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I retired from paid sw dev work in 2020 when COVID arrived. I’ve worked on my small projects since with all development by hand. I’d followed the rise of AI, b

I retired from paid sw dev work in 2020 when COVID arrived. I’ve worked on my small projects since with all development by hand. I’d followed the rise of AI, but not used it. Late last year I started a project that included reverse engineering some firmware that runs on an Intel 8096 based embedded processor. I’d never worked on that processor before. There are tools available, but they cost many $. So, I started to think about a simple disassembler. 2 weeks ago we decided to try Claude to see what it could do. We now have a disassembler, assembler and a partially working emulator. No doubt there are bugs and missing features and the code is a bit messy, but boy has it sped up the work. One thing did occur to me. Vendors of small utilities could be in trouble. For example I needed to cut out some pages from a pdf. I could have found a tool online(I’m sure there are several), write one myself. However, Claude quickly performed the task.

TeMPOraL 8mo ago
> Vendors of small utilities could be in trouble. For example I needed to cut out some pages from a pdf. I could have found a tool online(I’m sure there are several), write one myself. However, Claude quickly performed the task. Definitely. Making small, single-purpose utilities with LLMs is almost as easy these days as googling for them on-line - much easier, in fact, if you account for time spent filtering out all the malware, adware, "to finish the process, register an account" and plain broken "tools" that dominate SERP. Case in point, last time my wife needed to generate a few QR codes for some printouts for an NGO event, I just had LLM make one as a static, single-page client-side tool and hosted it myself -- because that was the fastest way to guarantee it's fast, reliable, free of surveillance economy bullshit, and doesn't employ URL shorteners (surprisingly common pattern that sometimes becomes a nasty problem down the line; see e.g. a high-profile case of some QR codes on food products leading to porn sites after shortlink got recycled).
- Antibabelic 8mo ago
  Whatever happened to just typing "apt install qrencode"? It's definitely "fast, reliable, free of surveillance economy bullshit, and doesn't employ URL shorteners".
  - senko 8mo ago
    You need to know "qrencode" exists under that exact name. Claude already knows about it and how to use it.
    - Antibabelic 8mo ago
      Sure, but that's entirely different from vibe-coding a tool, which sounds like a colossal waste of resources.
      - agos 8mo ago
        as long as that wast and the associated cost is heavily subsidized as it is today, nobody will care
        TeMPOraL 8mo ago
        Don't get the anti-AI propaganda get to you too much. Inference is cheap on the margin. Consider: there are models capable (if barely) of doing this job, that you can run locally, on a upper-mid-range PC with high-end consumer GPU. Take that as a baseline, assume it takes a day instead of an hour because of inference speed, tally up total electricity cost. It's not much. Won't boil oceans any more than people playing AAA video games all day will. Sure, the big LLMs from SOTA vendors use more GPUs/TPUs for inference, but this means they finish much faster. Plus, commercial vendors have lots of optimizations (batch processing, large caches, etc.), and data centers are much more power-efficient than your local machine, so "how much it'd cost me in power bill if I did it locally" is a good starting estimate.
      - simonw 8mo ago
        Having an LLM spit out a few hundred lines of HTML and JavaScript is not a colossal waste of resources, it's equivalent to running a microwave for a couple of seconds.
        TeMPOraL 8mo ago
gyomu 8mo ago
> Vendors of small utilities could be in trouble This is a mix of the “in the future, everyone will have a 3D printer at home and just 3D print random parts they need” and “anyone can trivially build Dropbox with rsync themselves” arguments. Tech savvy users who know how to use LLMs aren’t how vendors of small utilities stay in business. They stay in business because they sell things to users who are truly clueless with tech (99% of the population, which can’t even figure out the settings app on their phone), and solid distribution/marketing is how you reach those users and can’t really be trivially hacked because everyone is trying to hack it. Or they stay in business because they offer some sort of guarantee (whether legal, technical, or other) that the users don’t want to burden themselves with because they have other, more important stuff to worry about.
- CamperBob2 8mo ago
  I don't know. It's one thing to tell Joe or Jane User to "Get an FTP account, mount it locally with curlftpfs, and then use SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem." But if Joe or Jane can just cut-and-paste that advice into a prompt and get their own personal Dropbox...
  - whiplash451 8mo ago
    Except when that new Dropbox fails Joe or Jane on that Saturday evening, their only recourse is to ask the AI for help, and the AI starts spinning “oh yeah, mmm, I think I found where the problem is. Cut and paste these debugging lines in that function and let me know what the output is…”
    - CamperBob2 8mo ago
      Meanwhile, this year, that happens less often than it did last year... and it actually isn't how AI-assisted development works at all. Agentic models do the cutting-and-pasting by themselves, evaluate the results by themselves, and almost always succeed at fixing the problem by themselves.
      - 8mo ago

