[a5seo]

As a solo developer, I guess I’m going to start tracking how fast I type and the size of my code commits each day, and that, my dear IRS friend, is the only part of my day I spent “developing software.”

The reality is that even if you hire a “software developer,” they aren’t going to spend 100% on it. So now you have a situation where the IRS is supposed to audit how? Watch how much support you did? How much training and coaching other developers? How much email/scheduling/admin bs? Was that meeting about software development or customer research? The fools who write these laws are just ridiculously out of touch.

[dboreham]

That's not what this is about. It's to do with a situation where companies were trying to make the IRS believe that money they spent on S/W dev was a valid R&D expense (so they could claim some R&D credit and hence pay less tax), and the IRS said "nope, that seems to be not valid because we don't see S/W as really R&D". So...some campaign contributions later and voila there is a law saying definitively that S/W does count. Those companies asked for this change. Now, possibly the whole thing got lost in translation and became a terrible bad thing, but most likely not. Often these things need to be read in the context they apply, which is not "globally".

[eightysixfour]

That is absolutely not what this is.