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Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?

(martinalderson.com)
413 points martinald | 1 comments | 08 Dec 25 19:00 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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simonw ◴[08 Dec 25 22:37 UTC] No.46198601[source]▶
The cost of writing simple code has dropped 90%.

If you can reduce a problem to a point where it can be solved by simple code you can get the rest of the solution very quickly.

Reducing a problem to a point where it can be solved with simple code takes a lot of skill and experience and is generally still quite a time-consuming process.

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Terr_ ◴[08 Dec 25 23:46 UTC] No.46199323[source]▶
> The cost of writing simple code has dropped 90%.

Plus there's a lot of simple code you shouldn't be writing either way, because it's in a library by now.

By their nature, LLMs will do their best with things that could be plagiarized.

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mewpmewp2 ◴[09 Dec 25 00:15 UTC] No.46199615[source]▶
Aren't we having major issues with there being too many small libraries right now and dependency chain that grows exponentially? I have thought LLMs will actually benefit us a lot here, with not having to use a lib for every little thing (leftpad etc?).
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1. rsynnott ◴[09 Dec 25 11:20 UTC] No.46203638[source]▶
That's primarily a culture problem, mostly with Javascript (you don't really see the same issue in most language ecosystems). Having lots of tiny libraries is bad, but writing things covered by libraries instead of using _sensible_ libraries is also bad.

(IMO Javascript desperately needs an equivalent to Boost, or at the very least something like Apache Commons.)