6 ms·

> What are you building? This x1000. The last 10 years in the software industry in particular seems full of meta-work. New frameworks, new tools, new virtualiz

> What are you building? This x1000. The last 10 years in the software industry in particular seems full of meta-work. New frameworks, new tools, new virtualization layers, new distributed systems, new dev tooling, new org charts. Ultimately so we can build... what exactly? Are these necessary to build what we actually need? Or are they necessary to prop up an unsustainable industry by inventing new jobs? Hard to shake the feeling that this looks like one big pyramid scheme. I strongly suspect that vast majority of the "innovation" in recent years has gone straight to supporting the funding model and institution of the software profession, rather than actual software engineering. > I'm not even sure building software is an engineering discipline at this point. Maybe it never was. It was, and is. But not universally. If you formulate questions scientifically and use the answers to make decisions, that's engineering. I've seen it happen. It can happen with LLMs, under the proper guidance. If you formulate questions based on vibes, ignore the answers, and do what the CEO says anyway, that's not engineering. Sadly, I've seen this happen far too often. And with this mindset comes the Claudiot mindset - information is ultimately useless so fake autogenerated content is just as valuable as real work.

ryandrake 7mo ago
> The last 10 years in the software industry in particular seems full of meta-work. Building new frameworks, new tools, new virtualization layers, new distributed systems, new dev tooling, new org charts. All to build... what exactly? Don't forget App Stores. Everyone's still trying to build app stores, even if they have nothing to sell in them. It's almost as if every major company's actual product is their stock price. Every other thing they do is a side quest or some strategic thing they think might convince analysts to make their stock price to move.
- jimbokun 7mo ago
  > It's almost as if every major company's actual product is their stock price. They are pretty much legally obligated to act in this manner.
  - wholinator2 7mo ago
    Has it always been this way? If not, did it used to be better? If so, how can we get back?
    - nostrademons 7mo ago
      The legal doctrine that a company's primary responsibility is to maximize shareholder value dates from the 1970s. It started with Milton Friedman with a 1971 essay in the NYTimes [1] and then gained a lot of currency throughout the 70s stagflation and economic malaise. The final death-knell of the corporation as a social enterprise came during the 1980s era of corporate raiders and PE buyouts. Note that the system that came before it had problems too. In the 50s and 60s, the top marginal tax rate was about 90%, which meant that above a certain level it made almost no sense for a corporate executive to be paid more. This kept executive salaries to a reasonable multiple of employee salaries, but it meant that executives and high-ranking managers tended to pay themselves in perks. This was the "Mad Men" era of private jets, private company apartments, secretaries who were playthings, etc. Friedman's essay was basically arguing against this world of corporate unaccountability and corruption, where formal pay and compensation were reasonable, but informal perks and arrangements managed to privilege the people in power in a complete opaque, unaccountable way. Turns out that power is a hell of a drug, and the people in power will always find ways to use that to enrich themselves regardless of what the laws and incentives are. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctrine-the-social-responsibility-of-business-is-to.html https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctr...
- lejalv 7mo ago
  > It's almost as if every major company's actual product is their stock price. It's almost as if we lived under capitalism. What other thing would they do? They are literally setting the Earth on fire to raise the stock price. No hostages taken. The true alignment problem behind the ploy AGI alignment problem for prêt-à-penser SF philosophers. Or prestidigitators.
- antihero 7mo ago
  Well that's the thing, AI can mean anyone with an idea can build it, but only the people that own stuff will be able to leverage that to own more stuff.
enraged_camel 7mo ago
>> The last 10 years in the software industry in particular seems full of meta-work. Building new frameworks, new tools, new virtualization layers, new distributed systems, new dev tooling, new org charts. All to build... what exactly? Are these tools necessary to build what we actually need? Or are they necessary to prop up an unsustainable industry by inventing new jobs? This is because all the low-hanging fruit has already been built. CRM. Invoicing. HR. Project/task management. And hundreds of others in various flavors.
- vinyl7 7mo ago
  It may exist (with a loose term of exist) but they are all mostly garbage. There's still plenty opportunity to make non-garbage version of things that already exist
  - enraged_camel 7mo ago
