27 ms·

Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?

• hjaveed 10mo ago
  the cost of creating a great product and amount of time it takes to get infront of the customers has still not reduced
• mwkaufma 10mo ago
  Feels almost too on-the-nose to write "Betteridge's Law of Headlines" but the answer is obviously no. Look no further than the farce of their made-up "graph" of cost over time with no units or evidence.
• more_corn 10mo ago
  Ask someone who builds software for a fee. Are you able to do 90% more? Fire 9/10 engineers? Produce 90% faster? No, no, and no.
  • recursive 10mo ago
    It's even worse. If the cost drops by 90%, the corresponding productivity increase should be 900%, not 90%.
  • bdangubic 10mo ago
    90% more - nope. 35-55% more, just about on average. I am 30-year in though, not sure what these numbers are for junior devs
    • jackie293746 10mo ago
      [dead]
    • nottorp 10mo ago
      https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/07/study-finds-ai-tools-made-open-source-software-developers-19-percent-slower/ https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/07/study-finds-ai-tools-made... They thought they were faster too. Yes, I know, AGI is just around the corner, we just need to wait more because "agents" are improving every day. In the mean time, LLMs are kinda useful instead of web searches, mostly because search is both full of spam and the search providers are toxic.
      • bdangubic 10mo ago
        I am just talking about personal point-of-view, wasn’t interviewed by Arstechnica or others that live off clickbait
      • bdangubic 10mo ago
        additional reading list - IntuitionLabs, “AI’s Impact on Graduate Jobs: A 2025 Data Analysis” (2025) - https://intuitionlabs.ai/pdfs/ai-s-impact-on-graduate-jobs-a-2025-data-analysis.pdf%20IntuitionLabs https://intuitionlabs.ai/pdfs/ai-s-impact-on-graduate-jobs-a... - Demirci, O., Hannane, J., & Zhu, X., “Who Is AI Replacing? The Impact of Generative AI on Online Freelancing Platforms,” Management Science (2024) - https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/10.1287/mnsc.2024.05420%20PubsOnline - Indeed Hiring Lab, “AI at Work Report 2025: How GenAI is Rewiring the DNA of Jobs” (September 2025) - https://www.hiringlab.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Indeed-Hiring-Lab-AI-at-Work-Report-2025.pdf%20Indeed%20Hiring%20Lab
• recursive 10mo ago
  Did I miss something or is there actually no evidence provided that costs have dropped?
  • isoprophlex 10mo ago
    Well... evidence, but there's obviously a graph with a line going places!
  • TheRoque 10mo ago
    Especially if you factor-in the fact that the AI companies are losing money for now, and that it's not sustainable.
    • djmips 10mo ago
      Yeah, when does the other shoe drops and after being addicted to AI coding we suddenly have the rug pulled on price.
• BigHatLogan 10mo ago
  Good write-up. I don't disagree with any of his points, but does anybody here have practical suggestions on how to move forward and think about one's career? I've been a frontend (with a little full stack) for a few years now, and much of the modern landscape concerns me, specifically with how I should be positioning myself. I hear vague suggestions like "get better at the business domain" and other things like that. I'm not discounting any of that, but what does this actually mean or look like in your day-to-day life? I'm working at a mid-sized company right now. I use Cursor and some other tools, but I can't help but wonder if I'm still falling behind or doing something wrong. Does anybody have any thoughts or suggestions on this? The landscape and horizon just seems so foggy to me right now.
  • isoprophlex 10mo ago
    Sheep farming sounds nice. Or making wooden furniture. Something physical.
  • martinald 10mo ago
    Author here, thanks for your kind words! I think it's about looking at what you're building and proactively suggesting/prototyping what else could be useful for the business. This does get tricky in large corps where things are often quite siloed, but can you think "one step ahead" of the product requirements and build that as well? I think regardless if you build it, it's a good exercise to run on any project - what would you think to build next, and what does the business actually want. If you are getting closer on those requests in your head then I think it's a positive sign you are understanding the domain.
    • BigHatLogan 10mo ago
      I think you're right about trying to stay one step ahead of product requirements. Maybe my issue here is that I'm looking for another "path" where one might not exist, at least not a concretely defined one. From childhood to now, things were set in front of me and I just sort of did them, but now it feels like we're entering a real fog of war. It would be helpful, as you suggest, to start shifting away from "I code based on concrete specs" to "I discover solutions for the business." Thanks for the reply (and for the original essay). It has given me a lot to chew on.
• andrewstuart 10mo ago
  If you’re quicker then competition heats up management wants more done, efficiencies are soon forgotten and new expectations and baselines set.
  • foxglacier 10mo ago
    Sure but that's the good of it. Lower labor cost = more productivity. The customer wins in the end because the equivalent product is cheaper or a better product costs the same. Businesses and employees still have to compete against each other so things won't get easier for them in the long term.
    • Draiken 10mo ago
      Except this is capitalism, so any improvements will go disproportionately to the owners. This narrative of improvements for customers has been repeated for decades and it keeps being wrong. More stock buybacks and subscriptions!
    • AngryData 10mo ago
      The customer only wins if the customer is the one using the tools directly, otherwise it leaves all the power in the hands of businesses who's only real goal is maximum profits. And without already possessing domain knowledge to be able to guide, judge, and correct AI along the way, its existence will be of limited use to consumers and business will not feel much pressure to make anything cheaper, it just leaves more margin to funnel to the top.
• qwertyastronaut 10mo ago
  I don’t know if it’s 90%, but I’m shipping in 2 days things that took 2-4 weeks before. Opus 4.5 in particular has been a profound shift. I’m not sure how software dev as a career survives this. I have nearly 0 reason to hire a developer for my company because I just write a spec and Claude does it in one shot. It’s honestly scary, and I hope my company doesn’t fail because as a developer I’m fucked. But… statistically my business will fail. I think in a few years there will only be a handful of software companies—the ones who already have control of distribution. Products can be cloned in a few weeks now; not long until it’s a few minutes. I used to see a new competitor once every six months. Now I see a new competitor every few hours.
  • martinald 10mo ago
    Agreed. Opus 4.5 does feel like a real shift and I have had exactly your experience. I've shipped stuff that would have taken me weeks in days. And really to a much higher quality standard - test suites would have been far smaller if I'd built manually. And probably everything in MVP Bootstrap CSS.
  • bdangubic 10mo ago
    this is roughly same for me
  • llmslave 10mo ago
    Yeah, I really think software engineering is over. Not right now, but Opus 4.5 is incredible, it wont be long before 5 and 5.5 are released. They wont automate everything, but the bar for being able to produce working software will plummet.
  • throwaway31131 10mo ago
    Just out of curiosity, what software product were you making in two weeks before using AI? Or maybe I’m misunderstanding your use of shipping.
    • deleted 10mo ago
      [deleted]
• neilv 10mo ago
  Copying GPL code, with global search&replace of the brand names, has always lowered the cost of software 'development' dramatically.
  • bdangubic 10mo ago
    I would love to see where I can find a full test coverage to paste in for an internal too that I can search&replace on to get it working…
• JohnMakin 10mo ago
  This article mentions cost to ship, but ignores that the largest cost of any software project isn't consumed by how long it takes to get to market, but by maintenance and addition of new features. How is agentic coding doing there? I've only seen huge, unmaintainable messes so far.
  • bdangubic 10mo ago
    one year in, AI slop > Human-written slop
    • JohnMakin 10mo ago
      I am highly skeptical of this claim.
      • bdangubic 10mo ago
        personal experience, not general claim. I am 30-years in the industry and have seen a lot of human-written code…
        • szundi 10mo ago
          Like it means AI cannot be even worse
        • bdangubic 10mo ago
          there are many millions of people writing code… that’s way too many to get any good quality. you might get lucky and get involved with codebase which does not make you dizzy (or outright sick) but most of us are not that lucky
        • martinald 10mo ago
          Agreed. I think a core problem is many developers (on HN) don't realise how "bad" so much human written code is. I've seen unbelievably complex logistics logic coded in... WordPress templates and plugins to take a random example. Actually virtually impossible to figure out - but AI can actually extract all the logic pretty well now.
• an0malous 10mo ago
  Then why is all my software slower, buggier, and with a worse UX?
  • deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
  • HumblyTossed 10mo ago
    Right? Past couple years software quality has taken a shit.
  • 256_ 10mo ago
    I think this reflects one of the biggest fallacies behind LLM adoption; the idea that reducing costs for producers improves the state of affairs for consumers too. I've seen someone compare it to the steam engine. With the steam engine, though, consumers made a trade-off: You pay less, and get (in most cases, I presume) a worse product. With LLMs and other machine learning technologies, maybe if you're paying for the software there's a trade-off (if the software is actually cheaper anyway), but otherwise it doesn't exist. It costs the same amount of money for you to read an LLM-generated article as to read a real one; your internet bill doesn't go down. Likewise for gratis software. It's just worse, with no benefit. Hacker News is full of producers, in this sense, who often benefit from cutting corners, and LLMs allow them to cut corners, so obviously there are plenty of evangelists here. I saw someone else in this comment section mention that gamers who are not in the tech industry don't like "AI". That's to be expected; they're not the producers, so they're not the ones who benefit.
  • Covenant0028 10mo ago
    To reinforce that point: we've got the world's most prominent AI promoting company (MSFT), that has finally realized that Windows Explorer is too slow to start. And this company, with all the formidable powers of AI behind them, can find no way to optimize that other than pre loading the app in memory. And that's for a app that's basically a GUI for `ls`
• paoaoaks 10mo ago
  > written an entire unit/integration test suite in a few hours It’s often hard to ground how “good” blog writers are, but tidbits like this make it easy to disregard the author’s opinions. I’ve worked in many codebases where the test writers share the authors sentiment. They are awful and the tests are at best useless and often harmful. Getting to this point in your career without understanding how to write effective tests is a major red flag.
