> Why didn't they? Hint: it's not because it would have taken them longer without AI.
Yes it is. "How much will this cost us to build" is a key component of the build-vs-buy decision. If you build it yourself, you get something tailored to your needs; however, it also costs money to make & maintain.
If the cost of making & maintaining software went down, we'd see people choosing more frequently to build rather than buy. Are we seeing this? If not, then the price of producing reliable, production-ready software likely has not significantly diminished.
I see a lot of posts saying, "I vibe-coded this toy prototype in one week! Software is a commodity now," but I don't see any engineers saying, "here's how we vibe-coded this piece of production-quality software in one month, when it would have taken us a year to build it before." It seems to me like the only software whose production has been significantly accelerated is toy prototypes.
I assume it's a consequence of Amdahl's law:
> the overall performance improvement gained by optimizing a single part of a system is limited by the fraction of time that the improved part is actually used.
Toy prototypes proportionally contains a much higher amount of the type of rote greenfield scaffolding that agents are good at writing. The sticker problems of brownfield growth and robustification are absent.
Yes it is. "How much will this cost us to build" is a key component of the build-vs-buy decision. If you build it yourself, you get something tailored to your needs; however, it also costs money to make & maintain.
If the cost of making & maintaining software went down, we'd see people choosing more frequently to build rather than buy. Are we seeing this? If not, then the price of producing reliable, production-ready software likely has not significantly diminished.
I see a lot of posts saying, "I vibe-coded this toy prototype in one week! Software is a commodity now," but I don't see any engineers saying, "here's how we vibe-coded this piece of production-quality software in one month, when it would have taken us a year to build it before." It seems to me like the only software whose production has been significantly accelerated is toy prototypes.
I assume it's a consequence of Amdahl's law:
> the overall performance improvement gained by optimizing a single part of a system is limited by the fraction of time that the improved part is actually used.
Toy prototypes proportionally contains a much higher amount of the type of rote greenfield scaffolding that agents are good at writing. The sticker problems of brownfield growth and robustification are absent.