Comment by josephg
6 days ago
> Its also worth noting that if you can create a business with an LLM, so can everyone else. And sadly everyone has the same ideas
Yeah, this is quite thought provoking. If computer code written by LLMs is a commodity, what new businesses does that enable? What can we do cheaply we couldn't do before?
One obvious answer is we can make a lot more custom stuff. Like, why buy Windows and Office when I can just ask claude to write me my own versions instead? Why run a commodity operating system on kiosks? We can make so many more one-off pieces of software.
The fact software has been so expensive to write over the last few decades has forced software developers to think a lot about how to collaborate. We reuse code as much as we can - in shared libraries, common operating systems & APIs, cloud services (eg AWS) and so on. And these solutions all come with downsides - like supply chain attacks, subscription fees and service outages. LLMs can let every project invent its own tree of dependencies. Which is equal parts great and terrifying.
There's that old line that businesses should "commoditise their compliment". If you're amazon, you want package delivery services to be cheap and competitive. If software is the commodity, what is the bespoke value-added service that can sit on top of all that?
We said the same thing when 3D printing came out. Any sort of cool tech, we think everybody’s going to do it. Most people are not capable of doing it. in college everybody was going to be an engineer and then they drop out after the first intro to physics or calculus class. A bunch of my non tech friends were vibe coding some tools with replit and lovable and I looked at their stuff and yeah it was neat but it wasn't gonna go anywhere and if it did go somewhere, they would need to find somebody who actually knows what they're doing. To actually execute on these things takes a different kind of thinking. Unless we get to the stage where it's just like magic genie, lol. Maybe then everybody’s going to vibe their own software.
I don't think claude code is like 3d printing.
The difference is that 3D printing still requires someone, somewhere to do the mechanical design work. It democratises printing but it doesn't democratise invention. I can't use words to ask a 3d printer to make something. You can't really do that with claude code yet either. But every few months it gets better at this.
The question is: How good will claude get at turning open-ended problem statements into useful software? Right now a skilled human + computer combo is the most efficient way to write a lot of software. Left on its own, claude will make mistakes and suffer from a slow accumulation of bad architectural decisions. But, will that remain the case indefinitely? I'm not convinced.
This pattern has already played out in chess and go. For a few years, a skilled Go player working in collaboration with a go AI could outcompete both computers and humans at go. But that era didn't last. Now computers can play Go at superhuman levels. Our skills are no longer required. I predict programming will follow the same trajectory.
There are already some companies using fine tuned AI models for "red team" infosec audits. Apparently they're already pretty good at finding a lot of creative bugs that humans miss. (And apparently they find an extraordinary number of security bugs in code written by AI models). It seems like a pretty obvious leap to imagine claude code implementing something similar before long. Then claude will be able to do security audits on its own output. Throw that in a reinforcement learning loop, and claude will probably become better at producing secure code than I am.
> This pattern has already played out in chess and go. For a few years, a skilled Go player working in collaboration with a go AI could outcompete both computers and humans at go. But that era didn't last. Now computers can play Go at superhuman levels. Our skills are no longer required. I predict programming will follow the same trajectory.
Both of those are fixed, unchanging, closed, full information games. The real world is very much not that.
Though geeks absolutely like raving about go and especially chess.
3 replies →
> I can't use words to ask a 3d printer to make something
Setting aside any implications for your analogy. This is now possible.
3 replies →
The design work remains.
I’m not a fan of analogies, but here goes: Apple don’t make iPhones. But they employ an enormous number of people working on iPhone hardware, which they do not make.
If you think AI can replace everyone at Apple, then I think you’re arguing for AGI/superintelligence, and that’s the end of capitalism. So far we don’t have that.
There is verification and validation.
The first part is making sure you built to your specification, the second thing is making sure you built specification was correct.
The second part is going to be the hard part for complex software and systems.
12 replies →
> I can't use words to ask a 3d printer to make something.