  • p1necone 10mo ago
    I've used llms to help me write large sets of test cases, but it requires a lot of iteration and the mistakes it makes are both very common and insidious. Stuff like reimplementing large amounts of the code inside the tests because testing the actual code is "too hard", spending inordinate amounts of time covering every single edge case on some tiny bit of input processing unrelated to the main business logic, mocking out the code under test, changing failing tests to match obviously incorrect behavior... basically all the mistakes you expect to see totally green devs who don't understand the purpose of tests making. It saves a shitload of time setting up all the scaffolding and whatnot, but unless they very carefully reviewed and either manually edited or iterated a lot with the LLM I would be almost certain the tests were garbage given my experiences. (This is with fairly current models too btw - mostly sonnet 4 and 4.5, also in fairness to the LLM a shocking proportion of tests written by real people that I've read are also unhelpful garbage, I can't imagine the training data is of great quality)
  • IceDane 10mo ago
    But we have 500% code coverage?!?!
• debo_ 10mo ago
  > I'm sure every organisation has hundreds if not thousands of Excel sheets tracking important business processes that would be far better off as a SaaS app. Far better off for who? People constantly dismiss spreadsheets, but in many cases, they are more powerful, more easily used by the people who have the domain knowledge required to properly implement calculations or workflow, and are more or less universally accessible.
  • nesarkvechnep 10mo ago
    I’m yet to see a spreadsheet workflow successfully replaced by something else.
    • crubier 10mo ago
      Streamlit apps or similar are doing a great job at this where I'm at. As simple to build and deploy as Excel, but with the right data types, the right UI, the right access and version control, the right programming language that LLMs understand, the right SW ecosystem and packages, etc.
      • SauntSolaire 10mo ago
        Are they actually as simply to deploy as Excel? My guess would be that most streamlit apps never make it further than the computer they're written on.
        • crubier 10mo ago
          If you have the right tooling (e.g. Streamlit.io) then yes, literally. To 'deploy' an Excel file I go to Office365 and create my excel file and hit share To 'deploy' a Streamlit file I go to Streamlit and write my single file python code (can be a one liner) and hit share
      • deleted 10mo ago
        [deleted]
    • tehjoker 10mo ago
• on_the_train 10mo ago
  Ai saves me like an hour per month tops. I still don't understand the hype. It's a solution in search of a problem. It can't solve the hard coding problems. And it doesn't say when it can't solve the essay ones either. It's less valuable than resharper. So the business value is maybe $10 a month. That can't finance this industry.
  • averageRoyalty 10mo ago
    I read these sort of comments every so often and I do not understand them. You are in a sea of people telling you that they are developing software much quicker which ticks the required boxes. I understand that for some reason this isn't the case for your work flow, but obviously it has a lot more value for others. If you are a chairmaker and everyone gains access to a machine that can spit out all the chair components but sometimes only spits out 3 legs or makes a mistake on the backs, you might find it pointless. Maybe it can't do all the nice artisan styles you can do. But you can be confident others will take advantage of this chair machine, work around the issues and drive the price down from $20 per chair to $2 per chair. In 24 months, you won't be able to sell enough of your chairs any more.
    • throwaway31131 10mo ago
      Maybe, or maybe the size of the chair market grows because with $2 chairs more buyers enter. The high end is roughly unaffected because they were never going to buy a low end chair.
    • on_the_train 10mo ago
      > You are in a sea of people telling you that they are developing software much quicker which ticks the required boxes But that's exactly not the case. Everyone is wondering what tf this is supposed to be for. People are vehemently against this tech, and yet it gets shoved down our throats although it's prohibitively expensive. Coding should be among the easiest problems to tackle, yet none of the big models can write basic "real" code. They break when things get more complex than pong. And they can't even write a single proper function with modern c++ templating stuff for example.
• nine_k 10mo ago
  Had the cost of building custom software dropped 90%, we would be seeing a flurry of low-cost, decent-quality SaaS offering all over the marketplace, possibly undercutting some established players. From where I sit, right now, this does not seem to be the case. This is as if writing down the code is not the biggest problem, or the biggest time sink, of building software.
  • martinald 10mo ago
    It is happening though internally in businesses I've worked with. A few of them are starting to replace SaaS tools with custom built internal tooling. I suspect this pattern is happening everywhere to a varying level. Often these SaaS tools are expensive, aren't actually that complicated (or if they are complicated, the bit they need isn't) and have limitations. For example, a company I know recently got told their v1 API they relied on on some back office SaaS tool was being deprecated. V2 of the API didn't have the same features. Result = dev spends a week or two rebuilding that tool. It's shipped and in production now. It would have taken similar amount of time to work around the API deprecation.
    • nugger 10mo ago
      I don't understand the timelines here at all.
      • figers 10mo ago
        We were paying for Salesforce, then built the features we needed to do the same tracking into our interal tool and got rid of Salesforce to save money and simplify the data internally across departments
        • raw_anon_1111 10mo ago
          And now you have to spend money on developers for a system that “doesn’t make the beer taste better”. Does it give you a competitive advantage in the market?
• jackie293746 10mo ago
  [dead]
• bdavid21wnec 10mo ago
  I keep seeing articles like these popup. I am in the industry but not in the “AI” industry. What I have no concept of, is the current subsidized, VC funded, anywhere close to what the final product will be? I always fall back to the Uber paradox. Yes it was great at first, now it’s 3x what it cost and has only given cabs pricing power. This was good for consumers to start but now it’s just another part of the k shaped economy. So is that ultimately where AI goes? Top percent can afford a high monthly subscription and the not so fortunate get there free 5 minutes per month
  • martinald 10mo ago
    But even if that did happen, the open source models are excellent and cost virtually nothing? Like I prefer Opus 4.5 and Gemini 3 to the open weights models, but if Anthropic or Google upped the pricing 10x then everyone would switch to the open weights models. Arguably you could say that the Chinese labs may stop releasing them, true, but even if all model development stopped today then they'd still be extremely useful and a decent competitor.
    • bdavid21wnec 10mo ago
      Again I’m not in the “AI” industry so I don’t fully understand the economics and don’t run open models locally. What’s the cost to run this stuff locally, what type of hardware is required. When you say virtually nothing, do you mean that’s because you already have a 2k laptop or gpu? Again I am only asking because I don’t know. Would these local models run OK on my 2016 Mac Pro intel or do I need to upgrade to the latest M4 chip with 32GB memory for it to work correctly?
      • criemen 10mo ago
        The large open-weights models aren't really usable for local running (even with current hardware), but multiple providers compete on running inference for you, so it's reasonable to assume that there is and will be a functioning marketplace.
      • rimeice 10mo ago
• e10jc 10mo ago
  I totally agree with you. I am working on a new platform right now for a niche industry. Maybe theres $10m ARR to make total in the industry. Last year, it wouldn’t be worth the effort to raise, hire a PM, a few devs, QA, etc. But for a solo dev like myself with AI, it definitely is worth it now.
• jdmoreira 10mo ago
  I must be holding wrong then because I do use Claude Code all the time and I do think its quite impressive… still I cant see where the productivity gains go nor am I even sure they exist (they might, I just cant tell for sure!)
  • hurturue 10mo ago
    if you back and forth with the model, and discuss/approve every change it does, that's the problem. you need to give it a bigish thing so it can work 15 min on it. and in those 15 min you prepare the next one(s)
    • jdmoreira 10mo ago
      Sure. But am I supposed to still understand that code at some point? Am I supposed to ask other team members to review and approve that code as if I had written it? I'm still trying to ship quality work by the same standards I had 3 or 5 years ago.
      • hurturue 10mo ago
        when compiler appeared assembly programmers would complain all day how ugly and inneficient the generated code was if you want to get the productivity gain you need to figure out how to solve the code review problem
        • bccdee 10mo ago
          Your solution is, "just ship worse code, it's probably fine"? I think it's your standards that have fallen 90%…
          • onehair 10mo ago
            No not, worse code. Wrong code. Code filled with bugs. Code filled with lawsuits too. Code that make you look productive this month while you prepare to leave the company, and turn out to be absolute pooopoo the day after you leave.
• deleted 10mo ago
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• azov 10mo ago
  If the cost of building software dropped so much - where is that software?.. Was there an explosion of useful features in any software product you use? A jump in quality? Anything tangible an end user can see?..
  • Anamon 10mo ago
    This is also one of my arguments. I'm exaggerating, of course, but to me it feels like major software products and services haven't been adding new features for years now. What we get with updates these days are new restrictions on use, and "streamlining", i.e. the removal of features. Usually with the justification that the effort to maintain them was too high. I used to look at release notes excited about what new features I might get. Now I read them with some level of anxiety. I hope none of the inevitably removed features are ones I used. The AI evangelist talks to me about 10×. Meanwhile, all the software I use is becoming less functional, less configurable, less powerful, less secure, less stable, and in general crappier by the day.
