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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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tangotaylor ◴[09 Dec 25 12:42 UTC] No.46204312[source]▶
> Engineers need to really lean in to the change in my opinion.

I tried leaning in. I really tried. I'm not a web developer or game developer (more robotics, embedded systems). I tried vibe coding web apps and games. They were pretty boring. I got frustrated that I couldn't change little things. I remember getting frustrated that my game character kept getting stuck on imaginary walls and kept asking Cursor to fix it and it just made more and more of a mess. I remember making a simple front-end + backend with a database app to analyze thousands of pull request comments and it got massively slow and I didn't know why. Cursor wasn't very helpful in fixing it. I felt dumber after the whole process.

The next time I made a web app I just taught myself Flask and some basic JS and I found myself moving way more quickly. Not in the initial development, but later on when I had to tweak things.

The AI helped me a ton with looking things up: documentation, error messages, etc. It's essentially a supercharged Google search and Stack Overflow replacement, but I did not find it useful letting it take the wheel.

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r_lee ◴[09 Dec 25 13:08 UTC] No.46204550[source]▶
These posts like the one OP made is why I'm losing my mind.

Like, is there truly an agentic way to go 10x or is there some catch? At this point while I'm not thrilled about the idea of just "vibe coding" all the time, I'm fine with facing reality.

But I keep having the same experience as you, or rather leaning more on that supercharged Google/SO replacement

or just a "can you quickly make this boring func here that does xyz" "also add this" or for bash scripts etc.

And that's only when I've done most of the plumbing myself.

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1. vbezhenar ◴[09 Dec 25 15:26 UTC] No.46205924[source]▶
I tried claude code to write very simple app for me. Basically Golang mock server which will dump request to console. I'd write this kind of app in an hour. I spent around 1.5 hours with claude code and in the end I had code which I liked, almost the same code I'd write myself. It's not vibe coding, I carefully instructed it to write code in a way I prefer, one small step after another.

So for me, it's pretty obvious that with better training, I'd be able to achieve speed ups with the same result in the end. Not 10x, but 2x is possible. The very first attempt to use AI ended up with almost the same time I'd write the same code, and I have a lot to improve.

That said, I have huge problem with this approach. It's not fun to work like that. I started to program 25 years ago, because it was fun for me. It still fun for me today. I love writing all these loops and ifs. I can accept minimal automation like static autocomplete, but that's about it.