Has the cost of building software just dropped 90%?

Spreadsheets are an incredible tool. They were a key innovation in the history of applications. I love them and use them.

But it's very hard to have a large conventional cell-formula spreadsheet that is correct. The programming model / UI are closely coupled, so it's hard to see what's going on once your sheet is above some fairly low complexity. And many workplaces have monstrous sheets that run important things, curated lovingly (?) for many years. I bet many or most of them have significant errors.

Author here. Of course not everything needs to be a web app. But I'm meaning a lot of core sheets I see in businesses need more structure round them.

Especially for collaboration, access controls, etc. Not to mention they could do with unit testing.

I’m yet to see a spreadsheet workflow successfully replaced by something else.

Better security. Better availability. Less chance of losing data.

Assuming the SaaS is implemented competently, of course. Otherwise there's not much advantage.

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.

To be fair, writing a SaaS software is like an order, perhaps two orders of magnitude more effort than writing software that runs on a computer and does the thing you want. There's a ton of stuff that SaaS is used for now that's basically trivial and literally all the "engineering" effort is spent on ensuring vendor lock in and retaining control of the software so that you can force people to keep paying you.

> 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.

NODS HEAD VIGOROUSLY

Last 12 months: Docusign down 37%, Adobe down 38%, Atlassian down 41%, Asana down 41%, Monday.com down 44%, Hubspot down 49%. Eventbrite being bought for pennies.

They are being replaced by newer, smaller, cheaper, sometimes internal solutions.

While this is true, I think some fields like game development may not always have this problem. If your goal is to release a non-upgradable game - fps, arcade, single-player titles, maintenance may be much less important than shipping.

edit: typos

one year in, AI slop > Human-written slop

Blind leading the blind, but my thinking is this:

1. Use the tools to their fullest extend, push boundaries and figure out what works and what doesn't

2. Be more than your tools

As long as you + LLM is significantly more valuable than just an LLM, you'll be employed. I don't know how "practical" this advice is, because it's basically what you're already doing, but it's how I'm thinking about it.

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.

Don't chase specific technologies, especially not ones driven by for-profit companies. Chase ideas, become great in one slice of the industry, and the very least you can always fall back on that. Once established within a domain, you can always try to branch out, and feel a lot more comfortable doing so.

Ultimately, software is for doing something, and that something can be a whole range of things. If you become really good at just a slice of that, things get a lot easier regardless of the general state of the industry.

Its always been foggy. Even without AI, you were always at risk of having your field disrupted by some tech you didn't see coming.

AI will probably replace the bottom ~30-70%(depends who you ask) of dev jobs. Dont get caught in the dead zone when the bottom falls out.

Exactly how we'll train good devs in the future, if we don't give them a financially stable environment environment to learn in while they're bad, is an open question.

My suggestion would be to move to a higher level of abstraction, change the way which you view the system.

Maybe becoming full stack? Maybe understanding the industry a little deeper? Maybe analyzing your company's competitors better? That would increase your value for the business (a bit of overlap with product management though). Assuming you can now deliver the expected tech part more easily, that's what I'd do.

As for me, I've moved to a permanent product management position.

Most of the suggestions will be a variation of getting into a higher level role rather vs a build/IC role. Things like product or management - but these are very different roles and potentially lock you into a domain; one you may not find long term enticing. My advice to the young in this field (under 35) would be to move out of the field entirely - not to be a doomer but IMV the risk/uncertainity you are taking on your career isn't worth the effort you need to put in these days (e.g. swe interviews, constant learning, outsourcing, etc all for AI to maybe in the future just do it all anyway).

Its a big bet to put your career on and right now IMV it isn't worth it; especially when I see a lot of money right now (trillions?) betting and investing in the opposite outcome. The high risk/effort required was rewarded in the past by high pay in certain locations but that's changing as well.

Ironically the "bullshit jobs" as they call them might be safe havens in the short term since they often exist due to corporate processes, regulation, etc and already don't provide much value so in turn aren't measured by that. Its no accident that I see the people most excited by AI were the people who delivered the least value in the delivery process previously from an anecdotal POV.

No one knows the future and many are in the same boat as you. Its not great news (not even for me) but that's where things are heading I think. Its definitely the loosely stated goal of AI labs, etc to democratize coding and probably most creative/intellectual work at that.

Great question, hard to quickly answer.

My .02$. Show you can tackle harder problems. That includes knowing which problems matter. That happens with learning a "domain", versus just learning a tool (e.g. web development) in a domain.

Change is scary, but thats because most aren't willing to change. Part of the "scare" is the fear of lost investment (e.g. pick wrong major or career). I can appreciate that, but with a little flexibility, that investment can be repurposed quicker today that in pre-2022 thanks to AI.

AI is just another tool, treat it like a partner not a replacement. That can also include learning a domain. Ask AI how a given process works, its history, regulations, etc. Go confirm what it says. Have it break it down. We now can learn faster than ever before. Trust but verify.

You are using Cursor, that shows a willingness to try new things. Now try to move faster than before, go deeper into the challenges. That is always going to be valued.

Nobody knows the answer.

Answers I see are typically "be a product manager" or "start your own business" which obviously 95% of developers can't/don't want to do.

Well... evidence, but there's obviously a graph with a line going places!

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.

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…

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)

Right? Past couple years software quality has taken a shit.