Comment by zkmon
10 hours ago
A question that was not addressed in the article and contrasts software with industrialized products from the past is - who are the consumers of the software produced at industrial scale? Stitching of clothes by machines accelerated garment product only because there was demand and consumption tied to population. But software is not tied to population similar to food and clothes. It doesn't deprecate, it is not exclusively consumed by persons.
Another common misconception is, it is now easier to compete with big products, as the cost of building those products will go down. Maybe you think you can build your own Office suite and compete with MS Office, or build a SAP with better features and quality. But what went into these software is not just code, but decades of feedback, tuning and fixing. The industrialization of software can not provide that.
> who are the consumers of the software produced at industrial scale?
Basically every company that does anything non-trivial could benefit from tailor-made software that supports their specific workflow. Many small companies don't have that, either they cannot afford their own development team, or they don't know that/how software could improve their workflow, or they are too risk-averse.
Heck, even my small family of 4 persons could benefit from some custom software, but only in small ways, so it's not worth it for me to pursue it.
Once we're at the point where a (potentially specialized) LLM can generate, securely operate and maintain software to run a small to medium-sized business, we'll probably find that there are far more places that could benefit from custom software.
Usually if you introduce, say, an ERP system into a company that doesn't use one yet, you need to customize it and change workflows in the company, and maybe even restructure it. If it were cheap enough to build a custom ERP system that caters to the existing workflows, that would be less disruptive and thus less risky.
>who are the consumers of the software produced at industrial scale?
Games have a ton of demand for code that isn't readily shareable but also needs to be done quickly.
> but decades of feedback, tuning and fixing
On the contrary, this is likely the reason why we can disrupt these large players.
Experience from 2005 just don't hold that much value in 2025 in tech.
It absolutely does. I cannot believe I am reading this on HN... Do you think the idea of a pointer changed? That you need locks when accessing variables when doing multithreading? That principles like "Be conservative in what you send, and liberal in what you accept" have changed? In fact, almost nothing changed from 2005 to now in any conceptual form.
The short answer is that these things don't really exist anymore for most (business) applications when you stopped writing it in C.
So the things you mention indeed is experience you need to get rid of as you move to other software stacks and other technologies.
Software was never coded in a big-bang one shot fashion. It evolves through years of interacting with the field. That evolution takes almost same time with AI or not. Remember a version release has many tasks that need to go at human speed.
On that we agree.
But taking out features are difficult - even when they have near to zero value.
Why it sometimes make sense for new players to enter the market and start over - without the legacy.
This is indeed one of the value propositions in the startup I work in.
> Experience from 2005 just don't hold that much value in 2025 in tech
That would be why a significant portion of the world's critical systems still run on Windows XP, eh?
No, that is likely because there is no economic benefit to do anything about it - definitely not UX concerns.
code has no use-value. it is like being a baker in an island. the value comes from its user base.
User base comes from the value you provide. Value comes from the product features. Features come from code. If code is easy, anyone with 10K bucks in their pocket can provide those features and product. The only thing missing is, is the product battle-tested? That fortunately remains out of reach for AI.
I would say unfortunately out of reach since so far it seems AI will mostly fill out world with bad code which is not battle tested.