Comment by dumbfounder
15 hours ago
The future is that people stop buying software and just build it themselves. The spam filter in thunderbird was broken for me, I built my own in hours and it works way better. Oh that CRM doesn’t have the features you want? Build one that does. It will become very easy to built and deploy solutions to many of your own bespoke problems.
Unlikely. The future will be some people will do this, but honestly I think it will largely be people who were already tinkering with building things, whether full on software development or not
My mom and dad, my brother who drives a dump truck in a limestone quarry, my sister-in-law, none of them work in tech or consider themselves technical in any way. They are never, ever going to write their own software and will continue to just download apps from the app store or sign up for websites that accomplish the tasks they want
Some of us will do this, and it will be great for us for a period of time. That is, until others build another giant ball of shit 10,000x bigger than the npm/nodejs/javascript/java/cobol/c++/whatever else garbage pile we have today.
We'll be right back here in no-time.
No we won't, that was our hope when software development experience started going downhill with cheap offshoring teams.
The best we could achieve were the projects that got so burned that near shore started to become an alternative, but never again in-house.
They won't think about it in terms of building software, just like many house buyers don't think in terms of building houses, even though somebody has effectively built a house just for them.
They'll just ask their bank to help them fill out a family income form based on last year's earnings. They'll get the numbers back, without thinking about the Python script that used Pandas and some web APIs to generate those numbers. They'll think about it in terms of "that thing that Chat GPT just gave me to compare truck from nearby local dealers", without realizing that it's actually a React app, partially powered by reverse-engineered APIs, partially by data that their agent scraped off Facebook and Craigslist.
Correct, my ex couldn't even be bothered to update the notification settings on her iPhone, let alone she'd be generating and deploying an app using an LLM. Most people just don't want to have anything to do with tech, they just want it to work and get out of their way.
I did the same with my car, technically I could do maintenance myself and troubleshoot and what not, but I just couldn't be arsed, so I outsource it at a premium price.
Yeah, I think (completely biased as a long-time developer who is happily playing with AI for building stuff) people using AI to build their own tooling will be like a hot rod scene from the '60s. Lots of buzz, definitely some cool stuff, but in reality probably physically smaller than the noise around it.
Off to bust my virtual knuckles on something.
> Unlikely. The future will be some people will do this, but honestly I think it will largely be people who were already tinkering with building things, whether full on software development or not
Billions of dollars of stock market value disappeared because of the concern AI can create core SaaS functionality for corporations instead of them spending millions of dollars in licensing fees to SAP, Microsoft, etc.
This not about tinkering.
SaaS As We Know It Is Dead: How To Survive The SaaS-pocalypse! - https://www.forrester.com/blogs/saas-as-we-know-it-is-dead-h...
Why SaaS Stocks Have Dropped—and What It Signals for Software’s Next Chapter - https://www.bain.com/insights/why-saas-stocks-have-dropped-a...
Jim Cramer says AI fears have made the stock market fragile - https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/23/jim-cramer-says-ai-fears-hav...
Did you see the network security stock sell-off after Anthropic announced a code security analysis feature? There's a sliver of nothing between mob mentality and wisdom of the crowd.
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>Billions of dollars of stock market value disappeared because of the concern
That's really the key, right there. The value disappeared because of concern, not of anything real.
When ungodly amounts of money is governed entirely by vibes, it's hardly surprising they lose ungodly amounts of money to vibe-coding.
The downside is the effects of all that money shifting is very real :(
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Oh no Bain and Jim Cramer think software is dead. All that is is a signal to buy software stocks
No judgement, but if my mom or dad had a problem I could solve with a couple hours a month, with an larger initial investment of time at the beginning, I'd be willing to make it for them.
To the matter of driving a truck though, if someone needs an app idea, blue collar workers are having to spend an hour after work logging what they did that day. If they could do it in their truck while driving home for the day, you could make a pile of cash selling an app that lets them do that.
The future is either a regression of society from the resulting riots and massacres when 3/4 of the population is unemployed.
Or perpetual work camps for the masses.
Can you name me another time when humanity has run out of useful work to do?
Was it when we tamed fire, invented the wheel, writing, or double entry bookkeeping? All of which appear more consequential than current AI.
We’ll always have something to do. And humans like doing things.
