Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?

These kind of future prediction posts keep coming, and I'm tired of them. Reality is always more boring, less extreme, and slower at changing, because there are too many factors involved, and the authors never account for everything.

Maybe we should collect all of these predictions, then go back in 5-10 years and see if anyone was actually right.

Despite a couple forward-looking statements, I didn’t read this as a prediction. It seems more of a subjective/anecdotal assessment of where things are in December 2025. (Yes, with some conjecture about the implications for next year.)

Overall, it echos my experience with Claude Opus 4.5 in particular. We’ve passed a threshold (one of several, no doubt).

Just to test out the OP articles theory, I was about to write some unit tests. I decided to let Opus 4.5 have a go. It did a pretty good job, but I spent probably as much time parsing what it had done as I would have writing the code from scratch. I still needed to clean it up, and of course, unsurprisingly, it had made a few tests that only really exercised the mocking it had made. A kind of mistake I wouldn't be caught dead sending in for peer review.

I'm glad the OP feels fine just letting Opus do whatever it wants without a pause to look under the covers, and perhaps we all have to learn to stop worrying and love the LLM? But I think really, here and now, we're witness to just another hype article written by a professional blogger and speaker, who's highly motivated to write engagement bait like this.

This is only true if the code it wrote is something you can just sit down and write without any reference.

Now do something like I did: An application that can get your IMDB/Letterboxd/Goodreads/Steam libraries and store them locally (own your data). Also use OMDB/TMDB to enrich the movie and TV show data.

If you can write all that code faster than read what Claude did, I salute you and will subscribe to your Substack and Youtube channels :)

Oh btw, neither Goodreads, IMDB nor Letterboxd have proper export APIs so you need to have a playwright-style browser automation do it. Just debugging that mess by writing all the code yourself is going to be hours and hours.

The Steam API access Claude one-shotted (with Sonnet 3.7, this was a long time ago) as well as enriching the input data from different sources.