• deleted 10mo ago
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• atmavatar 10mo ago
  > Has the cost of building software just dropped 90%? I believe Betteridge's law of headlines [1] applies here: No. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
• deleted 10mo ago
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• zackmorris 10mo ago
  *90% so far.. I've only been working with AI for a couple of months, but IMHO it's over. The Internet Age which ran 30 years from roughly 1995-2025 has ended and we've entered the AI Age (maybe the last age). I know people with little programming experience who have already passed me in productivity, and I've been doing this since the 80s. And that trend is only going to accelerate and intensify. The main point that people are having a hard time seeing, probably due to denial, is that once problem solving is solved at any level with AI, then it's solved at all levels. We're lost in the details of LLMs, NNs, etc, but not seeing the big picture. That if AI can work through a todo list, then it can write a todo list. It can check if a todo list is done. It can work recursively at any level of the problem solving hierarchy and in parallel. It can come up with new ideas creatively with stable diffusion. It can learn and it can teach. And most importantly, it can evolve. Based on the context I have before me, I predict that at the end of 2026 (coinciding with the election) America and probably the world will enter a massive recession, likely bigger than the Housing Bubble popping. Definitely bigger than the Dot Bomb. Where too many bad decisions compounded for too many decades converge to throw away most of the quality of life gains that humanity has made since WWII, forcing us to start over. I'll just call it the Great Dumbpression. If something like UBI is the eventual goal for humankind, or soft versions of that such as democratic socialism, it's on the other side of a bottleneck. One where 1000 billionaires and a few trillionaires effectively own the world, while everyone else scratches out a subsistence income under neofeudalism. One where as much food gets thrown away as what the world consumes, and a billion people go hungry. One where some people have more than they could use in countless lifetimes, including the option to cheat death, while everyone else faces their own mortality. "AI was the answer to Earth's problems" could be the opening line of a novel. But I've heard this story too many times. In those stories, the next 10 years don't go as planned. Once we enter the Singularity and the rate of technological progress goes exponential, it becomes impossible to predict the future. Meaning that a lot of fringe and unthinkable timelines become highly likely. It's basically the Great Filter in the Drake equation and Fermi paradox. This is a little hard for me to come to terms with after a lifetime of little or no progress in the areas of tech that I care about. I remember in the late 90s when people were talking about AI and couldn't find a use for it, so it had no funding. The best they could come up with was predicting the stock market, auditing, genetics, stuff like that. Who knew that AI would take off because of self-help, adult material and parody? But I guess we should have known. Every other form of information technology followed those trends. Because of that lack of real tech as labor-saving devices to help us get real work done, there's been an explosion of phantom tech that increases our burden through distraction and makes our work/life balance even less healthy as underemployment. This is why AI will inevitably be recruited to demand an increase in productivity from us for the same income, not decrease our share of the workload. What keeps me going is that I've always been wrong about the future. Maybe one of those timelines sees a great democratization of tech, where even the poorest people have access to free problem solving tech that allows them to build assistants that increase their leverage enough to escape poverty without money. In effect making (late-stage) capitalism irrelevent. If the rate of increasing equity is faster than the rate of increasing excess, then we have a small window of time to catch up before we enter a Long Now of suffering, where wealth inequality approaches an asymptote making life performative, pageantry for the masses who must please an emperor with no clothes. In a recent interview with Mel Robbins in episode 715 of Real Time, Bill Maher said "my book would be called: It's Not Gonna Be That" about the future not being what we think it is. I can't find a video, but he describes it starting around the 19:00 mark: https://podcasts.musixmatch.com/podcast/real-time-with-bill-maher-01he5svaw0mdfsd4v1p4fvbahy/episode/ep-715-mel-robbins-killer-mike-donna-brazile-01kanb7n9d79bbavcb8xwdmpnh https://podcasts.musixmatch.com/podcast/real-time-with-bill-... Our best hope for the future is that we're wrong about it.
• SoftTalker 10mo ago
  Where are the billions of dollars spent on GPUs and new data centers accounted for in this estimation?
  • bdavid21wnec 10mo ago
    Ya completely agree, these companies will eventually push these costs to the consumer, might be in 1-2yrs, but it will eventually happen and though regulatory capture make it harder and harder to run local AI models because of “security” reasons.
• tschellenbach 10mo ago
  It depends. For AI to work for large projects (did a post on this forever ago in AI terms. https://getstream.io/blog/cursor-ai-large-projects/ https://getstream.io/blog/cursor-ai-large-projects/) But you need: a staff level engineer to guide it, great standardization and testing best practices. And yes in that situation you can go 10-50x faster. Many teams/products are not in that environment though.
  • andybak 10mo ago
    I work on a big ball of open source spaghetti and AI has become invaluable in helping me navigate my way through it. Even when it's wrong - it gives me valuable clues.
• Agingcoder 10mo ago
  > One objection I hear a lot is that LLMs are only good at greenfield projects. I'd push back hard on this. I've spent plenty of time trying to understand 3-year-old+ codebases where everyone who wrote it has left. Where I am, 3 year old is greenfield, and old and large is 20 years old and has 8million lines of nasty c++. I’ll have to wait a bit more I think …
  • glouwbug 10mo ago
    The argument is building anew is 90% cheaper. I can’t see LLMs contributing to anything this size when they can’t remember what I said 4 messages ago
• devnull3 10mo ago
  I think the cost of prototyping has definitely gone down. Developing production grade software which you want to people to rely on and pay for it is not gone down so much. The "weak" link is still human. Debugging complex production issues needs intimate knowledge of the code. Not gonna happen in next 3-4 years atleast.
  • glouwbug 10mo ago
    These tools do two things: 1. Rob one’s understanding of the design and implementation 2. Give the unqualified enough confidence to contribute
• vb-8448 10mo ago
  It's not just about "building" ... who is going to maintain all this new sub-par code pushed to production every day? Who is going to patch all bugs, edge cases and security vulnerabilities?
  • soco 10mo ago
    The theory goes very simple, you tell the agent to patch the bug. Now the practice though...
    • fullstackwife 10mo ago
      yeah, in practice: would you like to onboard a Boeing 747 where some of the bugs were patched by some agents, what is the percentage risk of malfunction you are going to accept as a passenger?
      • emodendroket 10mo ago
        No. But most software products are nowhere near that sensitive and very few of them are developed with the level of caution and rigor appropriate for a safety-critical component.
      • TuringNYC 10mo ago
        >> yeah, in practice: would you like to onboard a Boeing 747 where some of the bugs were patched by some agents, In this case, the traditional human process hasn't gone well either.
        • dboreham 10mo ago
          The bugs were mostly caused by MBAs, who one assumes will remain.
        • geon 10mo ago
          It is working great as long as it is adhered to and budgeted.
        • 10mo ago
• sublinear 10mo ago
  Perhaps the cost will drop over time, but it will be because writing code is becoming more accessible. It's not just because of AI, but the natural progress of education and literacy on the topic that would have happened anyway. What I see are salaries stagnating and opportunity for new niche roles or roles being redefined to have more technical responsibility. Is this not the future we all expected before AI hype anyway? People need to relax and refocus on what matters.
• cloogshicer 10mo ago
  > I've had Claude Code write an entire unit/integration test suite in a few hours (300+ tests) I'd love to see someone do this, or a similar task, live on stream. I always feel like an idiot when I read things like this because despite using Claude Code a lot I've never been able to get anything of that magnitude out of it that wasn't slop/completely unusable, to the point where I started to question if I hadn't been faster writing everything by hand. Claiming that software is now 90% cheaper feels absurd to me and I'd love to understand better where this completely different worldview comes from. Am I using the tools incorrectly? Different domains/languages/ecosystems?
  • fraud 10mo ago
    100% agreed. I use Claude Code to write 90% of my code at this point, but have found that it is genuinely worse than a junior at writing meaningful test cases. Most of the time it will make up interfaces or mock things incorrectly etc to the point where I just give up and write them myself. The bulk of the “tests” it writes test things which are meaningless (does the interface exist etc). This is with typescript + vitest with opus 4.5.
• nonameiguess 10mo ago
  I don't really build software any more and have moved into other parts of the business. But I'm still a huge user of software and I'd just echo all the other comments asking if it's so easy to get all these great tools built and shipped, where are they? I can see that YouTube is flooded with auto-generated content. I can see that blogspam has skyrocketed beyond belief. I can see that the number of phishing texts and voicemails I get every day has gone through the roof. I don't see any flood of new CNCF incubating projects. I don't see that holy grail entire OS comparable to Linux but written in Rust. I don't see the other holy grail new web browser that can compete with Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. It's possible people are shipping more of the stripped down Jira clones designed for a team of ten that gets 60 customers and stops receiving updates after 2 years but that's not the kind of software that would be visible to me. If you're replacing spreadsheets with a single-purpose web UI with proper access control and concurrent editing that doesn't need Sharepoint or Google Workspaces, fine, but if you're telling me that's going to revolutionize the entire industry and economy and justify trillions of dollars in new data centers, I don't think so. I think you need to actually compete with Sharepoint and Google Workspaces. Supposedly, Google and Microsoft claim to be using LLMs internally more than ever, but they're publicly traded companies. If it's having some huge impact, surely we'll see their margins skyrocket when they have no more labor costs, right?
• blauditore 10mo ago
  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.
  • tobyjsullivan 10mo ago
    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).
    • aeonfox 10mo ago
      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.
      • deleted 10mo ago
        [deleted]
      • theshrike79 10mo ago
        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.
• Normal_gaussian 10mo ago
  > 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'm not sure about this. The tests I've gotten out in a few hours are the kind I'd approve if another dev sent then but haven't really ended up finding meaningful issues.
  • torben-friis 10mo ago
    Have you noticed how it's never "I got this awesome code!"? It's always "I got good code, trust me". People say their prompts are good, awesome code is being generated, it solved a month's worth of work in a minute. Nobody comes with receipts.
    • dboreham 10mo ago
      I keep seeing posts like this so I decided to video record all my LLM coding sessions and post them on YouTube. Early days, I only had the idea on Saturday.
      • onraglanroad 10mo ago
        Possibly it would have been a good idea to include a link to the channel?
  • Aeolun 10mo ago
    I find I get better tests if I use agents to generate tests.
  • martinald 10mo ago
    Just to be clear, they weren't stupid 'is 1+1=2' type tests. I had the agent scan the UX of the app being built, find all the common flows and save them to a markdown file. I then asked the agent to find edge cases for them and come up with tests for those scenarios. I then set off parallel subagents to develop the the test suite. It found some really interesting edge cases running them - so even if they never failed again there is value there. I do realise in hindsight it makes it sound like the tests were just a load of nonsense. I was blown away with how well Claude Code + Opus 4.5 + 6 parallel subagents handled this.
