Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?

> 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.

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.

EVERY DX survey that comes out (surveying over 20k developers) says the exact same thing.

Staff engineers get the most time savings out of AI tools, and their weekly time savings is 4.4 hours for heavy AI users. That's a little more than 10% productivity, so not anywhere close to 10x.

What's more telling about the survey results is they are also consistent in their findings between heavy and light users of AI. Staff engineers who are heavy users of AI save 4.4 hours a week while staff engineers who are light users of AI save 3.3 hours a week. To put another way, the DX survey is pretty clear that the time savings between heavy and light AI users is minimal.

Yes surveys are all flawed in different ways but an N of 20k is nothing to sneeze at. Any study with data points shows that code generation is not a significant time savings and zero studies show significant time savings. All the productivity gains DX reports come from debugging and investigation/code base spelunking help.

do you have a link to the latest survey? my google-fu is failing me at the moment

your google-fu isnt failing. there's simply only a couple large studies on this, and of those, zero that have a useful methodology.

I think there is going to be 2-3 year lag in understanding how llms actually impact developer productivity. There are way too many balls in the air, and anyone claiming specific numbers on productivity increase is likely very very wrong.

For example citing staff engineers as an example will have a bias: they have years of traditional training and are obviously not representative of software engineers in general.