Comment by zingar

About 15 years ago I thought of writing custom software for friends and family instead of paying for gifts in order to save money (and give something more “meaningful”). For instance a fun guessing game using photos from a group holiday.

I never did it because I imagined the pain of supporting every device or screen size, or dealing with someone who wants to know why their gift stopped working 6 months later.

The gains I’ve seen from LLM code - making me personally more productive in languages I’ve never used before - don’t erase the support burden so I think I’d still avoid this.

Still, I wonder if soon ordinary people will find it easy enough to make software for their own amusement (not just us nerds doing side projects to stay current), and will my job ever morph into being a software “mechanic“ who is paid to fix what someone else built? Not just “someone else working at the company who owns the software”, but a different company or individual entirely?

Will software maintenance become the job that big industry stops wanting to take because it’s so cheap to write something new that they’ll never fix this year’s model?

Or is software maintenance being democratised by LLMs such that a corner software shop could realistically offer maintenance for this one copy of a piece of software on this one device that the customer brings in?

I think we’ve never discussed a “software right to repair” because changing software is expensive, but we might see that change.