• bitwize 10mo ago
  Maybe I'm holding it wrong, but I don't actually see the huge productivity gains from LLM-assisted software development. Work is leaning on us to use AI—not requiring it yet, but we're at DEFCON 3, borderline 2 (DEFCON 1 being a Shopify situation). My team's experience is that it needs LOTS of handholding and manual fixing to produce even something basic that's remotely fit for production use. I closed a comment from ~2.5y ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36594800 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36594800) with this sentence: "I'm not sure that incorporating LLMs into programming is (yet) not just an infinite generator of messes for humans to clean up." My experience with it is convincing me that that's just what it is. When the bills come due, the VC money dries up, and the AI providers start jacking up their prices... there's probably going to be a boom market for humans to clean up AI messes.
• rmnclmnt 10mo ago
  Can we also take into account the mental cost associates with building software? Because how I see it, managing output from agents is way more exhausting than doing it ourself. And obviously the cost of not upskilling in intricate technical details as much as before (aka staying at the high level perspective) will have to be paid at some point
  • djmips 10mo ago
    It is pretty hard work huh! I was surprised. In my case, I was doing a personal project but in the end I felt a little crispy although the result was succesful.
    • rmnclmnt 10mo ago
      Honestly now I only use agents for very narrow surgical scopes to avoid feeling numbed. It removed the fun of actually dreaming and building things
• MangoToupe 10mo ago
  No. Not unless your business wasn't competitive to begin with
• dclnbrght 10mo ago
  Domain knowledge is the moat, we need to rethink career planning https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46197349 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46197349
• criemen 10mo ago
  > This takes a fairly large mindset shift, but the hard work is the conceptual thinking, not the typing. But the hard work always was the conceptual thinking? At least at and beyond the Senior level, for me it was always the thinking that's the hard work, not converting the thoughts into code.
• liampulles 10mo ago
  I contracted briefly on a post-LLM-boom Excel modernization project (which ended up being consulting mainly, because I had to spend all my time explaining key considerations for a long-running software project that would fit their domain). The company had already tried to push 2 poor data analysts who kind of new Python into the role of vibe coding a Python desktop application that they would then distribute to users. In the best case scenario, these people would have vibe coded an application where the state was held in the UI, with no concept of architectural seperation and no prospects of understanding what the code was doing a couple months from inception (except through the lens of AI sycophancy), all packaged as a desktop application which would generate excel spreadsheets that they would then send to each other via Email (for some reason, this is what they wanted - probably because it is what they know). You can't blame the business for this, because there are no technical people in these orgs. They were very smart people in this case, doing high-end consultancy work themselves, but they are not technical. If I tried to do vibe chemistry, I'm sure it would be equally disastrous. The only thing vibe coding unlocks for these orgs by themselves is to run headfirst into an application which does horrendous things with customer data. It doesn't free up time for me as the experienced dev to bring the cost down, because again, there is so much work needed to bring these orgs to the point where they can actually run and own an internal piece of software that I'm not doing much coding anyway.
  • Havoc 10mo ago
    > post-LLM-boom Excel modernization project Well there is a terrifying thought
• henning 10mo ago
  By making up numbers and not supplying any evidence, you can come to any conclusion you like! Then you get to draw a graph with no units on it. Finally, you can say things that are objectively false like "These assertions are rapidly becoming completely false".
• bob1029 10mo ago
  In context of B2B SaaS products that require a high degree of customization per client, I think there could be an argument for this figure. The biggest bottleneck I have seen is converting the requirements into code fast enough to prove to the customer that they didn't give us the right/sufficient requirements. Up until recently, you had to avoid spending time on code if you thought the requirements were bad. Throwing away 2+ weeks of work on ambiguity is a terrible time. Today, you could hypothetically get lucky on a single prompt and be ~99% of the way there in one shot. Even if that other 1% sucks to clean up, imagine if it was enough to get the final polished requirements out of the customer. You could crap out an 80% prototype in the time it takes you to complete one daily standup call. Is the fact that it's only 80% there bad? I don't think so in this context. Handing a customer something that almost works is much more productive than fucking around with design documents and ensuring requirements are perfectly polished to developer preferences. A slightly wrong thing gets you the exact answer a lot faster than nothing at all.
• sharpy 10mo ago
  I think AI can be really powerful tool. I am more productive with it than not, but a lot of my time interacting with AI is reviewing its code, finding problems with it (I always find some issues with it), and telling it what to do differently multiple times, and eventually giving up, and fixing up the code by hand. But it definitely has reduced average time it takes me to implement features. But I also worry that not everyone would be responsible and check/fix AI generated code.
• CobrastanJorji 10mo ago
  Man, that's a big title. I can't wait to see the data on how the cost has dropped so far. > AI Agents however in my mind massively reduce... Nevermind. It's a vibe 90%.
  • marcosdumay 10mo ago
    That. I was expecting some overview of the last couple of decades in a "There's no Silver Bullet" fashion. Instead it's some guy that claims it takes a team to make CI/CD for something he can vibe-code in a day, and that agentic code totally solves the complexity problems caused by too much React.
    • bitwize 10mo ago
      Even if that were true, so we've made development needlessly more complicated, only to gain back the time lost by running numberwang across enough datacenters to fill a small country? You haven't abstracted anything away, Morty, just created another layer of shit. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22601623 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22601623
      • marcosdumay 10mo ago
        Oh, if LLMs did actually solve the problem of too much React, that would by itself drop the cost of doing the software the author cares about by close to 90%. And yes, it's a completely self-imposed problem that many people don't have at all. But LLMs make it worse, and the author is celebrating that it's worse now.
      • Anamon 10mo ago
        Love that Numberwang reference! A pretty apt description of how this stuff feels sometimes.
• mlhpdx 10mo ago
  If software actually is 90% cheaper to build in 2026 there will be 10x the simple apps and abandonware to follow. Throwaway software like throwaway phones. It’ll be weird.
• krupan 10mo ago
  I love how LLMs have made everyone forget how hard it is to verify software correctness and how hard it is to maintain existing software. There is endless gushing about how quickly LLMs can write code. Whenever I point out the LLMs make a lot of mistakes people just wave their hands and say software is easy to validate. The huge QA departments at all software shops would beg to disagree, along with the CVE database, the zero day brokers, etc. But you know, whatever, they're just boomers right?
• simonw 10mo ago
  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.
  • mountainriver 10mo ago
    I’ve found they are able to compose well, let it build small components and stitch them together
    • visarga 10mo ago
      That is a good approach, bottom up, manage complexity. But the general picture is - you set the direction and hold the model responsible, it does the actual work. Think of it as your work is the negative of the AI work, it writes the code, you ensure it tests that code. The better test harness you create, the better the AI works. The real task is to constrain the AI into a narrow channel of valid work.
  • loandbehold 10mo ago
    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.
    • nuclearnicer 10mo ago
      This is great. Asking questions of library code is a big pattern of mine too. Here's an example I saw on twitter. Asking an LLM to document a protocol from the codebase: https://ampcode.com/threads/T-f02e59f8-e474-493d-9558-11fddf823672?q=tmux https://ampcode.com/threads/T-f02e59f8-e474-493d-9558-11fddf... Do you think you will be able to capture any of this extra value? I think I'm faster at coding, but the overall corporate project timeline feels about the same. I feel more relaxed and confident that the work can be done. Not sure how to get a raise out of this.
• dzonga 10mo ago
  pretty decent article - but what it misses is most of these agents are trained on bad code - which is open source. so what does this mean in practice? for people working on proprietary systems (cost will never go down) - the code is not on github, maybe hosted on an internal VCS - bitbucket etc. the agents were never trained on that code - yeah they might help with docs (but are they using the latest docs?) for others - the agents spit bad code, make assumptions that don't exist, call api's that don't exist or have been deprecated ? each of those you need an experienced builder who has 1. technical know-how 2. domain expertise ? so has the cost of experienced builder(s) gone down ? I don't think so - I think it has gone up what people are vibecoding out there - is mostly tools / apps that deal in closed systems (never really interact with the outside world), scripts were ai can infer based on what was done before etc but are these people building anything new ? I have also noticed there's a huge conflation with regards to - cost & complexity. zirp drove people to build software on very complex abstractions eg kubernetes, nextjs, microservices etc - hence people thought they needed huge armies of people etc. however we also know the inverse is true that most software can be built by teams of 1-3 people. we have countless proof of this. so people think to reduce cost is to use a.i agents instead of addressing the problem head-on - built software in a simpler manner. will ai help - yeah but not to the extent of what is being sold or written daily.
  • simonw 10mo ago
    The idea that LLMs were trained on miscellaneous scraped low quality code may have been true a year ago, but I suspect it is no longer true today All of the major model vendors are competing on how well their models can code. The key to getting better code out of the model is improving the quality of the code that it is trained on. Filtering training data for high quality code is easier than filtering for high quality data if other types. My strong hunch is that the quality of code being used to train current frontier models is way higher than it was a year ago.
  • Tepix 10mo ago
    > these agents are trained on bad code - which is open source. This is doubtful and not what I've seen in over 30 years in the industry. People who are ashamed of their source code don't make it Open Source. In general, Open Source will be higher quality than closed source. Sure, these days you will need to avoid github repositories made by students for their homework assignments. I don't think that's a problem.
• samlinnfer 10mo ago
  The cost of writing software had dropped by 90% since outsourcing was invented and all the software jobs have moved to India was I was told 15 years ago.
• lisbbb 10mo ago
  This article was more of an advertisement for...something than any meaningful commentary. How good are tests written by AI, really? The junk "coverage" unit tests sure, but well thought out integration tests? No way. Testing code is difficult, some AI slop isn't going to make that easier because someone has to know the code and the infrastructure it is going in to and reason about all of it.