    This is technically true but also a bit naive. Established incumbents are very difficult to dislodge with merely a better version of their products. This becomes more true the larger the product and the average customer size. A good example is QuickBooks, which is a really janky accounting/bookkeeping software that is almost universally hated, but newer and better solutions haven't been able to capture much market share from it.
    - sarchertech 7mo ago
      It’s hard to actually build a better QuickBooks because to build a better QuickBooks you need 1000+ integrations that each took hundreds of man hours to build.
      - enraged_camel 7mo ago
        [dead]
  - faangguyindia 7mo ago
    They are not garbage, they are just deeply integrated where a newcomer thinks there is better way to do this but no gurantees you can make it better
abustamam 7mo ago
This is a good point. I've seen people with really complex AI setups (multiple agents collaborating for hours). But what are they building? Are they building a react app with an express backend? A next js app? Which itself is a layer on top of an abstraction? I haven't tried this myself but I'm curious if an LLM could build a scalable, maintainable app that doesn't use a framework or external libraries. Could be danger due to lack of training data but I think it's important to build stuff that people use, not stuff that people use to build stuff that people use to build stuff that.... Not that meta frameworks aren't valuable, but I think they're often solving the wrong problem.
- jimbokun 7mo ago
  When it comes time to debug would you rather ask questions about and dig through code in a popular open source library, or dig through code generated by an LLM specifically for your project?
  - apsurd 7mo ago
    If the LLM doing it, it doesn't matter, isn't that the point? Not saying I personally believe in this scenario, but everything I've heard supports the idea that code is no longer for humans to consume.
    - jimbokun 7mo ago
      You are going to allow a product from a company you have no reason to trust write important software for you and put it into production without checking the code to see what it does?
      - apsurd 7mo ago
        I agree with you, which makes me seem like the laggard at work. Devil's advocate is that AI-native development will use AI to ask these questions and such. So whether it's a framework or standard lib, def agree knowing your stuff is what matters, but the tools to demonstrate this knowledge is fast in flux. Again, I am on the slow train. But this seems to be all I hear. "code optimized for humans" is marked for death.
jr3592 7mo ago
> Are these tools necessary to build what we actually need? I think the entire software industry has reached a saturation point. There's not really anything missing anymore. Existing tools do 99% of what we humans could need, so you're just getting recycled and regurgitated versions of existing tools... slap a different logo and a veneer on it, and its a product.
- thewebguyd 7mo ago
  Resume driven development.
- bluGill 7mo ago
  The tools are mostly there, but there is a lot of need. Quality can be much better. Quality is UI, reliability, security, and a bunch of other similar things I can't think of offhand.
  - yunwal 7mo ago
    Doesn’t really seem like that’s the way the market is heading though
- yourapostasy 7mo ago
  Oh ye of little faith in the possible. We still don’t have truly transparent transference in locally-run software. Go anywhere in the world, and your locally running software tags along with precisely preserved state no matter what device you happen to be dragging along with you, with device-appropriate interfacing. We still don’t have single source documentation with lineage all the way back to the code. We still don’t treat introspection and observability as two sides of a troubleshooting coin (I think there are more “sides” but want to keep the example simple). We do not have the kind of introspection on modern hardware that Lisp Machines had, and SOTA observability conversations still revolve around sampling enough at the right places to make up for that. We still don’t have coordination planes, databases, and systems in general capable of absorbing the volume of queries generated by LLM’s. Even if LLM models themselves froze their progress as-is, they’re plenty sophisticated enough when deployed en masse to overwhelm existing data infrastructure. The list is endless. IMHO our software world has never been so fertile with possibilities.
Aurornis 7mo ago
> The last 10 years in the software industry in particular seems full of meta-work. New frameworks, new tools, new virtualization layers, new distributed systems, new dev tooling, new org charts. Ultimately so we can build... what exactly? Are these necessary to build what we actually need? Or are they necessary to prop up an unsustainable industry by inventing new jobs? The overwhelming majority of real jobs are not related to these things you read about on Hacker News. I help a local group with resume reviews and job search advice. A common theme is that junior devs really want to do work in these new frameworks, tools, libraries, or other trending topics they've been reading about, but discover that the job market is much more boring. The jobs working on those fun and new topics are few and far between, generally reserved for the few developers who are willing to sacrifice a lot to work on them or very senior developers who are preferred for those jobs.
