Comment by BobbyJo
2 days ago
Up until now, no business has been built on tools and technology that no one understands. I expect that will continue.
Given that, I expect that, even if AI is writing all of the code, we will still need people around who understand it.
If AI can create and operate your entire business, your moat is nil. So, you not hiring software engineers does not matter, because you do not have a business.
> Up until now, no business has been built on tools and technology that no one understands. I expect that will continue.
Big claims here.
Did brewers and bakers up to the middle ages understand fermentation and how yeasts work?
They at least understood that it was something deterministic that they could reproduce.
That puts them ahead of the LLM crowd.
Does the corner bakery need a moat to be a business?
How many people understand the underlying operating system their code runs on? Can even read assembly or C?
Even before LLMs, there were plenty of copy-paste JS bootcamp grads that helped people build software businesses.
> Does the corner bakery need a moat to be a business?
Yes, actually. Its hard to open a competing bakery due to location availability, permitting, capex, and the difficulty of converting customers.
To add to that, food establishments generally exist on next to no margin, due to competition, despite all of that working in their favor.
Now imagine what the competitive landscape for that bakery would look like if all of that friction for new competitors disappeared. Margin would tend toward zero.
> Now imagine what the competitive landscape for that bakery would look like if all of that friction for new competitors disappeared. Margin would tend toward zero.
This is the goal. It's the point of having a free market.
5 replies →
Most legacy apps are barely understood by anyone, and yet continue to generate value and and are (somehow) kept alive.
Many here have been doing the "understanding of legacy code" as a job +50 years.
This "legacy apps are barely understood by anybody", is just somnething you made up.
Give it another 10 years if the "LLM as compiler" people get their way.
> no business has been built on tools and technology that no one understands
Well, there are quite a few common medications we don't really know how they work.
But I also think it can be a huge liability.