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Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?

(martinalderson.com)
413 points martinald | 2 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. Lich ◴[09 Dec 25 15:55 UTC] No.46206330[source]▶
Feeling the same. I’m guessing the folks getting good results are literally writing extremely detailed pseudocode by hand?! Like:

Write a class Person who has members (int) age, (string) first name, (string) last name…

But if you can write that detailed…don’t you know the code you want to write and how you should write it? Writing plain pseudo code feels more verbose.

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2. skapadia ◴[09 Dec 25 17:35 UTC] No.46207855[source]▶
But the AI coding agent can then ask you follow up questions, consider angles you may not have, and generate other artifacts like documentation, data generation and migration scripts, tests, CRUD APIs, all in context. If you can reliably do all that from plain pseudo code, that's way less verbose than having to write out every different representation of the same underlying concept, by hand.

Sure, some of that, like CRUD APIs, you can generate via templates as well. Heck, you can even have the coding agent generate the templates and the code that will process/compile them, or generate the code that generates the templates given a set of parameters.