You can: the words are in the G-code language.
I mean: you are used to learn foreign languages in school, so you are already used to formulate your request in a different language to make yourself understood. In this case, this language is G-code.
4 replies →
You can basically hand it a design, one that might take a FE engineer anywhere from a day to a week to complete and Codex/Claude will basically have it coded up in 30 seconds. It might need some tweaks, but it's 80% complete with that first try. Like I remember stumbling over graphing and charting libraries, it could take weeks to become familiar with all the different components and APIs, but seemingly you can now just tell Codex to use this data and use this charting library and it'll make it. All you have to do is look at the code. Things have certainly changed.
It might be 80-95% complete but the last 5% is either going to take twice the time or be downright impossible.
3 replies →
I figure it takes me a week to turn the output of ai into acceptable code. Sure there is a lot of code in 30 seconds but it shouldn't pass code review (even the ai's own review).
8 replies →
> You can basically hand it a design
And, pray tell, how people are going to come up with such design?
6 replies →
The number of non-technical people in my orbit that could successfully pull up Claude code and one shot a basic todo app is zero. They couldn’t do it before and won’t be able to now.
They wouldn’t even know where to begin!
6 replies →
Not really. What the FE engineer will produce in a week will be vastly different from what the AI will produce. That's like saying restaurants are dead because it takes a minute to heat up a microwave meal.
7 replies →
The last 20% is usually what takes 80% of the time
Its not our current location, but our trajectory that is scary.
The walls and plateaus that have been consistently pulled out from "comments of reassurance" have not materialized. If this pace holds for another year and a half, things are going to be very different. And the pipeline is absolutely overflowing with specialized compute coming online by the gigawatt for the foreseeable future.
So far the most accurate predictions in the AI space have been from the most optimistic forecasters.
There is a distribution of optimism, some people in 2023 were predicting AGI by 2025.
No such thing as trajectory when it comes to mass behavior because it can turn on a dime if people find reason to. Thats what makes civilization so fun.
https://xkcd.com/605/
Thank you for posting this.
Im really tired, and exhausted of reading simple takes.
Grok is a very capable LLM that can produce decent videos. Why are most garbage? Because NOT EVERYONE HAS THE SKILL NOR THE WILL TO DO IT WELL!
The answer is taste.
I don't know if they will ever get there, but LLMs are a long ways away from having decent creative taste.
Which means they are just another tool in the artist's toolbox, not a tool that will replace the artist. Same as every other tool before it: amazing in capable hands, boring in the hands of the average person.
7 replies →
This goes well along with all my non-tech and even tech co-workers. Honestly the value generation leverage I have now is 10x or more then it was before compared to other people.
HN is a echo chamber of a very small sub group. The majority of people can’t utilize it and needs to have this further dumbed down and specialized.
That’s why marketing and conversion rate optimization works, its not all about the technical stuff, its about knowing what people need.
For funded VC companies often the game was not much different, it was just part of the expenses, sometimes a lot sometimes a smaller part. But eventually you could just buy the software you need, but that didn’t guarantee success. Their were dramatic failures and outstanding successes, and I wish it wouldn’t but most of the time the codebase was not the deciding factor. (Sometimes it was, airtable, twitch etc, bless the engineers, but I don’t believe AI would have solved these problems)
> The majority of people can’t utilize it
Tbh, depending on the field, even this crowd will need further dumbing down. Just look at the blog illustration slops - 99% of them are just terrible, even when the text is actually valuable. That's because people's judgement of value, outside their field of expertise, is typically really bad. A trained cook can look at some chatgpt recipe and go "this is stupid and it will taste horrible", whereas the average HN techbro/nerd (like yours truly) will think it's great -- until they actually taste it, that is.
3 replies →
> To actually execute on these things takes a different kind of thinking
Agreed. Honestly, and I hate to use the tired phrase, but some people are literally just built different. Those who'd be entrepreneurs would have been so in any time period with any technology.