- Fr0styMatt88 7mo ago
  There’s a whole world out there that doesn’t seem to be addressed by the original comment. On one end of that scale you have things like bespoke software for small businesses, some niche inventory management solution that just sits quietly in the corner for years. On the other end, there’s the whole world of embedded software, game dev, design software, bespoke art pipeline tools… It can seem that the majority of software in the world is about generating clicks and optimising engagement, but that’s just the very loud minority.
- someprick 7mo ago
  Not that you asked… But I would be happy with a junior position writing production C or ASM - but I assume that those sorts of positions are on the other end of the same boat. Who the hell has any use for an amateur dev. with an autistic fascination and _zero_ practical experience? Someone here shared an article here, recently, espousing something along the lines of "home garden programming." I see software development moving in this direction, just like machining did: Either in a space-age shop, that looks more like a lab, with a fix-axis "machining center," or in the garage with Grandpappy's clapped out Atlas - and nothing in between.
mysterydip 7mo ago
I’ve seen so many articles of “introducing flimflam: a squiggle for burfy” it makes my head spin.
blargey 7mo ago
> I strongly suspect that vast majority of the "innovation" in recent years has gone straight to supporting the funding model and institution of the software profession, rather than actual software engineering. Feels like there’s a counter to the frequent citation of Jevon’s Paradox in there somewhere, in the context of LLM impact on the software dev market. Overestimation of external demand for software, or at least any that can be fulfilled by a human-in-the-loop / one-dev-to-many-users model? The end goal of LLMs feels like, in effect, the Last Framework, and the end of (money in) meta-engineering by devs for devs.
- emmitska 7mo ago
  Amen. Now with all the agents and bots, I often pause and wonder — how much code is there left to write that we need AI as our saving grace? How many unsolved problems, underserved customers, unanswered questions actually justify the volume? Where did we all go wrong?
  - alt227 7mo ago
    I think we have reached peak functionality in software, therefore the only place left to go was make the underlying code more complex, messy, and impossible for humans to read. /s
jimbokun 7mo ago
In my lifetime software has given us: * the ability to find essentially any information ever created by anyone anywhere at anytime, * the ability to communicate with anyone on Earth over any distance instantaneously in audio, video, or text, * the ability to order any product made anywhere and have it delivered to our door in a day or two, * the ability to work with anyone across the world on shared tasks and projects, with no need for centralized offices for most knowledge work. That was a massive undertaking with many permutations requiring lots of software written by lots of people. But it's largely done now. Software consumes a significant fraction of all waking hours of almost everyone on Earth. New software mainly just competes with existing software to replace attention. There's not much room left to expand the market. So it's difficult to see the value of LLMs that can generate even more software even faster. What value is left to provide for users? LLMs themselves have the potential to offering staggering economic value, but only at huge social cost: replacing human labor on scales never seen before. All of that to say, maybe this is the reason so much time is being spent on meta-work today than on actual software engineering.
- HeWhoLurksLate 7mo ago
  I have watched artists thoughtfully integrate digital lighting and the like at a scale I'd never seen before the LLMs rolled up and made it possible to get programs to work without knowing how to program. The fundamental ceiling of what an LLM can do when connected to an IDE is incredible, and orders of magnitude higher than the limits of any no-code / low-code platform conceived thus far. "Democratizing" software - where now the only limits are your imagination, tenacity, and ability to keep the bots aligned with your vision, is allowing incredible things that wouldn't have happened otherwise because you now don't strictly need to learn to program for a programming-involved art project to work out. Should you learn how to code if you're doing stuff like that? Absolutely. But is it letting people who have no idea about computing dabble their feet in and do extremely impressive stuff for the low cost of $20/month? Also yes.
  - emporas 7mo ago
    Emacs can be configured with no code written by the user and Linux can be controlled with minimal user knowledge of the command line. Still some knowledge is necessary in most cases, but nowhere near what was required a handful of years back.
whattheheckheck 7mo ago
Yeah here you go https://youtu.be/DSzUYX7n2_A?si=q0_0lePoQ6MEz5d5 https://youtu.be/DSzUYX7n2_A?si=q0_0lePoQ6MEz5d5

