7 ms·

Even without LLMs, we were approaching a point of saturation where software development was bottlenecked by market demand and funding, not by a shortage of code

Even without LLMs, we were approaching a point of saturation where software development was bottlenecked by market demand and funding, not by a shortage of code. Our tooling has become so powerful that the pure act of programming is secondary. It's a world away from when the industry began. There's a great story from Bill Gates about a time when his ability to simply write code was an incredibly scarce resource. A company was so desperate for programmers that they hired him and Paul Allen as teenagers: "So, they were paying penalties... they said, 'We don’t care [that they are kids].' You know, so I go down there. You know, I’m like 16, but I look about 13. They hire us. They pay us. It’s a really amazing project... they got a kick out of how quickly I could write code." That story is a powerful reminder of how much has changed. Writing code was the bottleneck years ago. However the core problem has shifted from "How do we build it?" to "What should we build and is there a business for it?" Source: https://youtu.be/H1PgccykclM?si=YuIFsUcWc6sHRkAg https://youtu.be/H1PgccykclM?si=YuIFsUcWc6sHRkAg

OtherShrezzing 1y ago
>Even without LLMs, we were approaching a point of saturation where software development was bottlenecked by market demand and funding, not by a shortage of code I think it's credible to say that it was just market demand. Marc Andreessen's main complaint before the AI boom was that "there is more capital available than there are good ideas to fund". Personally, I think that's out of touch with reality, but he's the guy with all the money and none of the ideas, so he's a credible fist-hand source.
- afiodorov 1y ago
  I think the "more capital than ideas" problem is highly contextual and largely a Silicon Valley-centric view. There is immense, unmet demand for good software in developing countries—for example, robust applications that work well on underpowered phones and low-bandwidth networks across Africa or Southeast Asia. These are real problems waiting for well-executed ideas. The issue isn't a lack of good ideas, but a VC ecosystem that throws capital at ideas of dubious utility for saturated markets, while overlooking tangible, global needs because they don't fit a specific hyper-growth model.
  - aleph_minus_one 1y ago
    > while overlooking tangible, global needs because they don't fit a specific hyper-growth model. I do believe that these also fit the hyper-growth model. It's rather that these investors have a very US-centric knowledge of markets and market demands, and thus can simply barely judge ideas that target very different markets.
  - nitwit005 1y ago
    Investors generally don't care about the actual utility of what gets built. They want a high return on investment.
- oytis 1y ago
  If you define good idea to be limited to SaaS, then sure you'll reach saturation pretty soon. But, say, anything that involves hardware could definitely benefit from a little more funding. Also, he's a VC, but where more funding even in pure software is needed are sustainable businesses that don't have ambition to take over the world, but rather serve their customer niche well.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
netcan 1y ago
On a tangential note... This type of problem is very relevant for "impact of ai" estimates. I think we have a tendency to overestimate efficiency... because of the central roles it plays at the margins that mattered to us at any given time. . But the economy is bottlenecked in complex ways. Market demand, money, etc. It's not obvious that 100X more code is something we can use.
- JoshuaDavid 1y ago
  We can almost certainly use 100x as much code as is currently written. There's a ton of throwaway code that, if written, would produce small but nonzero value. Certainly 100x as much code wouldn't produce 100x as much value though. I suspect value per unit of code is one of those power law things.
aleph_minus_one 1y ago
> There's a great story from Bill Gates about a time when his ability to simply write code was an incredibly scarce resource. The capability to write high-quality code and have a deep knowledge about it is still a scarce resource. The difference from former days is rather that the industry began to care less about this.
- Cthulhu_ 1y ago
  This is in tandem with several generations of programming language, tooling, best practices, etc. LLMs haven't suddenly increased people's productivity, improved tooling did. Back when these tools did not exist yet, a lot of this knowledge didn't exist yet. Software now is built on the shoulders of giants. You can write a line of code and get a window in your operating system, people like Bill Gates and his generation wrote the low level graphics code and had to come up with the concept of a window first, had to invent the fundamentals of graphics programming, had to wait and interact with hardware vendors to help make it performant.
otabdeveloper4 1y ago
> Writing code was the bottleneck years ago. No it wasn't. It never was.
- afiodorov 1y ago
  If you're hiring 16 year olds just because of their ability to write code sounds like you're bottlenecked by writing code. Your comment doesn't clarify why you disagree.
  - otabdeveloper4 1y ago
    > hiring 16 year olds just because of their ability to write code They weren't. They were hired because of their ability to deliver software products. Huge difference. Every kid who mechanically copied BASIC games from a magazine could "write code", but they weren't Bill Gates. (Anyways Bill Gates was hired because of nepotism, but that's irrelevant here.)

