4 ms·

The premise is extremely flawed. If users are able to generate their own apps instead of having to buy them, it shrinks the TAM for those apps. If a meatpacker

by ghc 10mo ago

The premise is extremely flawed. If users are able to generate their own apps instead of having to buy them, it shrinks the TAM for those apps. If a meatpacker makes its own CRM, it's not going to put it on an app store or try to sell it! Building software and publishing software are fundamentally two different activities. If AI tilts the build vs. buy equation too far into the build column, we should see a collapse in the published software market. The canary will be a collapse in the outsourced development / consulting market, since they'd theoretically be undercut by internal teams with AI first -- they're expensive and there's no economy of scale when they're building custom software for you.

conartist6 10mo ago
Right but now you're talking about 5 or 20 or 100 or 1000 companies building CRM software. They're basically doing the mostly the same work over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and (I would like you to know that I typed every single one of these "and over"s with my very own fingers) and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and I think only the AI companies really benefit from that. I feel silly explaining this as if it's a new thing, but there's a concept in social organization called "specialization" in which societies advance because some people decide to focus on growing food while some people focus on defending against threats and other people focus on building better tools, etc. A society which has a rich social contract which facilitates a high degree of specialization is usually more virile than a subsistence economy in which every individual has all the responsibilities: food gathering, defense, toolmaking, and more. I wonder if people are forgetting this when they herald the arrival of a new era in which everyone is the maker of their own tools...
- zkmon 10mo ago
  That's right. Infact, I see more outsourcing to happen, due to risk delegation and complexity management. AI would only make humans lazier and risk averse. Complexity of regulations, government reach, security risks would only increase. Risk can't distributed to AI employees (agents). A supervisor of AI agent populations can't be held responsible for all the bugs and complexity in a AI-generated product.
- gfdvgfffv 10mo ago
  The thing is that also empowering individuals to do specialized activities by way of a tool (instead of themselves having to specialize) is a hallmark of progress? Like I don’t need a “professional” to wash my clothes, I don’t need to wash my clothes myself. I use a washing machine. I don’t need to hire a programmer. I don’t need to be a programmer. I can use a tool to program for me. (We sure as hell aren’t there yet, but that’s a possibility).
  - wizzwizz4 10mo ago
    Your washing machine can only deal with certain classes of clothing. It will completely destroy others, and has no way to determine what clothing has been put into it. Meanwhile, the average untrained-but-conscientious human will, at worst, damage a small portion of an item of clothing before spotting the problem and acting to mitigate it. (If the clothing is "absolutely must never come into contact with water" levels of dry-clean only, they might still trash the whole item, but they aren't likely to make the same mistake twice.) Programming is far more the latter kind of task than the former. Data-processing or system control tasks in the "solve ordinary, well-specified problem" category are solved by executing software, not programming.
  - conartist6 10mo ago
    Using an AI is still like hiring someone to do programming work for you. It's going to cost money. Why would you waste money? We have sewing machines, but you don't make all your own clothes do you?
    - rtp4me 10mo ago
      If the cost of the raw materials and worker were less than the price tag at the store, sure, I would probably opt to make my own clothes. They would fit me perfectly, and I can get the right shade of blue instead of bluish. In the case of AI, Claude costs $100 or $200/mo for really good coding tasks. This is much less expensive than hiring someone to do the same thing for me.
      - conartist6 10mo ago
- singpolyma3 10mo ago
  Not only AI companies benefit the companies themselves benefit too from getting software that actually meets (more of) their needs rather than whatever some dev imagined they might need.
- danaris 10mo ago
  God, yes. I see so many people quote that damnable Heinlein quote about specialization being for insects as if it's some deep insight worth making the cornerstone of your philosophy, when in fact a) it's the opinion of a character in the book, and b) it is hopelessly wrong about how human beings actually became as advanced as we are. We're much better off taking the Unix philosophy (many small groups of people each getting really really good at doing very niche things, all working together) to build a society. It's probably still flawed, but at least it's aimed in the right direction.
- ghc 10mo ago
  Companies have always written their own software (or abused spreadsheets). The tool is the computer; writing software to solve your own problems is advanced tool use, not making your own tools. Obviously this doesn't apply to every kind of software, but I would argue that anything someone might be tempted to build in Excel is fair game.
blazespin 10mo ago
Nobody collapses, everything just shrinks. And we're seeing that in the labor numbers. Sometimes things are harder to see because it's chipping away and everywhere at the margins.
- ghc 10mo ago
  A market doesn't have to shrink all that much before there's a collapse. Generally it's quite gradual, and then very sudden. There's a tipping point where a market cannot sustain a public company and their structural overhead and have declining revenue. Investors don't want to invest in shrinking markets because it's a guaranteed way to lose money. This leads to share price collapse and the sudden rapid destruction of market incumbents.

