Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?

FTA

> I've had Claude Code write an entire unit/integration test suite in a few hours (300+ tests) for a fairly complex internal tool. This would take me, or many developers I know and respect, days to write by hand.

I have no problem believing that Claude generated 300 passing tests. I have a very hard time believing those tests were all well thought out, consise, actually testing the desired behavior while communicating to the next person or agent how the system under test is supposed to work. I'd give very good odds at least some of those tests are subtly testing themselves (ex mocking a function, calling said function, then asserting the mock was called). Many of them are probably also testing implementation details that were never intended to be part of the contract.

I'm not anti-AI, I use it regularly, but all of these articles about how crazy productive it is skip over the crazy amount of supervision it needs. Yes, it can spit out code fast, but unless your prepared to spend a significant chunk of that 'saved" time CAREFULLY (more carefully than with a human) reviewing code, you've accepted a big drop in quality.

> you've accepted a big drop in quality.

Right, but you do it in a 10th of the time.

So you're openly saying you're fine with quantity over quality.... in software engineering? That's fine for a MVP, maybe, but nothing beyond on that IMHO unless they're throw away scripts.

"Houston, we have a problem."

"Yeah, but we did it in a 10th of the time"

Here is the thing, most software engineers are not designing rockets, they are making basic CRUD apps. If there is a minor defect it can be caught and corrected without much issue. Our jobs are a lot less "critical infrastructure" than a lot of software engineers will allow their egos to accept.

Sure if you are making some medical surgery robot do it right, but if you are making a website the recommends wine pairings who cares if one of the buttons has a weird animation bug that doesn't even get noticed for a couple of years.

I think I'm "most" engineers and I haven't ever worked on something that was "just" a CRUD app. Having a DB behind your web app doesn't make it "just" a CRUD.

It's really overestimated how many simple apps exist.

What kind of apps do you work on?

Regular SaaS products of different kinds, cloud software, hosting software, etc. Really representative of most of the Web-enabled software out there.

For every one of them there has been an almost negligible amount of CRUD code, the meat of every one of those apps was very specific business logic. Some were also heavy on the frontend with equal amount of complexity on the backend. As a senior/staff level engineer you also have dive into other things like platform enablement, internal tooling, background jobs and data wrangling, distributed architectures, etc. which are even farther from CRUD.