• xdc0 10mo ago
  Betteridge's law proven correct once again. The answer to the headline is: no. Perhaps it will be true in the future, nobody knows. I'm skeptical the extent to which people publishing articles like this use AI to build non-trivial software, and by non-trivial I mean _imperfect_ codebases that have existed for a few years, battle tested, with scars from hotfixes to deal with fires and compromises to handle weird edge cases/workarounds and especially a codebase where many developers have contributed to it over time. Just this morning I was using Gemini 3 Pro working on some trivial feature, I asked it about how to go about solving an issue and it completely hallucinated a solution suggesting to use a non-existing function that was supposedly exposed by a library. This situation has been the norm in my experience for years now and, while this has improved over time, it's still very, very common occurrence. If it can't get these use cases down to an acceptable successful degree, I just don't see how much I can trust it to take the reins and do it all with an agentic approach. And this is just a pure usability perspective. If we consider the economics aspect, none of the AI services are profitable, they are all heavily subsidized by investor cash. Is it sustainable long term? Today it seems as if there is an infinite amount of cash but my bet is that this will give in before the cost of building software drops by 90%.
  • Pannoniae 10mo ago
    >I asked it about how to go about solving an issue and it completely hallucinated a solution suggesting to use a non-existing function that was supposedly exposed by a library. Yeah, that's a huge pain point in LLMs. Personally, I'm way less impacted by them because my codebase is only minimally dependent on library stuff (by surface area) so if something doesn't exist or whatever, I can just tell the LLM to also implement the thing it hallucinated :P These hallucinations are usually a good sign of "this logically should exist but it doesn't exist yet" as opposed to pure bs.
• CobrastanJorji 10mo ago
  I love the hand drawn chart. Apparently "Open Source" was invented around 2005, which significantly reduced development cost, then AWS was invented in 2011 or so and made development even cheaper, but then, oh no, in 2018 "complexity" happened and development became harder!
  • zqna 10mo ago
    In 2018 We had kubernetes, which improved the development speed another 300%!
    • RajT88 10mo ago
      Kubernetes with production workloads allowed companies to finally realize the "fail fast" ethos.
      • nrhrjrjrjtntbt 10mo ago
        With Kubernetes this hated it must be boring enough to safely start using!
        • tormeh 10mo ago
          It's boring, alright. You're gonna curse this moment when you realize you've become a yaml engineer. Actually, I bet AI is pretty good at creating those damn manifests. It's mostly regurgitation after all.
  • jcelerier 10mo ago
    I don't read this as when open-source was invented, but when it happened for the corporate world. In 2002 it was a very reasonable choice for $BIG_COMPANY to use a proprietary web server, e.g. IIS. In 2008 that would have been really be weird.
    • CobrastanJorji 10mo ago
      But why did that make development cheaper? An enterprise copy of Windows with IIS cost maybe a thousand bucks, right? Maybe there were more costs, my knowledge is, y'know, 23 years out of date.
• alex-ross 10mo ago
  The cost of building "something" has dropped 90%. The cost of building "something good" has maybe dropped 30%. The gap between a demo and a product is still enormous.
• gtsop 10mo ago
  [dead]
• rudedogg 10mo ago
  The author teaches AI workshops. Nothing wrong with that, but I think it should be disclosed here. A lot of money is riding on LLMs being financially successful which explains a lot of the hype.
• hoppp 10mo ago
  The cost of training agents is in the billions so Im not sure the cost dropped, it just shifted and now the cost distribution is different
• codyb 10mo ago
  Writing a giant unit test suite being the primary example that stuck out to me from that article really doesn't give a lot of credence to the question? And yet, the conclusion seems to be as if the answer is yes? Until AI can work organizationally as opposed to individually it'll necessarily be restricted in its abilities to produce gains beyond relatively marginal improvements (Saved 20 hours of developer time on unit tests) for a project that took X weeks/months/years to work it's way through Y number of people. So sure, simple projects, simple asks, unit tests, projects handled by small teams of close knit coworkers who know the system in and out and already have the experience to differentiate between good code and bad? I could see that being reduced by 90%. But, it doesn't seem to have done much for organizational efficiency here at BigCo and unit tests are pretty much the very tip of a project's iceberg here. I know a lot of people are using the AI agents, and I know a lot of people who aren't, and I worry for the younger engineers who I'm not sure have the chops to distinguish between good, bad, and irrelevant and thus leave in clearly extraneous code, and paragraphs in their documents. And as for the senior engineers with the chops, they seem to do okay with it although I can certainly tell you they're not doing ten times more than they were four years ago. I kinda rambled at the end there, all that to say... organizational efficiency is the bug to solve. (It's very difficult, I believe the 2D interfaces we've had for the last 40 years or whatever are not truly meeting the needs of the vast cathedrals of code we're working in, same thing for our organizations, our code reviews, everything man)
• shusson 10mo ago
  The cost of generating lines of code which look good has dropped 90%.... Take that as you will.
• ed_elliott_asc 10mo ago
  Im really liking it for writing boring code. As an example I wanted a plugin for visual studio. In the past I would have spent hours on it or just not bothered but I used Claude code to write it, it isn’t beautiful or interesting code, it lacks tests but it works and saves me time. It isn’t worth anything, won’t ever be deployed into production, I’ll likely share it but won’t try to monetise it, it is boring ugly code but more than good enough for its purpose. Writing little utility apps has never been simpler and these are probably 90% cheaper
  • skydhash 10mo ago
    A plugin that does what exactly? A lot of comments here and under other posts are just declaring things with the following template: "I wanted to do X, but before it would took me N amount of hours, but now with LLM tool L, it has taken me way less time. I can't share anything about X, but LLM tool L is very useful. Just trust me, bro"
    • foobarbecue 10mo ago
      My favorite is this advert I keep getting that says "Imagine being able to build an app with your name on it!" I'm like... if you're struggling with the part where you put your name on it... and that's the priority.. I don't know what to tell you. Ah, here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FEWLvKztD0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FEWLvKztD0
• mikewarot 10mo ago
  This wouldn't be the first time that the cost of software radically dropped. It happened back during the early 1960s for the first time when IBM introduced the System 360, which included backward compatibility for the 1401. Prior to this point, the maximum lifespan of software was tied to that of the computer in question. The software would be re-written for the next architecture, every time a new computer was purchased. The advent of the PC, and the appearance of Turbo Pascal, Visual Basic, and spreadsheets that could be automated made it possible for almost anyone to write useful applications. If it gets cheaper to write code, we'll just find more uses for it.
• ls-a 10mo ago
  My tell-tale sign that AI is moving the needle is the disappearance of the concept of leetcode. If you've done an interview lately you would know AI hasn't moved any needles yet
• jdswain 10mo ago
  Software Development is much more than writing code. Writing code may have become 90% easier, but a lot of the other development tasks haven't appreciably changed due to AI, although that might come. So, for now at least the answer to the question posed in the headline is no. An exception might be building something that is well specified in advance, maybe because it's a direct copy of existing software.
• deleted 10mo ago
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• vinipolicena 10mo ago
  > Software engineering has got - in my opinion, often needlessly - complicated, with people rushing to very labour intensive patterns such as TDD, microservices, super complex React frontends and Kubernetes. TDD as defined by Kent Beck (https://tidyfirst.substack.com/p/canon-tdd https://tidyfirst.substack.com/p/canon-tdd ) doesn't belong in that list. Beck's TDD is a way to order work you'd do anyway: slice the requirement, automate checks to confirm behavior and catch regressions, and refactor to keep the code healthy. It's not a bloated workflow, and it generalizes well to practices like property-based testing and design-by-contract.
• Glyptodon 10mo ago
  I'd like to believe that this is the case, and it may well be the case that we do end up there. But currently reproduceability, reliability, correctness, and consistency are lacking. There's also meaningful domain variance.
• nrhrjrjrjtntbt 10mo ago
  Building yes. Maintaining no. Cars wont be cheap because bumper prices fell 90% But.... Obviously AI is coming for the whole car so I will operate on tbe assumption 90% is coming. We will eventually be agentic orhcestra conductors.
• dubeye 10mo ago
  it has for me. I'm probably paying less than 10%, saving on seas, occasional contract fees for custom integrations, and zapier fees linking them together. I've no idea what's going on in the enterprise space, but in the small 1-10 employee space, absolutely
• nelox 10mo ago
  How we would design a rigorous study that measures total cost of ownership when teams integrate AI assistance, including later maintenance and defect rates, rather than just initial output speed?
• djmips 10mo ago
  It's fascinating to read these comments - I believe everyone. Some are getting huge productivity gains and others very little - so perhaps we are not in the same business. I know that I've ranged over various work - all called software development and the variety of work was quite different - some I wouldn't call challenging but still needed a lot of manual labor - perhaps this is the type of work that finds easy wins from AI automation. Still other work was much more challenging but I've never really attempted to use AI in my work because it was forbidden by policy. I've used AI at home for fun projects and it has helped me with languages I've never used before but I've never come close to 90% productivity boost. Anyway, fascinating!