OtherShrezzing 1y ago

>Even without LLMs, we were approaching a point of saturation where software development was bottlenecked by market demand and funding, not by a shortage of code I think it's credible to say that it was just market demand. Marc Andreessen's main complaint before the AI boom was that "there is more capital available than there are good ideas to fund". Personally, I think that's out of touch with reality, but he's the guy with all the money and none of the ideas, so he's a credible fist-hand source.

afiodorov 1y ago
I think the "more capital than ideas" problem is highly contextual and largely a Silicon Valley-centric view. There is immense, unmet demand for good software in developing countries—for example, robust applications that work well on underpowered phones and low-bandwidth networks across Africa or Southeast Asia. These are real problems waiting for well-executed ideas. The issue isn't a lack of good ideas, but a VC ecosystem that throws capital at ideas of dubious utility for saturated markets, while overlooking tangible, global needs because they don't fit a specific hyper-growth model.
- aleph_minus_one 1y ago
  > while overlooking tangible, global needs because they don't fit a specific hyper-growth model. I do believe that these also fit the hyper-growth model. It's rather that these investors have a very US-centric knowledge of markets and market demands, and thus can simply barely judge ideas that target very different markets.
- nitwit005 1y ago
  Investors generally don't care about the actual utility of what gets built. They want a high return on investment.
oytis 1y ago
If you define good idea to be limited to SaaS, then sure you'll reach saturation pretty soon. But, say, anything that involves hardware could definitely benefit from a little more funding. Also, he's a VC, but where more funding even in pure software is needed are sustainable businesses that don't have ambition to take over the world, but rather serve their customer niche well.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

netcan 1y ago

On a tangential note... This type of problem is very relevant for "impact of ai" estimates. I think we have a tendency to overestimate efficiency... because of the central roles it plays at the margins that mattered to us at any given time. . But the economy is bottlenecked in complex ways. Market demand, money, etc. It's not obvious that 100X more code is something we can use.

JoshuaDavid 1y ago
We can almost certainly use 100x as much code as is currently written. There's a ton of throwaway code that, if written, would produce small but nonzero value. Certainly 100x as much code wouldn't produce 100x as much value though. I suspect value per unit of code is one of those power law things.

aleph_minus_one 1y ago

> There's a great story from Bill Gates about a time when his ability to simply write code was an incredibly scarce resource. The capability to write high-quality code and have a deep knowledge about it is still a scarce resource. The difference from former days is rather that the industry began to care less about this.

Cthulhu_ 1y ago
This is in tandem with several generations of programming language, tooling, best practices, etc. LLMs haven't suddenly increased people's productivity, improved tooling did. Back when these tools did not exist yet, a lot of this knowledge didn't exist yet. Software now is built on the shoulders of giants. You can write a line of code and get a window in your operating system, people like Bill Gates and his generation wrote the low level graphics code and had to come up with the concept of a window first, had to invent the fundamentals of graphics programming, had to wait and interact with hardware vendors to help make it performant.

otabdeveloper4 1y ago

> Writing code was the bottleneck years ago. No it wasn't. It never was.

afiodorov 1y ago
If you're hiring 16 year olds just because of their ability to write code sounds like you're bottlenecked by writing code. Your comment doesn't clarify why you disagree.
- otabdeveloper4 1y ago
  > hiring 16 year olds just because of their ability to write code They weren't. They were hired because of their ability to deliver software products. Huge difference. Every kid who mechanically copied BASIC games from a magazine could "write code", but they weren't Bill Gates. (Anyways Bill Gates was hired because of nepotism, but that's irrelevant here.)