Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?

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 switched jobs somewhat recently. At my previous job, where I was on the codebase for years, I knew where the changes should be and what they should look like. So I tried to jump directly to implementation with the AI because I didn't need much help planning and the AI got confused and did an awful job.

In a new codebase, where I had no idea how things are structured, I started the process by using AI to understand where the relevant code is, the call hierarchies and side effects, etc.

I have found by using the AI to conduct the initial investigation, it was then very easy to get the AI to generate an effective spec, and then it was relatively easy to get the AI to generate the code to that spec. That flow works much better than trying to one shot implementation

not sure what you are trying to say.