ryandrake 7mo ago

> The last 10 years in the software industry in particular seems full of meta-work. Building new frameworks, new tools, new virtualization layers, new distributed systems, new dev tooling, new org charts. All to build... what exactly? Don't forget App Stores. Everyone's still trying to build app stores, even if they have nothing to sell in them. It's almost as if every major company's actual product is their stock price. Every other thing they do is a side quest or some strategic thing they think might convince analysts to make their stock price to move.

jimbokun 7mo ago
> It's almost as if every major company's actual product is their stock price. They are pretty much legally obligated to act in this manner.
- wholinator2 7mo ago
  Has it always been this way? If not, did it used to be better? If so, how can we get back?
  - nostrademons 7mo ago
    The legal doctrine that a company's primary responsibility is to maximize shareholder value dates from the 1970s. It started with Milton Friedman with a 1971 essay in the NYTimes [1] and then gained a lot of currency throughout the 70s stagflation and economic malaise. The final death-knell of the corporation as a social enterprise came during the 1980s era of corporate raiders and PE buyouts. Note that the system that came before it had problems too. In the 50s and 60s, the top marginal tax rate was about 90%, which meant that above a certain level it made almost no sense for a corporate executive to be paid more. This kept executive salaries to a reasonable multiple of employee salaries, but it meant that executives and high-ranking managers tended to pay themselves in perks. This was the "Mad Men" era of private jets, private company apartments, secretaries who were playthings, etc. Friedman's essay was basically arguing against this world of corporate unaccountability and corruption, where formal pay and compensation were reasonable, but informal perks and arrangements managed to privilege the people in power in a complete opaque, unaccountable way. Turns out that power is a hell of a drug, and the people in power will always find ways to use that to enrich themselves regardless of what the laws and incentives are. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctrine-the-social-responsibility-of-business-is-to.html https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctr...
lejalv 7mo ago
> It's almost as if every major company's actual product is their stock price. It's almost as if we lived under capitalism. What other thing would they do? They are literally setting the Earth on fire to raise the stock price. No hostages taken. The true alignment problem behind the ploy AGI alignment problem for prêt-à-penser SF philosophers. Or prestidigitators.
antihero 7mo ago
Well that's the thing, AI can mean anyone with an idea can build it, but only the people that own stuff will be able to leverage that to own more stuff.

enraged_camel 7mo ago

>> The last 10 years in the software industry in particular seems full of meta-work. Building new frameworks, new tools, new virtualization layers, new distributed systems, new dev tooling, new org charts. All to build... what exactly? Are these tools necessary to build what we actually need? Or are they necessary to prop up an unsustainable industry by inventing new jobs? This is because all the low-hanging fruit has already been built. CRM. Invoicing. HR. Project/task management. And hundreds of others in various flavors.

vinyl7 7mo ago
It may exist (with a loose term of exist) but they are all mostly garbage. There's still plenty opportunity to make non-garbage version of things that already exist
- enraged_camel 7mo ago
  This is technically true but also a bit naive. Established incumbents are very difficult to dislodge with merely a better version of their products. This becomes more true the larger the product and the average customer size. A good example is QuickBooks, which is a really janky accounting/bookkeeping software that is almost universally hated, but newer and better solutions haven't been able to capture much market share from it.
  - sarchertech 7mo ago
    It’s hard to actually build a better QuickBooks because to build a better QuickBooks you need 1000+ integrations that each took hundreds of man hours to build.
    - enraged_camel 7mo ago
      [dead]
- faangguyindia 7mo ago
  They are not garbage, they are just deeply integrated where a newcomer thinks there is better way to do this but no gurantees you can make it better