3 things
1) I don’t disagree with the spirit of your argument
2) 3D printing has higher startup costs than code (you need to buy the damn printer)
3) YOU are making a distinction when it comes to vibe coding from non-tech people. The way these tools are being sold, the way investments are being made, is based on non-domain people developing domain specific taste.
This last part “reasonable” argument ends up serving as a bait and switch, shielding these investments. I might be wrong, but your comment doesn’t indicate that you believe the hype.
100%, it's like with "Suno" - everyone can create a good quality music/song basically in 2-3 minutes (and vibe programming can only do.... nothing in a few minutes) - how many new great bands and musicions we got )))))
You might not get great musicians from using Suno, but an ad company might decide to just generate a jingle rather than hire a musician to do it. Same with images/videos. The result might not be great, but the companies does it in 3 minutes and close-to-zero cost. Similarly, you can vibe-code a website for a restaurant (that does a very basic thing like display a menu, opening hours, maybe a google map location). It might not be the best, but you would be surprised at the amount of people that are willing to sacrifice quality for cheap prices.
1 reply →
I heard a stat on the economist podcast the other day talking about AI music production. They said spotify estimates 40% of songs on their platform are now AI generated. The AI generated songs make up 0.5% of total listening time.
Low quality music made in bulk seems much less useful than low quality code made in bulk.
This reminds me of the old idea of the Lisp curse. The claim was that Lisp, with the power of homoiconic macros, would magnify the effectiveness of one strong engineer so much that they could build everything custom, ignoring prior art.
They would get amazing amounts done, but no one else could understand the internals because they were so uniquely shaped by the inner nuances of one mind.
Even if code gets cheaper, running your own versions of things comes with significant downsides.
Software exists as part of an ecosystem of related software, human communities, companies etc. Software benefits from network effects both at development time and at runtime.
With full custom software, you users / customers won't be experienced with it. AI won't automatically know all about it, or be able to diagnose errors without detailed inspection. You can't name drop it. You don't benefit from shared effort by the community / vendors. Support is more difficult.
We are also likely to see "the bar" for what constitutes good software raise over time.
All the big software companies are in a position to direct enormous token flows into their flagship products, and they have every incentive to get really good at scaling that.
The logical endgame (which I do not think we will necessarily reach) would be the end of software development as a career in itself.
Instead software development would just become a tool anybody could use in their own specific domain. For instance if a manager needs some employee scheduling software, they would simply describe their exact needs and have software customized exactly to their needs, with a UI that fits their preference, ready to go in no time, instead of finding some SaaS that probably doesn't fit exactly what they want, learning how to use it, jumping through a million hoops, dealing with updates you don't like, and then paying a perpetual rent on top of all of this.
Writing the code has never been the hard part for the vast majority of businesses. It's become an order of magnitude cheaper, and that WILL have effects. Businesses that are selling crud apps will falter.
But your hypothetical manager who needs employee scheduling software isn't paying for the coding, they're paying for someone to _figure out_ their exact needs, and with a UI that fits their preference, ready to go in no time.
I've thought a lot about this and I don't think it'll be the death of SaaS. I don't think it's the death of a software engineer either — but a major transformation of the role and the death if your career _if you do not adapt_, and fast.
Agentic coding makes software cheap, and will commoditize a large swath of SaaS that exists primarily because software used to be expensive to build and maintain. Low-value SaaS dies. High-value SaaS survives based on domain expertise, integrations, and distribution. Regulations adapt. Internal tools proliferate.
> they're paying for someone to _figure out_ their exact needs,
Back in the 1980s this was called "systems analysis". The role disappeared a bit before the web came along, and coders were tasked with the job or told to just guess what the exact needs are, which is why so much software is trash.
I don't know, though, Claude Opus is most of the way to being a good systems analyst, and early reports say that having an AI provide descriptions/requirements to a fleet of code-writing AIs gives better results than having a human do it.
