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Comment by zacksiri

6 hours ago

The way I see it is AI collapses hierarchy. Abstraction layers will become more flat both in software and in society. Because ultimately software and layers of heirarchy in society exists to serve a function. But now those functions are being replaced.

Imagine this you used to need a library for common things in your software project. Even if you just need one function but because it was easier to just import a library that would have been the standard practice. But now the AI will just go “I can just implement that thing you need in 10 lines”. You used to need things like react native or flutter if you wanted to build cross platform apps. Now not anymore you just need to tell the LLM and it does it in both, and you get better results too.

In society we also had all these layers of abstractions and hierarchies that we used to need but will become more and more irrelevant collapsing the hierarchy.

There is a saying “as above so below, as below so above” I think this applies here. It will propagate all through our social construct, software, society.

9 comments

zacksiri

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yoz-y  3 hours ago

I am honestly _astonished_ that the current crop of agents are not all written natively for every platform.

I tried porting a moderately complex workout app that I’ve built over years (and which includes a whole agentic loop) from web to iOS native. It took me a couple of evenings.

There is now no excuse to not offer a native experience for every supported platform when you are a bigger company.

Make one of the platforms using good coding practices. Vibe code the others from the source using a proper test battery.

  • piker  3 hours ago

    Because it’s too complex and not worth the effort. Most users will not care about or perceive the benefit. If they delegate that responsibility to Google via Electron, they can focus on features/bug fixes that move the needle.

    • yoz-y  3 hours ago

      What effort ? I’ve started seeing this attitude more and more. We had a thing that took a week to do before. Now it takes a morning. So we refuse to spend half a day polishing it because it’s too annoying.

      Once the initial port is done, keeping platforms in sync is fast. Not to mention that a harness that would automate this would be valuable.

      I run codex on an old rpi, it eats 190M of ram for what essentially is a telnet client.

      1 reply →

    • pydry  2 hours ago

      This isnt how a company which has "solved programming" would act.

      Especially since users do prefer a native experience and having their RAM conserved.

  • testdelacc1  2 hours ago

    I have a question about web to iOS native. How do you distribute that app? I’m assuming you’re paying $99 yearly to distribute through the App Store? Is this app meant just for you or for anyone to find?

    Reason I’m asking is because I’d like to make native iOS apps just for myself rather than progressive web apps. But I haven’t understood the best way to distribute.