Comment by Workaccount2
4 months ago
Software is going to completely change. The writing is on the wall, it's just a matter of who can step back to see it.
Giga-projects with 50k, 100k, 500K, lines of code are going to get decimated. By and large these programs are written to capture large audiences by offering a massive feature set. But how often is any one user ever actually needing those 100k LOC?
If LLMs can start nailing 5K LOC projects pretty reliably, and the technical moat cleared away (i.e. using an IDE to run code). Software businesses are going to see a collapse in users as people just churn out bespoke single task software for their own use case each day.
If you think it's fine because you can't prompt Gemini "Create an excel clone", you are doing the equivalent of drawing a robot with a vinyl record player in 1950 and calling it "Entertainment of the future!". In a world with functional robots, portable vinyl players for it to play music make no sense.
> it's just a matter of who can step back to see it
I’m not sure why those fully bought into the AI hype so often dismiss anyone who’s less bullish as simply too small-minded to see the writing on the wall.
That aside, while I do think software is going to change, I’m not sure that I agree with your particular version. What examples of apps with 100k, 500k+ LoC codebases are going to get decimated? The biggest successes in software today have moats around inventory or network effects. Are people going to make their own Netflix or Uber? Even at a smaller level, is the idea that local gym owners are going to replace gym management software with their own mini apps? Or restaurants are going to do their own point of sales apps? Unless AI can make the cost of maintaining software something close to zero time, which is a really tall order, why would business owners waste time on something outside of their core business. And if this is such an untapped opportunity why didn’t we see the start of it with the no-code movement?
Will a big chunk of the software market fall off and be replaced by custom mini apps that the layperson crafts with AI? Maybe? But I don’t see how one justifies the level of confidence I see from these predictions.
You are absolutely right
Because, as we all know, what is important about coding is outputting lines of code.
This is the main difficulty, this is were IA will change the game forever.
Thinking about the code you write, that's worthless, do not do that. Improving a large code base ? Again, no need to think to do that. Just inject random lines of code and it will do the trick.
Of course, in a world where your code has no value because it's just a copy/paste from elsewhere that has a low lifetime expectancy, IA is shinning.
But if you want something a bit more useful, a bit more clever, a bit more adapted to your use case, IA sucks. Because IA do not think.
IA is a threat to dev that do not think. Good ridance, they won't be missed.
Complexity is going up rather than down. Companies already solve simple problems with spreadsheets.
The spreadsheet is the hammer or the white collar office worker.