Also people aren't going to stop paying some negligible sum for reliable software and opt for a vibe coded pile of code that breaks with every other edge case. SaaS definitely isn't getting replaced imo.
> If software is the commodity, what is the bespoke value-added service that can sit on top of all that?
Troubleshooting and fixing the big mess that nobody fully understands when it eventually falls over?
> Troubleshooting and fixing the big mess that nobody fully understands
If that's actually the future of humans in software engineering then that sounds like a nightmare career that I want no part of. Just the same as I don't want anything to do with the gigantic mess of Cobal and Java powering legacy systems today.
And I also push back on the idea that llms can't troubleshoot and fix things, and therefore will eventually require humans again. My experience has been the opposite. I've found that llms are even better at troubleshooting and fixing an existing code base than they are at writing greenfield code from scratch.
My experience so far has been they are somewhat good at troubleshooting code, patterns, etc, that exist in the publicly viewable sphere of stuff it's trained on, where common error messages and pitfalls are "google-able"
They are much worse at code/patterns/apis that were locally created, including things created by the same LLM that's trying to fix a problem.
I think LLMs are also creating a decline in the amount of good troubleshooting information being published on the internet. So less future content to scrape.
This whole comment thread here is really echoing and adding to some thoughts ive had lately on the shift from considering LLMs replacing engineering to make software (much of which is about integration, longevity and customization of a general system), vs LLMs replacing buying software.
If most software is just used by me to do a specific task, then being able to make software for me to do that task will become the norm. Following that thought, we are going to see a drastic reduction in SASS solutions, as many people who were buying a flexible-toolbox for one usecase to use occasionally, just get an llm to make them the script/software to do that task as and when they need it, without any concern for things like security, longevity, ease of use by others (for better or for worse).
I guess what im circling around is that if we define engineering as building the complex tools that have to interact with many other systems, persist, be generally useful and understandable to many people, and we consider that many people actually dont need that complexity for their use of the system, the complexity arises from it needing to serve its purpose at huge scale over time. then maybe there will be less need for enginners, but perhaps first and foremost because the problems that engineering is required to solve are much less if much more focused and bespoke solutions to peoples problems are available on demand.
As an engineer i have often felt threatened by LLMs and agents of late, but i find that if i reframe it from Agents replacing me, to Agents causing the type of problems that are even valuable to solve to shift, it feels less threatening for some reason. Ill have to mull more.
Taking it further, imagine a traditional desktop OS but it generates your programs on the fly.
Google's weird AI browser project is kind of a step in this direction. Instead of starting with a list of programs and services and customizing your work to that workflow, you start with the task you need accomplished and the operating system creates an optimized UI flow specifically for that task.
but bringing it back, you 1° need to pitch this idea to investors liberate money to cover the Sahara desert with a huge server to suffice these sci-fi needs /s
It's hard to swallow. I'm a 14 YOE software engineer working in an office of about 40 people, with five on the software team. We could cut our software team to 3 people and then maybe 2 after a couple years. The rest of the office could be skimmed to maybe 5 or 10 people. The engineers would babysit the systems and the other personnel would handle the face to face. With these systems developing in the OS the last year or so, it seems as though everything can be automated... Everyone has an X on their back, not just engineers.
Luckily my org has a bit of a pushback attitude towards AI systems, but it will only be a matter of time before we have to compete and adapt. It's kind of depressing, and only the strong will survive.
> One obvious answer is we can make a lot more custom stuff. Like, why buy Windows and Office when I can just ask claude to write me my own versions instead? Why run a commodity operating system on kiosks? We can make so many more one-off pieces of software
yes, it will enable a lot of custom one-off software but I think people are forgetting the advantages of multiple copied instances, which is what enabled software to be so successful in the first place.
Mass production of the same piece of software creates standards, every word processor uses the same format and displays it the same way.
