Comment by vanuatu
3 days ago
Reasonable conclusion, if you think the entire software industry is rotten then accelerating rot won't do much
I personally disagree with that worldview. (I read the article and the guy's tone is lowkey salty)
The reality is it's insanely hard to convince people (/especially/ consumers. //especially// technical consumers) to pay up to use software. Anyone who has tried to sell software as a startup knows, customers are laser focused on outcomes and value and anything that raises an eyebrow means you're toast
Ofc there are perverse incentives and I think those are bad
I wonder if this is a sign of bad value. Long ago you'd be willing to pay. The relationship was clearer , simpler, stabler. No sudden change of price or rules, no constant false improvement. It was less flexible, and riskier on a way, but it cleaned the noise.
My 2cts
I mean software as a customer/user is by and large completely miserable anymore.
People don't like spending money on yet another Solution that will screw them over then shut down, screwing them over again regarding whatever they were using it for. Look at the reactions and expectations when Beloved Name gets bought by private equity, or how people count down the days until Useful Service starts enshittification and becomes terrible.
People have been trained to leapfrog from service to service while watching for signs of rot because nobody makes software or has long-term plans that actually care about the customer's long-term well being anymore. If Founder McSynergy can make an extra dollar by throwing the entire userbase into a volcano, well, that's just a sacrifice he's willing to make.
> The reality is it's insanely hard to convince people (/especially/ consumers. //especially// technical consumers) to pay up to use software.
The industry is in an extremely bimodal situation, which drives most of that rot.
You have the startups and small businesses who can't get businesses or customers to pay up. And you have the SaaS giants, who already have their customers and can charge whatever they want.
And this is where the "rotten software industry" and doubts about AI feasibility intersect: Both of these business archetypes lack a clear use case for AI.
If you're small, congratulations you can now spend thousands a month on tokens and still have $0 of revenue. AI doesn't really help you "catch up" to customer expectations as now you're also having to compete with the myriad of slop-shops and in-house AI software development.
If you're a giant, well... why bother? Why give OpenAI or Anthropic a million dollars in tokens? They don't need to make the software better nor do need any "AI efficiency" to do layoffs.
I'm curious as to where your perspective comes from.
My view is they both have a clear use case for AI, because every business has a use case for more intelligence on tap. Enterprises big and small already shell out billions upon billions for AI so I'm not sure how your premise holds
In fact AI has resulted in more startups than ever starting to take market share from the incumbent software companies (and the market has started to price that in)
> because every business has a use case for more intelligence on tap.
This is the part I would contest.
Obviously there's some disagreement about how much AI is actually meaningfully intelligent for any given task, but even outside of that:
Turning "intelligence" or staff skill into revenue is not automatic or trivial. You can hire the smartest process engineer on the planet, but if your assembly line has no major inefficiencies, they just can't do anything. They can build you a 2nd assembly line but if there's not the market demand to buy that much product, it's pointless.
For software development: "More code" does not really translate into "more revenue".
If you are a SaaS giant, you don't need "More code". You're not in the business of doing software development. You're in the business of rent seeking. No need to replace people with AI, you can just fire them and replace them with nobody.
And if you're a small firm, code isn't your USP. Everyone has code. Good god especially now with AI, every dumbass' startup can have a trillion lines of code. As has oft been observed (long before AI), the code is a liability. There's not really much efficiency to be had by using AI, because the devs are already minimally writing code.
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> Enterprises big and small already shell out billions upon billions for AI so I'm not sure how your premise holds
By your logic, shouldn't these enterprise's cash flow be expanding due to AI instead of shrinking?
Every business has a use case for more intelligence on tap, but it is abundantly clear that LLMs are not in any way intelligent. They still frequently make egregious errors in what they do, because they are just token predictors with no intelligence or understanding of what they are doing. Yes, even the state of the art frontier models. This in turn means you have to either baby sit them, or accept a much higher rate of failures than a human would produce. Either option kills any potential productivity gains.
> My view is they both have a clear use case for AI, because every business has a use case for more intelligence on tap.
They all do, but for small companies it won't be a benefit, it will be table stakes. It will also not increase revenue for them, it will reduce it because more competitors will be introduced, and customers won't be able to easily differentiate the true slop from the expert-guided and curated slop. The only alternative will be to become more of a slop shop, i.e. replace expensive programmers with cheaper AI, lowering your quality. Or to shut down.
For big companies who have always had terrible quality that didn't matter at all to their bottom line, of course it's a good investment. They can fire programmers. Do buybacks.
> Anyone who has tried to sell software as a startup knows, customers are laser focused on outcomes and value
So the solution is to reduce the cost to zero, instead of competing to provide the best outcome and highest value?
If you've ever tried to start your own company in the US it's a grueling, insane warzone of competition
That results in the winners providing insane value to both customers and equity holders