4 ms·

In my lifetime software has given us: * the ability to find essentially any information ever created by anyone anywhere at anytime, * the ability to communica

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.
- mikestorrent 7mo ago
  Now this is the right take. It's one thing for us to do navel-gazing into the recursive autononomous future; it's another to step back and see what Normal People can do, now that the walls are coming down around our profession. Creating new walls is probably not the answer! From the Cathedral and Bazaar, we now have an entire metaphorical city of development happening, by people who would not have thought it possible a few years ago. I don't know what the future of my job holds other than what it always had: helping people who have good ideas to get them done properly.
  - Forgeties79 7mo ago
    The thing is though it all still feels so…rudderless/pointless sometimes? When digital cameras came out, it democratized filmmaking immensely. But it wasn’t just people screwing around - amazing new works of art, received positively by audiences and critics alike, exploded in number. They wound up winning film fests, garnering millions of views (and fans) online, and even on big screens world wide, almost immediately Where are the vibe coded apps that are actually good? Where are the new, innovative creations built by “normal” people? Because by now you’d think we’d see them. It’s all been parlor tricks, proofs of concept, and post mortems on how a bot ruined half a year’s work or whatever. The “good stuff” is still happening behind closed doors, led by experienced engineers on existing projects. It’s a productivity multiplier more than anything it seems, but it doesn’t seem useful as a tool for new people to make new things in any given space.
    - andyferris 7mo ago
      Vibe coding is actually "good" for small, bespoke things. The same way that Excel is "good" for small tasks, bad bad for larger things. Too easy to make mistakes, too hard to maintain. I could equally ask - where are all the Excel workbooks that are actually _good_? No-one needs to share their Excel workbooks. They don't need 10k github stars. They just achieve some small goal of the Excel user. These LLM agents just need to do what the user needs doing at any moment. (Sometimes, that can be a small part of a larger job in software, or a series of small parts perhaps - but again you are going to see this "show up" as a part of peoples workflow in maintaining enterprise software which is what most programmers are employed to do, in other words, you won't directly see it at all. And no, digital cameras didn't change the field 18 months after the first somewhat-usable one was released - it took quite a while for the technology to become good enough and cheap to democratize filmmaking).
- foobarchu 7mo ago
  > the low cost of $20/month? At what threshold does this stop being true? AI firms are famously hemorrhaging money and it will not last.
  - weakened_malloc 7mo ago
    When the small local models catch up I would think
  - deaux 7mo ago
    It will keep being true. A few months ago the bar was Sonnet 4.0 performance. Literally just a few months ago. Now we have open weights models that reach that level.
- mingyeow 7mo ago
  “ 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.” Curious on this - why?
  - HeWhoLurksLate 7mo ago
    AI Agents can write and modify base Python / C++ / Rust / whatever pretty well, and thus users aren't limited by "sorry the building blocks only go together in this one particular manner". It's like the difference between an EZ-Bake oven and a fully furnished kitchen. The EZ-Bake oven can get some stuff done but its limits are much more severely obvious than the kitchen's, and the kitchen's first limiting factor in what can be produced is usually the human cooking in it
    - d4lt4 7mo ago
      There is a paper [0] that shows that LLMs, in fact, cannot write and modify ‘whatever’ pretty well. [0] A Survey on Large Language Models for Code Generation: https://dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/3747588 https://dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/3747588
- jimbokun 7mo ago
  Sure but maybe we’re all better off spending more time going for walks, learning to cook, playing sports , talking to friends and family, participating in spiritual communities, and making love (to other people!)
  - HeWhoLurksLate 7mo ago
    This line of reasoning applies to nearly any way to spend time - "why are you playing videogames? Learn X instead!" or "why are you bothering with X when Y exists?" or "what, you don't know how to make sourdough? Silly goose!" At the end of the day, we all have only finite time on this earth, and how one chooses to spend the meager time between eat, sleep, and fend for self is up to them. If a person is content to play sports in their free time, more power to them. If they want to play videogames, and find satisfaction in that, great! Broadly, I like to create. Most of my creations are engineering-adjacent much more than they art. That's fine, and I'm happy. I do everything you named on that list in addition to building stuff. While using AI, I have caused things to exist that I want much faster than I could have otherwise - I know how to program, but I'm not very fast and I have to have the docs open all the time because the things I want to do are so broad and varied that one week it's bash SLURM scripts and the next it's adding things to my k8s config and the one after that it's something in Python and I don't have enough brain cells to keep track of seven different languages well enough to not accidentally put semicolons at the end of my Python scripts or use the wrong syntax but boy at least I have a bunch of stuff that actually works in the time frame and attention span that I have left after the rest of my life for that day occurs. It's not like I wasn't programming before AI - I've been doing bash scripts and Arduino stuff since middle school - but I have a lot more to show for the little free time I have to work with in the last year or so. And, for the people who don't really know how to code, the incredible power of their computers is now much closer to their fingertips and usable for more than Electron apps. Want to have a thing happen? Ask, Wait, Iterate. All for cheaper than fiverr, and you might learn a few things before you finish.
    - jimbokun 7mo ago
      Sure but today many of us are spending huge amounts of time every day staring at screens and the evidence suggests it’s damaging our mental health. Creation on screens is better than mere consumption, but probably still not as good as having less screen time in our days.
nizsle 7mo ago
Agree. Productivity tools all the way down.
didgetmaster 7mo ago
I see the next really big task for software as the ability to separate the signal from the noise. Sifting the wheat from the chaff has gone from a 'nice to have' to 'rescue my sanity'. Maybe agents and AI in general will help with that. Maybe it will just make the problem worse.
chickensong 7mo ago
> But it's largely done now Somehow I doubt that. The monkey is never satisfied.
- jimbokun 7mo ago
  If that were true there wouldn’t be so many layoffs in the industry. Sure there is still some residual need for new software or modifying existing software. But it’s far less than it was say 30 years ago.
  - chickensong 7mo ago
    I suspect the layoffs are for financial reasons, not because software is "done". It still takes incredible amounts of resources just to build and operate even modest piles of spaghetti. The industry is basically just layers of duct tape being applied all the time to hold things together. The average user can barely operate a computer. There's no consensus for handling identity or distributed computing. We still have a long way to go.
code4life 7mo ago
I’m not sophisticated enough to enjoy abstract art. Maybe AI will bring abstract software projects to the world next. I can imagine all the people staring at these software projects amazed at the genius it must have taken to create them. :)
paganel 7mo ago
> What value is left to provide for users? A spreadsheet editor with at most a couple of hundred MBs in size that can compete against Excel, for example. While also not eating from RAM resources. The same goes for a new browser and a new browser engine, it's time for Chrome to have a real competitor, it has become a mess. I can of other such examples, but these are the 2 biggest ones.
- whattheheckheck 7mo ago
  None of that is blocking money from being made
- jimbokun 7mo ago
  Ok it’s useful to have a few developers working with LLMs to make existing software more efficient, granted.
therealdrag0 7mo ago
Not all software is competing for attention. The big win of automation is it frees your attention to do other things!
0xbadcafebee 7mo ago
> 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? I know a half dozen people who've created working software in the past month to solve a problem nothing else solved as well as what they made themselves. Software developers have finally automated themselves out of a job. (I still think it's interesting that this requires pre-existing languages, libraries, etc, so this might not work in the future. But at least for now, we now have "Visual Basic" without the need for the visual part)
econ 7mo ago
> the ability to find essentially any information ever created by anyone anywhere at anytime, Except from. You know, books. And all the websites die pretty fast. At an insane rate. > the ability to communicate with anyone on Earth over any distance instantaneously in audio, video, or text, https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jimbokun https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jimbokun No contact info, intentionally. >* the ability to order any product made anywhere and have it delivered to our door in a day or two, You can buy the same things from a thousand stores with 99% asking many times what it costs. >* the ability to work with anyone across the world on shared tasks and projects, with no need for centralized offices for most knowledge work. Again, in theory yes. I wish it was all true, and it should be. But it isn't, sadly.
- adammarples 7mo ago
  Yes, you can get books. I have hundreds of ebooks on my Kindle with pretty much any other book a moment's download away. Even LLMs can regurgitate 95% of Harry Potter with a single prompt.
LoganDark 7mo ago
> 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? In the past two or three days I generated an interactive disk usage crawler tailored to my operating system and my needs. I have audited essentially none of the code, merely providing vision and detailed explanations of the user experience and algorithms that I want, and yet got back an interactive TUI application that does what I want with tons of tests and room to easily expand. I plan to audit the code more deeply soon to get it into a shape I'd be more comfortable open-sourcing. One thing agents suck at is meaningful DRY.
ElFitz 7mo ago
> What value is left to provide for users? Everything and anything people actually want or need, whether it’s every day or just for five minutes, that nobody else could be bothered to make. Today most won’t know what to do with it, just like they didn’t know what to do with a web browser. But that won’t last.
YZF 7mo ago
"Everything That Can Be Invented Has Been Invented" https://quoteinvestigator.com/2023/06/23/invented/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2023/06/23/invented/ The actual quote from 1884 seems to have been: "The advancement of the arts, from year to year, taxes our credulity, and seems to presage the arrival of that period when human improvement must end." - Henry L. Ellsworth Either way we have a lot of things but it's not quite STTNG yet. There's no limit to how much more we can do.