  • ehnto 10mo ago
    I agree with your observations, in my own job I cover a great deal of the aspects of all software development practices for a few clients. Probably something you'd normally have a bunch of different roles do. Not because of AI, I have been in this role since before the AI boom, this is just how agency work is sometimes. My observation is that there is perhaps 15% of my job that has been boosted by AI by quite a lot, and the rest it hasn't touched much at all. Most of the job just isn't coding badically. The code generation aspect is a bit flawed too because to get good results I often spend more time collating requirements and engineering the prompt that I again could have just done it quicker myself. There is a sweet spot in there where the requirements were easy to write out, and the code was simple enough but there is a lot to write, that it's nice to not have to write it myself. But even then I am finding that AI is often not successful, and if it takes three tries to get it to do the work properly then there is no productivity gain. Often enough time is lost to the failed attempts. Usually there isn't that much code to write, but it's fairly complex and needs to be correct, which is where I find LLMs have too many failed attempts and waste time. (I am an 18+ year "everything" developer, my experiences are from using Claude Code)
• arach 10mo ago
  this probably levels the playing field for a while, and then dramatically raises the bar over a longer period of time as better engineers and better designers get more leverage with lower nuisance in the form of meetings and other people, they will be able to build better software with a level of taste and sophistication that wouldn't make sense if you had to hand type everything
• deleted 10mo ago
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• 0xbadcafebee 10mo ago
  I think the whole software industry has tried to obscure the fact that most companies who hire software engineers are writing exactly the same code as every other company. How many people here have written the same goddamn webapp at the last 3 companies they've been to? Anyone ever wonder why nobody just publishes blueprints to software and licenses that blueprint to a single engineer to customize? Because there's a lot less money in doing that, versus selling a lot more software add-ons/SaaS/etc. There is no value-add to hiring software engineers to build basic apps. That's what AI will be good for: repeating what has already been written and published to the web somewhere. The commoditized software that we shouldn't have been paying to write to begin with. But AI won't help you with all the rest of the cost. The maintenance, which is 80% of your cost anyway. The infrastructure, monitoring, logging, metrics, VCS hosting, security scanning, QA, product manager, designer, data scientist, sales/marketing, customer support. All of that is part of the cost of building and running the software. The software engineers that churn out the initial app is a smaller cost than it seems. And we're still gonna need skilled engineers to use the AI, because AI is an idiot savant. Personally I think 50% cost reduction in human engineers is the best you can expect. That's not nothing, but that's probably like a 10% savings on total revenue expenditure.
  • KellyCriterion 10mo ago
    >> infrastructure, monitoring, logging, metrics, VCS hosting, security scanning, QA << Well, arent these the topics for what we have AI-managed infrastructure now? :-D LOL
• BloondAndDoom 10mo ago
  Can someone help me out how to get started in this kind of coding setup? I haven't written production code for the last 8 years, but has prior development experience for about 17 years (ranging from C++, full stack, .NET, PHP and bunch of other stuff). I used AI at personal level, and know the basics. Used Claude/Github to me help fix and write some pieces of the code in languages I wasn't familiar with. But it seems like people talking and deploying large real world projects in short-"er" amount of time. An old colleague of mine whom I trust mentioned his startup is developing code 3x faster than we used to develop software. Is there resource that explains the current best practices (presumably it's all new)? Where do I even start?
• lrsaturnino 10mo ago
  The cost of building the first version of FB has dropped 90% The cost of building the next FB stays the same More sophisticated tools mean more refined products. If an easier and cheaper method for working carbon fiber becomes broadly available, it won't mean you get less money; it means you'll now be cramming carbon fiber in the silverware, in the shoes, in baby strollers, EVERYWHERE. The cost of a carbon fiber bike will drop 90%, but teams will be doing a LOT more. You could say the cost per line of code has dropped 90%, but the number of lines of code written will 100x.
• jmward01 10mo ago
  I am a believer in the new agentic coding tools (I wasn't 6 months ago) but the delays and time it takes to build something haven't really changed even though everyone I know is using them. What I see is what has always been there: Product doesn't understand the product because if it was easy to understand then someone else would have solved the problem already and we wouldn't have jobs. This means you need to iterate and discuss and figure out just like always. The iterations can be bolder, bigger, etc and maybe a bit faster but ultimately software scales np so a 10x improvement in -individual- capability doesn't scale to 10x improvement in -organizational- capability. Let me put it another way. If your problem was so simple you could write a 200 word prompt to fully articulate it then you probably don't have much of a moat and aren't providing enough value to be competitive.
• DrewADesign 10mo ago
  As I said in a previous post: I think the 90/90 rule comes into play. We all know Tom Cargill quote (even if we’ve never seen it attributed): The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time. It feels like a gigantic win when it carves through that first 90%… like, “wow, I’m almost done and I just started!” And it ‘is’ a genuine win! But for me it’s dramatically less useful after that. The things that trip up experienced developers really trip up LLMs and sometimes trying to break the task down into teeny weeny pieces and cajole it into doing the thing is worse than not having it. So great with the backhoe tasks but mediocre-to-counterproductive with the shovel tasks. I have a feeling a lot of the impressiveness depends on which kind of tasks take up most of your dev time. If your job is pumping out low-effort websites that are essentially marketing tools for small businesses, it must feel like magic. I think the more magical it feels for your use case, the less likely your use case will be earning you a living 2 years from now.
  • janalsncm 10mo ago
    Yeah, I think the more your job demands correctness in novel scenarios the less impressed you are with these shiny demos. I encourage anyone to pause the demo once the thing is generated and stare at what it did. Is it genuinely correct and impressive? Are you impressed because it made a thing generally shaped like what you expected, or because it would be genuinely impressive (or even adequate) if a person did it?
    • saikia81 10mo ago
      you are right, but the inverse doesn't have to be. There is a factor that could make the work so cheap, that people don't care about the quality anymore.
      • DrewADesign 10mo ago
        The only way that state would be sustainable is if we suddenly solved code vulnerabilities, or the damage they cause.
• kalx 10mo ago
  Let’s say you’re right. Do we still want to, though? I mean. At some point we will no longer have the skill to babysit the AI agent.
  • turtletontine 10mo ago
    When the LLM code bases are too complex for the humans on deck to understand and debug… that sounds like the turning point when companies go back to real developers IMO. Any serious mission critical code needs knowledgeable humans on deck who can leap into again when s** hits the fan, put out fires and patch critical bugs.
    • onraglanroad 10mo ago
      Not if you can have the AI rewrite your entire stack in 5 minutes and you just deploy that. CR/CD ftw! (continuous rewrite/continuous deployment)
• est 10mo ago
  The cost of building droppped by 90% but the cost of maitaining is increased by 9000%
  • Havoc 10mo ago
    Next quarters problem
• gaigalas 10mo ago
  I think the author underestimate the forces that introduce coordination overhead. "Good AI developers" are a mystery being (not really, but for corporate they are). Right now, companies are trying to measure them to understand what makes them tick. Once that is measured, I can assure you that the next step is trying to control their output, which will inevitably kill their productivity. > This then allows developers who really master this technology to be hugely effective at solving business problems. See what I mean? "If only we could make them work to solve our problems..." You can! But that implies additional coordination overhead, which means they'll not be as productive as they were. > Your job is going to change My job changes all the time. Developers are ready for this. They were born of change, molded by it. You know what hasn't caught up with the changes?
• reactordev 10mo ago
  The cost of writing software dropped but the complexity ballooned so we’re on the side of needing ai assistants to write it all for us.
• m0llusk 10mo ago
  It will be interesting how this goes moving forward. Agents learn from massive scraping. With the newest tools and frameworks there is nothing but documentation and initial examples to scrape. And now that agent output is flooding everything it can be expected there will be a lot of feedback with automated learning early in development cycles. Lots of applications have a simple structure of collecting and operating data with fairly well documented business logic tying everything together. Coding outside of that is going to be more tricky. And if agentic coding is so great then why are there so still so many awful spreadsheets that can't compete with Excel? Something isn't adding up quite as well as some seem to expect.
• hexo 10mo ago
  No, it did not. Thanks for asking.
• maddmann 10mo ago
  I strongly agree. It may be even more than 90%. For example yesterday I was able to use lovable (and Claude code web) on my phone to build out an almost 1:1 replacement (for my purposes) for an expensive subscription based app for working out: https://strengthquest.lovable.app/ https://strengthquest.lovable.app/ This is simply unimaginable level of productivity— in one day on my phone, I can essentially build and replace expensive software. Unreal days we are living in.
• tehjoker 10mo ago
  This is the kind of piece that becomes popular around the top of the hype cycle when people are trying to keep it going but can sense that perhaps Wiley E coyote has run off the cliff and is suspended in the air. Obviously, by any possible objective indicator, the cost of software development has barely budged and "AGI" is nowhere in the offing while luminary scientists appear to be drawn to whatever the next big thing is, having seen the limits of their (admittedly impressive) creation. I'm sure that AI tools will be here to stay and will become more integrated and better. I wonder what the final result will be, -20% productivity as in the METR study? +20%? Anything like 90% is the kind of sensationalism reserved for r/WallStreetBets
• jbruton 10mo ago
  Betteridge's law of headlines applies here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines
  • deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
• culi 10mo ago
  The only cost that's dropped by 90% is writing unoriginal blog posts
• phendrenad2 10mo ago
  > 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 should have stopped reading here. People who think that the time it takes to write some code is the only metric that matters are only marginally better than people who rank employees by lines of code.
• chasing 10mo ago
  Alternate take: The cost of building software will remain the same but software will need to be 10x as feature-rich to remain competitive. If you can build it in a weekend so can I. So you're going to have to figure out bigger things to build.
  • seanmcdirmid 10mo ago
    We might actually get all the software we actually need. We won’t have to listen to antiquated DMV/IRS/health systems not being updated because the projects designed to replace them failed.
• laughing_man 10mo ago
  I'll believe that when I see it.
• d--b 10mo ago
  > Jevons Paradox says that when something becomes cheaper to produce, we don't just do the same amount for less money. Take electric lighting for example; while sales of candles and gas lamps fell, overall far more artificial light was generated. Can’t wait to debug all that stuff.
• foobarbecue 10mo ago
  How is it that some people feel comfortable just making up numerical statistics out of thin air?
• joeyguerra 10mo ago
  Yes.
• nurettin 10mo ago
  For me, the cost of motivating myself dropped significantly. I now feel like working on little things that have been pending tasks for ages. A db synch script here , an unearthed project from 12 years ago there , migrating project package versions , finding and fixing incomplete/missing data , refactoring legacy code to be suitable for unit testing , installing a bunch of cron jobs all in a day's work.
