/anecdotal assessment of where things are in December 2025. (Yes, with some conjecture about the implications for next year.)

Overall, it echos my experience with Claude Opus 4.5 in particular. We’ve passed a threshold (one of several, no doubt).

Just to test out the OP articles theory, I was about to write some unit tests. I decided to let Opus 4.5 have a go. It did a pretty good job, but I spent probably as much time parsing what it had done as I would have writing the code from scratch. I still needed to clean it up, and of course, unsurprisingly, it had made a few tests that only really exercised the mocking it had made. A kind of mistake I wouldn't be caught dead sending in for peer review.

I'm glad the OP feels fine just letting Opus do whatever it wants without a pause to look under the covers, and perhaps we all have to learn to stop worrying and love the LLM? But I think really, here and now, we're witness to just another hype article written by a professional blogger and speaker, who's highly motivated to write engagement bait like this.