abustamam 7mo ago

This is a good point. I've seen people with really complex AI setups (multiple agents collaborating for hours). But what are they building? Are they building a react app with an express backend? A next js app? Which itself is a layer on top of an abstraction? I haven't tried this myself but I'm curious if an LLM could build a scalable, maintainable app that doesn't use a framework or external libraries. Could be danger due to lack of training data but I think it's important to build stuff that people use, not stuff that people use to build stuff that people use to build stuff that.... Not that meta frameworks aren't valuable, but I think they're often solving the wrong problem.

jimbokun 7mo ago
When it comes time to debug would you rather ask questions about and dig through code in a popular open source library, or dig through code generated by an LLM specifically for your project?
- apsurd 7mo ago
  If the LLM doing it, it doesn't matter, isn't that the point? Not saying I personally believe in this scenario, but everything I've heard supports the idea that code is no longer for humans to consume.
  - jimbokun 7mo ago
    You are going to allow a product from a company you have no reason to trust write important software for you and put it into production without checking the code to see what it does?
    - apsurd 7mo ago
      I agree with you, which makes me seem like the laggard at work. Devil's advocate is that AI-native development will use AI to ask these questions and such. So whether it's a framework or standard lib, def agree knowing your stuff is what matters, but the tools to demonstrate this knowledge is fast in flux. Again, I am on the slow train. But this seems to be all I hear. "code optimized for humans" is marked for death.

jr3592 7mo ago

> Are these tools necessary to build what we actually need? I think the entire software industry has reached a saturation point. There's not really anything missing anymore. Existing tools do 99% of what we humans could need, so you're just getting recycled and regurgitated versions of existing tools... slap a different logo and a veneer on it, and its a product.

thewebguyd 7mo ago
Resume driven development.
bluGill 7mo ago
The tools are mostly there, but there is a lot of need. Quality can be much better. Quality is UI, reliability, security, and a bunch of other similar things I can't think of offhand.
- yunwal 7mo ago
  Doesn’t really seem like that’s the way the market is heading though
yourapostasy 7mo ago
Oh ye of little faith in the possible. We still don’t have truly transparent transference in locally-run software. Go anywhere in the world, and your locally running software tags along with precisely preserved state no matter what device you happen to be dragging along with you, with device-appropriate interfacing. We still don’t have single source documentation with lineage all the way back to the code. We still don’t treat introspection and observability as two sides of a troubleshooting coin (I think there are more “sides” but want to keep the example simple). We do not have the kind of introspection on modern hardware that Lisp Machines had, and SOTA observability conversations still revolve around sampling enough at the right places to make up for that. We still don’t have coordination planes, databases, and systems in general capable of absorbing the volume of queries generated by LLM’s. Even if LLM models themselves froze their progress as-is, they’re plenty sophisticated enough when deployed en masse to overwhelm existing data infrastructure. The list is endless. IMHO our software world has never been so fertile with possibilities.

Aurornis 7mo ago

> The last 10 years in the software industry in particular seems full of meta-work. New frameworks, new tools, new virtualization layers, new distributed systems, new dev tooling, new org charts. Ultimately so we can build... what exactly? Are these necessary to build what we actually need? Or are they necessary to prop up an unsustainable industry by inventing new jobs? The overwhelming majority of real jobs are not related to these things you read about on Hacker News. I help a local group with resume reviews and job search advice. A common theme is that junior devs really want to do work in these new frameworks, tools, libraries, or other trending topics they've been reading about, but discover that the job market is much more boring. The jobs working on those fun and new topics are few and far between, generally reserved for the few developers who are willing to sacrifice a lot to work on them or very senior developers who are preferred for those jobs.