• seinecle 10mo ago
  To nick pick, it is more about 800% gain in productivity. Cost actually increased. I refer here to my experience as a solo developer. With AI assistance I don't spend less hours coding, but more. There is the thrill of shipping relevant features that were sleeping in my drawers for ages, quicker. Each hour of coding delivers just 8 x more features and bug solving. Also, whereas I spent a few dozen dollars per month on server costs, I now also spend an equivalent amount on subscriptions and API calls to LLM services for this AI assisted coding. Worth every penny. So while productivity increased manifold, absolute cost actually increased as well for me.
• gloosx 10mo ago
  From the creators of the 10x engineer: 0.1x engineering cost
• 112233 10mo ago
  From the article: "I've had Claude Code write an entire unit/integration test suite in a few hours (300+ tests) for a fairly complex internal tool" Did you catch what the author didn't mention? Are the tests any good? Are they even tests? I'm playing with Opus now (best entertainment for a coder), it is excellent at writing fake code and fabricating results. It wrote me a test that validates an extremely complex utility, and the test passed! What was the test? Call utility with invalid parameters and check that there is an error.
• DeathArrow 10mo ago
  >Software engineering has got - in my opinion, often needlessly - complicated, with people rushing to very labour intensive patterns such as TDD, microservices, super complex React frontends and Kubernetes. Let's say it is complicated. But what is the better alternative when dealing with large software? To what point we can simplify it and not lose anything important?
• _pdp_ 10mo ago
  The majority of vibe coded software I have seen (and produced) are similar to spreadsheets - it does the job for 5 minutes - easily forgettable. It is throwaway software at best. What AI did was to move the goalpost even further. Now you need to write exceptional software.
• asilis 10mo ago
  > I'd rather inherit a repo written with an agent and a good engineer in the loop than one written by a questionable quality contractor who left three years ago, with no tests, and a spaghetti mess of classes and methods. Oh, false dilemma :/
• Dave_Wishengrad 10mo ago
  [dead]
• harishpanwar9 10mo ago
  This is a fascinating perspective — and honestly, it feels like one of those shifts we’ll only fully recognize in hindsight. The idea that software development could transition from months of coordination and engineering overhead to rapid iteration with small, high-leverage teams is both exciting and a little uncomfortable. The 90% cost reduction isn’t just about efficiency — it’s about access. If the barrier to shipping software drops this dramatically, we’re likely standing at the edge of a new wave of innovation driven not just by engineers, but by domain specialists who previously couldn’t justify the investment. The most interesting takeaway here is that technical mastery may become less of the moat, while contextual and domain intelligence becomes the real differentiator. That flips the traditional power structure in tech. 2026 might really be the year where “build fast, throw away, rebuild smarter” becomes normal instead of reckless. Curious to see how fast organizations adapt — and who gets left behind simply because they assumed disruption would arrive slower.
  • dvh 10mo ago
    > emdashes > isn’t just How do you do fellow human
    • Anamon 10mo ago
      Fair indicators, although I'd say the fresh user account and the lack of any concrete meanings in the statements are even more telling. Saying this partly in self-defense – as a human who likes using en dashes and ellipses in my manual writing… Besides, I wonder why people do this. What's the motivation? Is there some way of financially profiting from writing comments on HN that I'm unaware of?
      • deleted 10mo ago
        [deleted]
• blobbers 10mo ago
  I am shocked by the number of people who are dismissive of AI, or have stuck to the whole copy and paste into a chatbot approach to development. I'm finding this stuff, when given proper guidance, can reproduce experiments I've run incredibly fast. Weeks of typing done in minutes of talking to Claude Code. In the working world, a lot of the time what matters is getting results, not writing 'perfect' code the way software engineers would like to. concerns: - security bugs - business logic errors that seem correct but are wrong as long as you have domain experts, I suspect these will gradually go away. hopefully LLMs can be trained not to do insecure things in code.
  • liampulles 10mo ago
    > In the working world, a lot of the time what matters is getting results, not writing 'perfect' code the way software engineers would like to. But you do recognize that one's ability to speedily implement features is dependent on the present quality of a codebase, right? Being a serious practitioner here means balancing active feature development with active tending to the codebase to keep it in a reasonable state, since its quality will tend ever downward otherwise. In your experiments, do you find agents readily find this balance? I ask genuinely, I have only minimal experience with Cursor.
    • theshrike79 10mo ago
      To be blunt and a bit nihilistic: I get paid to ship features. Client wants a feature EoW, they get it EoW, they're not paying for a week of extra work for the "quality codebase" feature. But the good thing is that we've had objective and automated tooling for quality checks for code. We used to use them for humans, but now we apply the same tools for AI. Good unit testing practices, exhaustive linters, .editorconfig etc. force humans AND LLMs to produce code within specific parameters. If your project doesn't have automated tests and linters, now is the time to add them. Maybe use an LLM to help you with it :)
      • mrsubletbot 10mo ago
        Maintaining a quality code base is more than just having tests and linters. It's about organization, right-sized abstractions, architecture and choosing the right patterns. There is no real way to automate the verification of these things. If an agent farts out a 2,000 LOC feature in a day but bifurcates the code base, duplicates functions or makes awful abstractions, it WILL eventually turn into a big ball of mud. All that being said, if wielded correctly an LLM can contribute to a healthy repository, but it requires much of the same thought and planning that development pre-LLMs did. I promise you, if you stick with the same code base long enough using your approach and little consideration to its health, it will become a hellish place to build in.
• SiempreViernes 10mo ago
  > AI Agents however in my mind massively reduce the labour cost of developing software. So the claim of massive cost reduction is just something the author made up (or hallucinated to use the lingo of the field)? Seems like Betteridges law applies here.
• o999 10mo ago
  Some indirect results to this might be: - More engineers moving from employment to indie development. - Less abandoned open source software. - Indie developers, small teams, and open source software developers will be more able to catch up and better compete with tech giants. I believe the AI agentic coders will threat tech giants more than it - collectively - threats software engineers.
  • drcxd 10mo ago
    > I believe the AI agentic coders will threat tech giants more than it - collectively - threats software engineers. Currently, I don't think so. Coding agents' performance generally depends on the quality of the model behind them. Running a powerful model is assets-dependent. Not everyone has the hardware and power to support Sonnet 4.5 or Gemini 3 even if they are open-source. So, before the top notch models can be deployed on personal computing devices, I would not say coding agents will threat any organization.
    • o999 10mo ago
      You don't have to self host, $100/engineer/mo is enough for many usecases.
• otikik 10mo ago
  The cost of writing code has gone down - I don't think by 90%. Maybe by 30%, with a big asterisk that says something like "as long as someone has put some similar code somewhere or is a very mechanical refactor". The thing is, writing code is just the first step on building software. You are reviewing what your AI generates, right? You will still be held responsible when it doesn't work. And you will have to maintain and support that code. That is, in my mind, also "building software". This reminds me of the (amazing) Vim experts that zip around a codebase with their arcane keystrokes. I'm a main Vim user and I can't mimic a fraction of their power. It's mesmerizing to watch them edit files, it's as if their thoughs get translated into words on the screen. I also know that editing is just the first step. If you skip the rest, you are being misled by an industry with vested interests.
• j45 10mo ago
  Software becoming easier to build will mean it's possible to build far deeper into solving problems with software. Cost is a funny misnomer. The best code that's written is the code that doesn't need to be written, and doesn't have to be supported. Being able to build different approaches to solving a problem quickly may turn out to be a lot more helpful than saving 90%.
• benrutter 10mo ago
  We should find out pretty quick, I'd probably suggest by now already, 10x is an absolutely massive productivity increase. That would essentially mean, all the software development my team did by November could have instead been finished by the end of January.
• zkmon 10mo ago
  Building the software is only a small part of the overall cost. For any significant production deployment, the cost goes into change management and support. Only a miniscule part of the work is green-field development. Everything else is managing a mess.
• throwawayffffas 10mo ago
  That has not been my experience, vibe coded code is typically unworkable garbage. I use it as motivation. I ask it to do something, if it works, I keep it without looking at it. If it doesn't I look, recoil in horror, delete and rewrite myself. It takes more time but seems to work for me.
• lanthissa 10mo ago
  i think theres a huge section of tasks which required you pay high salaries for which are gone. just thinking from the finance world, in 2010 no knew how to program on the desk and no one knew sql, and even if they did the institutional knowledge to use the dev systems was not worth their time. So you had multiple layers of meetings and managers to communicate programs. As a result, anything small just didn't get done, and everything took time. by 2020 most junior guys knew enough python to pick up some of the small stuff in 2025 ai tools are good enough that they're picking up things that legit would have taken weeks to do in 2010 because of the processes around them not the difficulty and doing it in hours. A task that would take an hour to do used to take multiple meetings to properly outline to someone without finance knowledge and now they can do themselves in less time than it took to describe to a fresh cs grad. Those tasks that junior traders/strats are able to do now that would have taken weeks or months to get into prod going through an it department i'm seeing cost drop 90% everyday right now. Which is good, it lets tech focus on tech and not learning the minutia of options trading in some random country
• JanTurnherr 10mo ago
  a little anecdote: i used gemini cli for a large implementation of a feature for a cpp api. gemini did a huge amount of work i otherwise had to write by myself. problem? in all this great work was somewhere a memory bug hidden. there was no error you just feed to the cli and call it a day. after 4 days debugging i found the bug. needless to say, gemini did not even once came close to where the bug was in the guessing game... will this change in the future? we will see...
• axismundi 10mo ago
  Maybe that 90% transferred into lots of low quality code caused by reckless vibe coding? That slop now sits there as kind of technical debt?
• tangotaylor 10mo ago
  > 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.
  • r_lee 10mo ago
    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.
    • adam_patarino 10mo ago
      I keep using this excel analogy. When excel came out everyone said accountants were dead. Now we have more accountants than ever. The analogy carries to what you’re saying here. Accountants or folks who know excel deeply can get a lot more from it than folks who are novice to it. AI coding can be really helpful for an engineer. Keep at it!
