Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?

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.

Most of software work is maintaining "legacy" code, that is older systems that have been around for a long time and get a lot of use. I find Claude Code in particular is great at grokking old code bases and making changes to it. I work on one of those old code bases and my productivity increased 10x mostly due to Claude Code's ability to research large code bases, make sense of it, answer questions and making careful surgical changes to it. It also helps with testing and debugging which is huge productivity boost. It's not about its ability to churn out lots of code quickly: it's an extra set of eyes/brain that works much faster that human developer.

I have the opposite experience. Claude can't get it all in the context window and make changes that will completely break something on the other side of the program.

Granted that's because the program is incredibly poorly written, but still, context window will stay a huge barrier for quite some time.