Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?

> 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.

I don’t vibe code yet but it has sped me up a lot when working with large frameworks that have a lot of magic behind the scenes (Spring Boot). I am doing a very large refactor, major version spring boot upgrade, at the moment.

When given focused questions for parts of the code it it will give me 2-4 different approaches extending/implementing different bean overrides. I go through a cycle of back and forth having it give me sample implementations. I often ask what is considered the more modern or desirable approach. Things like give me a pros and cons list of the different approaches. The one I like the best I then go look up the specific docs to fact check a bit.

For this type of work it easily is a 2-3x. Spring specifically is really tough to search for due to its long history and large changes between major versions. More times than not it lands me on the most modern approach for my Spring Boot version and while the code it produces is not bad it isn’t great either. So, I rewrite it.

Also it does a pretty good job of writing integration tests. I have it give me the boilerplate for the test and then I can modify it for all my different scenarios. Then I run those against the unmodified and refactored code as validation suite that the refactor didn’t introduce issues.

When I am working in GoLang I don’t get this level of speed up but I also don’t need to look up as much. The number of ways to do things is far lower and there is no real magic behind the scenes. This might be one reason experiences may differ so radically.