    • adriand 10mo ago
      > Like, is there truly an agentic way to go 10x or is there some catch? Yes. I think it’s practice. I know this sounds ridiculous, but I feel like I have reached a kind of mind meld state with my AI tooling, specifically Claude Code. I am not really consciously aware of having learned anything related to these processes, but I have been all in on this since ChatGPT, and I honestly think my brain has been rewired in a way that I don’t truly perceive except in terms of the rate of software production. There was a period of several months a while ago where I felt exhausted all the time. I was getting a lot done, but there was something about the experience that was incredibly draining. Now I am past that and I have gone to this new plateau of ridiculous productivity, and a kind of addictive joy in the work. A marvellous pleasure at the orchestration of complex tasks and seeing the results play out. It’s pure magic. Yes, I know this sounds ridiculous and over-the-top. But I haven’t had this much fun writing software since my 20s.
• 6r17 10mo ago
  We are in that era where most people don't know about software quality enough to have an influence that annihilates the hole market. This makes me think of the lemon market thing ; eg : if people are unable to know what product qualitative or bad - then everything collapses.
• swiftcoder 10mo ago
  > Previously, you'd have a small team of people working on setting up CI/CD... Nearly all of this can be done in a few hours with an agentic coding CLI I've had a couple of contracts now, where I get to fix everything for teams who vibe-coded their infrastructure. I'm not saying it isn't a speed-up for teams who already have a wealth of infra experience - but it's not a substitute for the years of infra experience such a team already has.
• ForHackernews 10mo ago
  Article mentions Jevons Paradox, but where is it? Where are all the thousands of new apps?
• adam_patarino 10mo ago
  I feel like people who write articles like this have never worked at big companies. My wife works at Shutterstock, first as a SWE, now as a product manager. Most of their tasks involve small changes in 5 different systems. Sometimes in places like Salesforce. A simple ask can be profoundly complicated. AI has certainly made grokking, and code changes easier. But the real cost of building has not been reduced 90%. Not even close.
  • enbugger 10mo ago
    The author "teaches workshops on AI development for engineering teams". This is nothing but a selling post for companies. I don't know what to discuss here honestly, this is more primitive bait than an average video preview picture on YouTube.
  • arduinomancer 10mo ago
    These articles act like creating new demo apps or isolated tools is what software development is all about
• kachapopopow 10mo ago
  honestly, my usage of AI is constantly evolving and sometimes I have days where I just don't use it at all, but it also allows me to do things I could never make myself do like realigning icons for 400+ models and also allows me to understand just enough of a subject to leave it behind and continue on my own. AI has also probably saved me 100 hours of repetitive work at this point and completely elimitated the need to rely on other people working on time consuming configuration tasks and back-and-forward which used to stall work for me since I am the kind of person who will work for 20 hours until something is finished without losing that much in productivity.
• jgeada 10mo ago
  Articles like this seem to keep highlighting a fundamental disconnect between what software teams really do vs what the people "managing" software teams a couple of layers above think those teams actually do. The people up in the clouds think they have a full understanding of what the software is supposed to be, that they "own" the entire intent and specification in a few ambiguously worded requirements and some loose constraints and, being generous, a very incomplete understanding of the system dependencies. They see software teams as an expensive cost center, not as true the source of all their wealth and power. The art of turning that into an actual software product is what good software teams do; I haven't yet seen anything that can automate that process away or even help all that much.
• Volundr 10mo ago
  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.
  • kllrnohj 10mo ago
    Anecdotes etc etc but the AI tests I've been sent to review have been absolute shit. Stuff like that just calling a function doesn't crash the program. No assertions other than "end of test method reached" Yes sometimes those tests are necessary, but it seemed to just do it everywhere because it made the code coverage percentage go up. Even though it was useless. I have also had great experiences with AI cranking out straightforward boilerplate or asking C++ template metaprogramming questions. It's not all negative. But net-net it feels like it takes more work in total to use AI as you have to learn to recognize when it just won't handle the task, which can happen a lot. And you need to keep up with what it did enough to be able to take over. And reading code is harder than writing it.
    • piperswe 10mo ago
      I’ve seen agents produce plenty of those tests, but recently I’ve seen them generate some actually decent unit tests that I wouldn’t have thought of myself. It’s a bit of a crapshoot
  • rkozik1989 10mo ago
• netdevphoenix 10mo ago
  Maybe not 90% but everyone can see the signs in the horizon. The tale goes like this: one day visual arts got commoditised to the point any given visual artwork could be obtained for virtually free digitally. This has been the case for centuries. The aural arts (see records of spoken poetry, podcasts, music) have been commoditised for a long time. Full commodisation might never been happen (ie you can still work in the field) but it is undeniable that it has had a massive impact in their respective fields. Getting a Picasso-like painting might not be quite possible but we are getting quite there, same with music. The same is coming for devs. Devving is still far away but it doesn't really take that much to produce a significant impact in the field. The percentage of devs who can be able to get late 10s salaries will be gradually diminishing over time. This is what early stage commodisation looks like.
• yakattak 10mo ago
  > The agentic coding tools have got extremely good at converting business logic specifications into pretty well written APIs and services. I haven’t experienced this at all. They can do okay with greenfield services (as the author mentioned). However it’s often not “extremely good”. It’s usually “passable” at best. It doesn’t save me any time either. I have to read and audit every line and change it anyway.
• urxvtcd 10mo ago
  If AI is such a competitive advantage, why are AI companies even trying to sell it? Wouldn't it bring more money to use a bleeding edge internal model and just vibe a couple of facebooks at the fraction of the cost and profit like crazy?
  • bagacrap 10mo ago
    It seems the people who think they can just tell computers to write code for them, also are the people who are inclined to tell other people to build apps for them. We are hurdling towards a brave new world where only 10% of humans have to work, and the other 90% form the bureaucracy on top.
  • arduinomancer 10mo ago
    Every time I see an article like this I ask the same question: show me the money? If it’s so good why hasn’t it made you rich?
• manishsharan 10mo ago
  Yes the cost of building software dropped by 90%. However, the cost of software maintenance went up by 1000% . Lets hope you don't need to ever add a new business rule or user interface to your vibe coded software.
• Ologn 10mo ago
  I am on the free tier of Gemini 3. With some intervention on my part, I got it to build, in Emacs Lisp, a primitive-recursive function for determining if a number is prime (by mu-recursive I mean a function built from the building blocks of a constant, successor and projection function, as well as a primitive recursive function and compositional function/macro). I was impressed, as previous models (including Anthropic and OpenAI) could not do this. For the past few days I asked it to built a mu-recursive Ackermann function in Emacs Lisp (built on the primitive-recursive functions/operators, plus an extra operator - minimization). I said that the prime detector function it already built should be able to use the same functions/operators, and to rewrite code if necessary. So far it has been unable to do this. If I thought it could but was stumbling over Emacs Lisp I might ask it to try in Scheme or Common Lisp or some other language. It's possible I'll get it to work in the time I have allotted from my daily free tier, but I have had no success so far. I am also starting with inputs to the Ackermann function of 0,0 - 0,1 - 1,0 - 1,1 to not overburden the system but it can't even handle 0, 0. Also it tries to redefine the Emacs Lisp keyword "and", which Emacs hiccups on. A year ago LLMs were stumbling over Leetcode and Project Euler functions I was asking it to make. They seem to have gotten a little better, and I'm impressed Gemini 3 can handle, with help, primitive recursive functions in Emacs Lisp. Doesn't seem to be able to handle mu-recursive functions with minimization yet though. The trivial, toy implementations of these things. Also as I said, it tried to redefine "and" as well, which Emacs Lisp fell over on. So it's a helpful helper and tool, but definitely not ready to hand things over to. As the saying goes, the first 90% of the code takes 90% of the time, and the last 10% of the code takes the other 90% of the time. Or the other saying - it's harder to find bugs than write code, so if you're coding at peak mental capacity, finding bugs becomes impossible. It does have its uses though, and has been getting better.
• bagacrap 10mo ago
  If the cost of building software had dropped 90%, the author wouldn't need to write a blog post. Just undercut the competition by 80% (they can keep 10% for themself).
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• newsoftheday 10mo ago
  > 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. What was the value add of those tests, when I tried this, AI would often re-write the code to make match its poorly written test.
• misja111 10mo ago
  > I've had Claude Code write an entire unit/integration test suite in a few hours (300+ tests) for a fairly complex internal tool. And what do you have then? 300 tests that test the behavior that's exposed by the implementations of the api. Are they useful? Probably some are, probably some are not. The ones that are not will just be clutter and maintenance overhead. Plus, there will be lots of use-cases for which you need to look a little deeper than just the api implementation, which are now not covered. And those kind of tests, tests that test real business use cases, are by far the most useful ones if you want to catch regressions. So if your goal is to display some nice test coverage metrics on SonarQube or whatever, making your CTO happy, yes AI will help you enormously. But if your goal is to speed up development of useful test cases, less so. You will still gain from AI, but nowhere near 90%.
• john61 10mo ago
  LLMs are calculating probable text/code. A lot of it in very short time. Probable text/code is not the same as correct/proper text/code. It is a huge mass of probable and maybe correct/proper text/code. That is very dangerous as it looks correct but maybe it is not. It is likely that the cost of software will increase because of the unmanageable mess that this creates.
• insane_dreamer 10mo ago
  This is a bit like saying RoR or Django dropped the cost of building web apps by 90% because you could write a blog app with 5 lines of code (IIRC early Rails claim). So yes, the cost of certain tasks may drop by 90% (though I think that's a high number still), certainly the cost of developing software overall has not dropped by 90%. I might be able to whip up a script in 30 seconds instead of 30 minutes, but I still have to think of whether I need the script, what exactly it should do, what am I trying to build and how and why, how does it fit with all the requirements, etc. That part isn't being reduced by 90%.
• FarMcKon 10mo ago
  No.