Comment by wiether
8 hours ago
> I think by 2030 any product without an API designed for agents will be dead
And I think that products making billions today by only exposing a 20yo SOAP API are still going to make billions in 4 years.
I hate having to work with them, but I've been playing this game long enough to know that most of the world is running on legacy software and it won't change in about 1400 days.
It depends on who the customer is. Government and regulated industries have massive inertia, consumers and startups will spin on a dime.
How many VB6, Java 6, Delphi, etc web apps and services, and GUIs out there today in production you think? Still churning
I worked on a system which used Oracle 9i database run on Itanium with HPUX OS.
User-facing side was written with Delphi 7 (quite a huge client application, it even had constructor to build new forms inside the application and GUI to build algorithms, like n8n of 90-s, I learned a lot working on that system).
I've used Java 6, then migrated to Java 7 to write some new components for that system with web UI. I was bad at Delphi and they didn't really care about consistency, so I went that route.
AFAIK this system is in use nowadays. They wanted to update it with modern database and other modern stuff 15 years ago. They wanted to update it every year since that, but every year this modernization project is postponed. So probably one day they'll replace everything, but so far it works.
I won't delve into details, but this system serves as a database of criminals and some other stuff for a small country, so it's actually quite important one.
TBH I don't think that AI could even build it. When I had to build it last time, the build consisted of several VMs. You had to build various DLLs and then build final application. Every part was built in a separate VM with separate installed Delphi components of a specific versions. It was a huge mess.
This is stupid and doesnt consider very few apps are made for automation. Apps are made for people to use and it wouldnt make sense to maintain an API for agents when 100% of the revenue is from people.