Comment by stateofinquiry
8 hours ago
Interesting points. With the extreme cheapening of the cost (time/skill) for software production, we can have "Extremely Personal Software", as you mention and as demonstrated by the source. I wonder if we will reach a stage where "software" is written by a computer for an audience of 1 and for a single task, to be run once only- via an interface that works for all tasks. The very concept of software as something that users have to learn to use (memorizing keybindings, for example), might go the way of the punch card.
More like Star Trek, we would just ask "computer" to do things, and its machinations (and "software") will be invisible to us. We would just have output to deal with.
I think this would mean a lot of things. I'm sure I can't fathom all of the implications, but it sure makes me feel old! Interesting times ahead.
LLMs seem to be great for speeding up the creation of things that aren't all that hard to write in the first place.
They don't seem to be helping much with difficult tasks.
Text editor? Easy. That used to be a rite of passage. Lots of people have written their own basic text editor.
3d solid modeler? It's always been difficult and AI coders aren't (yet?) up to the task. Most open source CAD projects that show up here are layers on top of OCCT (Open Cascade) which is pretty far behind what commercial geometry kernels are capable of.
More likely we'll have a library of skeletons for single task software, where the LLM can fill in the blanks as needed.
Maybe it saves the script locally (invisible to the user) and reuses it if the user repeats the same request, the script is deleted if it's not needed for X amount of time.