Fr0styMatt88 7mo ago
There’s a whole world out there that doesn’t seem to be addressed by the original comment. On one end of that scale you have things like bespoke software for small businesses, some niche inventory management solution that just sits quietly in the corner for years. On the other end, there’s the whole world of embedded software, game dev, design software, bespoke art pipeline tools… It can seem that the majority of software in the world is about generating clicks and optimising engagement, but that’s just the very loud minority.
someprick 7mo ago
Not that you asked… But I would be happy with a junior position writing production C or ASM - but I assume that those sorts of positions are on the other end of the same boat. Who the hell has any use for an amateur dev. with an autistic fascination and _zero_ practical experience? Someone here shared an article here, recently, espousing something along the lines of "home garden programming." I see software development moving in this direction, just like machining did: Either in a space-age shop, that looks more like a lab, with a fix-axis "machining center," or in the garage with Grandpappy's clapped out Atlas - and nothing in between.

mysterydip 7mo ago

I’ve seen so many articles of “introducing flimflam: a squiggle for burfy” it makes my head spin.

blargey 7mo ago

> I strongly suspect that vast majority of the "innovation" in recent years has gone straight to supporting the funding model and institution of the software profession, rather than actual software engineering. Feels like there’s a counter to the frequent citation of Jevon’s Paradox in there somewhere, in the context of LLM impact on the software dev market. Overestimation of external demand for software, or at least any that can be fulfilled by a human-in-the-loop / one-dev-to-many-users model? The end goal of LLMs feels like, in effect, the Last Framework, and the end of (money in) meta-engineering by devs for devs.

emmitska 7mo ago
Amen. Now with all the agents and bots, I often pause and wonder — how much code is there left to write that we need AI as our saving grace? How many unsolved problems, underserved customers, unanswered questions actually justify the volume? Where did we all go wrong?
- alt227 7mo ago
  I think we have reached peak functionality in software, therefore the only place left to go was make the underlying code more complex, messy, and impossible for humans to read. /s

jimbokun 7mo ago

In my lifetime software has given us: * the ability to find essentially any information ever created by anyone anywhere at anytime, * the ability to communicate with anyone on Earth over any distance instantaneously in audio, video, or text, * the ability to order any product made anywhere and have it delivered to our door in a day or two, * the ability to work with anyone across the world on shared tasks and projects, with no need for centralized offices for most knowledge work. That was a massive undertaking with many permutations requiring lots of software written by lots of people. But it's largely done now. Software consumes a significant fraction of all waking hours of almost everyone on Earth. New software mainly just competes with existing software to replace attention. There's not much room left to expand the market. So it's difficult to see the value of LLMs that can generate even more software even faster. What value is left to provide for users? LLMs themselves have the potential to offering staggering economic value, but only at huge social cost: replacing human labor on scales never seen before. All of that to say, maybe this is the reason so much time is being spent on meta-work today than on actual software engineering.

HeWhoLurksLate 7mo ago
I have watched artists thoughtfully integrate digital lighting and the like at a scale I'd never seen before the LLMs rolled up and made it possible to get programs to work without knowing how to program. The fundamental ceiling of what an LLM can do when connected to an IDE is incredible, and orders of magnitude higher than the limits of any no-code / low-code platform conceived thus far. "Democratizing" software - where now the only limits are your imagination, tenacity, and ability to keep the bots aligned with your vision, is allowing incredible things that wouldn't have happened otherwise because you now don't strictly need to learn to program for a programming-involved art project to work out. Should you learn how to code if you're doing stuff like that? Absolutely. But is it letting people who have no idea about computing dabble their feet in and do extremely impressive stuff for the low cost of $20/month? Also yes.
- emporas 7mo ago
  Emacs can be configured with no code written by the user and Linux can be controlled with minimal user knowledge of the command line. Still some knowledge is necessary in most cases, but nowhere near what was required a handful of years back.

whattheheckheck 7mo ago

Yeah here you go https://youtu.be/DSzUYX7n2_A?si=q0_0lePoQ6MEz5d5 https://youtu.be/DSzUYX7n2_A?si=q0_0lePoQ6MEz5d5