TeMPOraL 8mo ago

> Vendors of small utilities could be in trouble. For example I needed to cut out some pages from a pdf. I could have found a tool online(I’m sure there are several), write one myself. However, Claude quickly performed the task. Definitely. Making small, single-purpose utilities with LLMs is almost as easy these days as googling for them on-line - much easier, in fact, if you account for time spent filtering out all the malware, adware, "to finish the process, register an account" and plain broken "tools" that dominate SERP. Case in point, last time my wife needed to generate a few QR codes for some printouts for an NGO event, I just had LLM make one as a static, single-page client-side tool and hosted it myself -- because that was the fastest way to guarantee it's fast, reliable, free of surveillance economy bullshit, and doesn't employ URL shorteners (surprisingly common pattern that sometimes becomes a nasty problem down the line; see e.g. a high-profile case of some QR codes on food products leading to porn sites after shortlink got recycled).

Antibabelic 8mo ago
Whatever happened to just typing "apt install qrencode"? It's definitely "fast, reliable, free of surveillance economy bullshit, and doesn't employ URL shorteners".
- senko 8mo ago
  You need to know "qrencode" exists under that exact name. Claude already knows about it and how to use it.
  - Antibabelic 8mo ago
    Sure, but that's entirely different from vibe-coding a tool, which sounds like a colossal waste of resources.
    - agos 8mo ago
      as long as that wast and the associated cost is heavily subsidized as it is today, nobody will care
      - TeMPOraL 8mo ago
        Don't get the anti-AI propaganda get to you too much. Inference is cheap on the margin. Consider: there are models capable (if barely) of doing this job, that you can run locally, on a upper-mid-range PC with high-end consumer GPU. Take that as a baseline, assume it takes a day instead of an hour because of inference speed, tally up total electricity cost. It's not much. Won't boil oceans any more than people playing AAA video games all day will. Sure, the big LLMs from SOTA vendors use more GPUs/TPUs for inference, but this means they finish much faster. Plus, commercial vendors have lots of optimizations (batch processing, large caches, etc.), and data centers are much more power-efficient than your local machine, so "how much it'd cost me in power bill if I did it locally" is a good starting estimate.
    - simonw 8mo ago
      Having an LLM spit out a few hundred lines of HTML and JavaScript is not a colossal waste of resources, it's equivalent to running a microwave for a couple of seconds.
      - TeMPOraL 8mo ago

gyomu 8mo ago

> Vendors of small utilities could be in trouble This is a mix of the “in the future, everyone will have a 3D printer at home and just 3D print random parts they need” and “anyone can trivially build Dropbox with rsync themselves” arguments. Tech savvy users who know how to use LLMs aren’t how vendors of small utilities stay in business. They stay in business because they sell things to users who are truly clueless with tech (99% of the population, which can’t even figure out the settings app on their phone), and solid distribution/marketing is how you reach those users and can’t really be trivially hacked because everyone is trying to hack it. Or they stay in business because they offer some sort of guarantee (whether legal, technical, or other) that the users don’t want to burden themselves with because they have other, more important stuff to worry about.

CamperBob2 8mo ago
I don't know. It's one thing to tell Joe or Jane User to "Get an FTP account, mount it locally with curlftpfs, and then use SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem." But if Joe or Jane can just cut-and-paste that advice into a prompt and get their own personal Dropbox...
- whiplash451 8mo ago
  Except when that new Dropbox fails Joe or Jane on that Saturday evening, their only recourse is to ask the AI for help, and the AI starts spinning “oh yeah, mmm, I think I found where the problem is. Cut and paste these debugging lines in that function and let me know what the output is…”
  - CamperBob2 8mo ago
    Meanwhile, this year, that happens less often than it did last year... and it actually isn't how AI-assisted development works at all. Agentic models do the cutting-and-pasting by themselves, evaluate the results by themselves, and almost always succeed at fixing the problem by themselves.
    - 8mo ago