Every date library you import will calculate two months from now the same way, therefore this is code you don't have to constantly double check in your debug sessions.
> why buy Windows and Office when I can just ask claude to write me my own versions instead? Why run a commodity operating system on kiosks?
Linux costs $0. Creating a linux clone compatible with your hardware from the hardware spec sheets with an AI for complicated hardware would cost thousands to millions of dollars in tokens, and you'd end up with something that works worse than linux (or more likely something that doesn't even boot).
Even if the price falls by a thousand fold, why would you spend thousands of dollars on tokens to develop an OS when there's already one you can use?
Even if software becomes cheaper to write, it's not free, and there's a lot of software (especially libraries) out there which is free.
> cost thousands to millions of dollars in tokens
> Even if the price falls by a thousand fold, why would you spend thousands of dollars on tokens to develop an OS when there's already one you can use?
Why do you assume token price will only fall a thousand fold? I'm pretty sure tokens have fallen by more than that in the last few years already - at least if we're speaking about like-for-like intelligence.
I suspect AI token costs will fall exponentially over the next decade or two. Like Dennard scaling / Moore's law has for CPUs over the last 40 years. Especially given the amount of investment being poured into LLMs at the moment. Essentially the entire computing hardware industry is retooling to manufacture AI clusters.
If it costs you $1-$10 in tokens to get the AI to make a bespoke operating system for your embedded hardware, people will absolutely do it. Especially if it frees them up from supply chain attacks. Linux is free, but linux isn't well optimized for embedded systems. I think my electric piano runs linux internally. It takes 10 seconds to boot. Boo to that.
Token prices have literally gone up, where are you getting this information from.... Noone would have pay for a bespoke linux made by an stochastic llm when security is a concern, even if it was $10.00 which it will never be.
The hardware required to run these things has all ballooned in price, there are no efficiencies coming. To run Kimi2.5 4bit you're sitll spending 100k in hardware, and its not nearly as reliable as Claude. Also Agentic Tooling have made their token consumption go up to increase revenue, and models are becoming more verbose in their output (wonder why). You're smoking something.
1 reply →
Software isn't just the code, it's also the stability that can only be gained after years of successful operation and ironing out bugs, the understanding of who your customers truly are, what are their actual needs (and not perceived needs), which features will drive growth. etc. I think there's still a "there" there.
I think the kind of software that everybody needs (think Slack or Jira) is at the greatest risk, as everybody will want to compete in those fields, which will drive margins to 0 (and that's a good thing for customers)! However, I think small businesses pandering to specific user groups will still be viable.
> Yeah, this is quite thought provoking. If computer code written by LLMs is a commodity, what new businesses does that enable? What can we do cheaply we couldn't do before?
The model owner can just withhold access and build all the businesses themselves.
Financial capital used to need labor capital. It doesn't anymore.
We're entering into scary territory. I would feel much better if this were all open source, but of course it isn't.
I think this risk is much lower in a world where there are lots of different model owners competing with each other, which is how it appears to be playing out.
New fields are always competitive. Eventually, if left to its own devices, a capitalist market will inevitably consolidate into cartels and monopolies. Governments better pay attention and possibly act before it's too late.
1 reply →
Why would the model owner do that? You still need some human input to operate the business, so it would be terribly impractical to try to run all the businesses. Better to sell the model to everyone else, since everyone will need it.
The only existential threat to the model owner is everyone being a model owner, and I suspect that's the main reason why all the world's memory supply is sitting in a warehouse, unused.
> If software is the commodity, what is the bespoke value-added service that can sit on top of all that?
It would be cool if I can brew hardware at home by getting AI to design and 3D print circuit boards with bespoke software. Alas, we are constrained by physics. At the moment.
> If software is the commodity, what is the bespoke value-added service that can sit on top of all that?
Aggregation. Platforms that provide visibility, influence, reach.