by ghc 10mo ago

conartist6 10mo ago

Right but now you're talking about 5 or 20 or 100 or 1000 companies building CRM software. They're basically doing the mostly the same work over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and (I would like you to know that I typed every single one of these "and over"s with my very own fingers) and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and I think only the AI companies really benefit from that. I feel silly explaining this as if it's a new thing, but there's a concept in social organization called "specialization" in which societies advance because some people decide to focus on growing food while some people focus on defending against threats and other people focus on building better tools, etc. A society which has a rich social contract which facilitates a high degree of specialization is usually more virile than a subsistence economy in which every individual has all the responsibilities: food gathering, defense, toolmaking, and more. I wonder if people are forgetting this when they herald the arrival of a new era in which everyone is the maker of their own tools...

zkmon 10mo ago
That's right. Infact, I see more outsourcing to happen, due to risk delegation and complexity management. AI would only make humans lazier and risk averse. Complexity of regulations, government reach, security risks would only increase. Risk can't distributed to AI employees (agents). A supervisor of AI agent populations can't be held responsible for all the bugs and complexity in a AI-generated product.
gfdvgfffv 10mo ago
The thing is that also empowering individuals to do specialized activities by way of a tool (instead of themselves having to specialize) is a hallmark of progress? Like I don’t need a “professional” to wash my clothes, I don’t need to wash my clothes myself. I use a washing machine. I don’t need to hire a programmer. I don’t need to be a programmer. I can use a tool to program for me. (We sure as hell aren’t there yet, but that’s a possibility).
- wizzwizz4 10mo ago
  Your washing machine can only deal with certain classes of clothing. It will completely destroy others, and has no way to determine what clothing has been put into it. Meanwhile, the average untrained-but-conscientious human will, at worst, damage a small portion of an item of clothing before spotting the problem and acting to mitigate it. (If the clothing is "absolutely must never come into contact with water" levels of dry-clean only, they might still trash the whole item, but they aren't likely to make the same mistake twice.) Programming is far more the latter kind of task than the former. Data-processing or system control tasks in the "solve ordinary, well-specified problem" category are solved by executing software, not programming.
- conartist6 10mo ago
  Using an AI is still like hiring someone to do programming work for you. It's going to cost money. Why would you waste money? We have sewing machines, but you don't make all your own clothes do you?
  - rtp4me 10mo ago
    If the cost of the raw materials and worker were less than the price tag at the store, sure, I would probably opt to make my own clothes. They would fit me perfectly, and I can get the right shade of blue instead of bluish. In the case of AI, Claude costs $100 or $200/mo for really good coding tasks. This is much less expensive than hiring someone to do the same thing for me.
    - conartist6 10mo ago
singpolyma3 10mo ago
Not only AI companies benefit the companies themselves benefit too from getting software that actually meets (more of) their needs rather than whatever some dev imagined they might need.
danaris 10mo ago
God, yes. I see so many people quote that damnable Heinlein quote about specialization being for insects as if it's some deep insight worth making the cornerstone of your philosophy, when in fact a) it's the opinion of a character in the book, and b) it is hopelessly wrong about how human beings actually became as advanced as we are. We're much better off taking the Unix philosophy (many small groups of people each getting really really good at doing very niche things, all working together) to build a society. It's probably still flawed, but at least it's aimed in the right direction.
ghc 10mo ago
Companies have always written their own software (or abused spreadsheets). The tool is the computer; writing software to solve your own problems is advanced tool use, not making your own tools. Obviously this doesn't apply to every kind of software, but I would argue that anything someone might be tempted to build in Excel is fair game.

blazespin 10mo ago

Nobody collapses, everything just shrinks. And we're seeing that in the labor numbers. Sometimes things are harder to see because it's chipping away and everywhere at the margins.

ghc 10mo ago
A market doesn't have to shrink all that much before there's a collapse. Generally it's quite gradual, and then very sudden. There's a tipping point where a market cannot sustain a public company and their structural overhead and have declining revenue. Investors don't want to invest in shrinking markets because it's a guaranteed way to lose money. This leads to share price collapse and the sudden rapid destruction of market incumbents.