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This feels like when 3D printers hit the consumer market and everyone declared that buying things was over, everyone will just print them at home. There's tons of benefits to standardised software too. Companies rely on the fact they can hire people who already know photoshop/xero/webpack/etc rather than having to train them from scratch on in house tools.
Business software is also useful because it gives companies a process to follow that even if not optimal, is probably better than what they’d come up with on their own.
The flexibility of big source of truth systems like ERP and CRM is sometimes (often) a downside. Many times these companies need to be told how to do something instead of platform vendors bending over backwards to enable horrible processes
> Companies rely on the fact they can hire people who already know photoshop/xero/webpack/etc rather than having to train them from scratch on in house tools.
Yeah, I've seen perfectly good flexible in house products abandoned because it was just easier to hire people who knew Salesforce or whatever.
But the true AI Believer would object you don't need to hire anymore, you can just get more agents to cold call or whatever :)
What ever happened to that?
They became much like woodworking or power tools. Accessible to anyone who wants them, but still requires an investment to learn and use. While the majority still buys their stuff from retail.
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It turns out they're really great at building toys, cosplay gear and little plastic parts for things, but in general not that useful in most people's daily lives. Kind of like Ai.
Funnily enough, this will make many "tragedy of the commons" / "Goodhart's law hacking" problems more tractable.
Right now, there's only one Google algorithm, one Amazon search and so on. The moment you let agents run wild, each with a different model, prompt and memory, effectively introducing randomness into the process, it becomes much harder to optimize for "metric go up."
we've seen what "no barrier of entry" marketplaces look like...
Quality go down.
That is only true at the start.
The quality will always be lower for a new product/ production line, because 1) it hasn't had the time to iterate that got the established, big-name producers to where they are, and 2) it democratizes the market to allow for lower-quality version that weren't fiscally feasible under a more complex (and thus expensive) manufacturing/ production base.
But after the market normalizes, it will start to naturally weed out the price-divorced low-quality products, as people will figure out which ones are shitty even for their price, and the good-for-their-price ones will remain.
Eventually you'll end up with a wider range of quality products than you started with, at a wider range (especially at the low end, making products more accessible) than when it started.
High barrier of entry marketplaces only benefit big companies who don't want to actually compete to stay on top.
Tying it back to the discussion here...
Sure, AI will produce a million shitty Google clones, but no one is using them but their makers. Eventually the good ones will start to inch up in users as word gets around, and eventually one might actually make an inroad that Google has to take note of.
Totally agree. I've found in many cases it's easier to roll your own software/patch existing software with AI than to open an issue, submit a PR, get it reviewed/merged, etc. Let alone buying software
Yes, but this is the honeymoon period. A year from now when you want to make three of the tools talk to each other and they're in three different languages, two of which you don't know and there's no common interface or good place to put one, well, here's hoping you hung onto the design documents.
Maybe I'm just naive, but I've been making lots of my 'vibe-coded' tools interoperable already.
My assumption is that eventually the VC-backed gravy train of low-cost good-quality LLM compute is going to dry-up, and I'm going to have to make do with what I got out of them.
What I want is to be able to use AI to modify the software we already have. Granted I've wanted to do that long before AI, but now maybe plugins will get more popular again now that AI could write them for us
I’m imagining a world where everyone was using emacs/lisp or Smalltalk VMs, and what kind of world-improving insanity we could be sharing through LLMs.
They won't build software, they'll let some AI-based software do the execution of their instructions (which is inefficient, opaque, vendor-locked, not reproducible etc.)
I think Greasemonkey scripts to fix the websites you use is an interesting area too. My bank now supports OFX exports because Claude vibecoded me an extractor for it in 10m.
This is honestly one of the more naive takes I've seen in awhile. People includes more than people that frequent HN. My wife and I are discussing I'd like to keep finance and related things in a password manager. She is in the social sciences (has a couple of degrees) and isn't a fan.
The majority of computer users are not on HN.
You profile says "Trying to figure out what I want to do with my life. DM me if you have ideas." - I would recommend exploring connections and opinions outside tech.
Definitely feels like that is the bigger take away. Not that it "solves all problems" or "isn't good enough to be merged". But that we are arriving to a place where solutions can be good enough to solve the problem you have. Reminds me of early Github when custom and unique software became much more accessible to everyone. Way less digging or going without.
Lots of unaudited and battle tested software. Sounds like a nightmare.
But people don’t actually want to just build it themselves - they never have, and I don’t see any reason to believe they ever will.