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.
mikestorrent 7mo ago
Now this is the right take. It's one thing for us to do navel-gazing into the recursive autononomous future; it's another to step back and see what Normal People can do, now that the walls are coming down around our profession. Creating new walls is probably not the answer! From the Cathedral and Bazaar, we now have an entire metaphorical city of development happening, by people who would not have thought it possible a few years ago. I don't know what the future of my job holds other than what it always had: helping people who have good ideas to get them done properly.
- Forgeties79 7mo ago
  The thing is though it all still feels so…rudderless/pointless sometimes? When digital cameras came out, it democratized filmmaking immensely. But it wasn’t just people screwing around - amazing new works of art, received positively by audiences and critics alike, exploded in number. They wound up winning film fests, garnering millions of views (and fans) online, and even on big screens world wide, almost immediately Where are the vibe coded apps that are actually good? Where are the new, innovative creations built by “normal” people? Because by now you’d think we’d see them. It’s all been parlor tricks, proofs of concept, and post mortems on how a bot ruined half a year’s work or whatever. The “good stuff” is still happening behind closed doors, led by experienced engineers on existing projects. It’s a productivity multiplier more than anything it seems, but it doesn’t seem useful as a tool for new people to make new things in any given space.
  - andyferris 7mo ago
    Vibe coding is actually "good" for small, bespoke things. The same way that Excel is "good" for small tasks, bad bad for larger things. Too easy to make mistakes, too hard to maintain. I could equally ask - where are all the Excel workbooks that are actually _good_? No-one needs to share their Excel workbooks. They don't need 10k github stars. They just achieve some small goal of the Excel user. These LLM agents just need to do what the user needs doing at any moment. (Sometimes, that can be a small part of a larger job in software, or a series of small parts perhaps - but again you are going to see this "show up" as a part of peoples workflow in maintaining enterprise software which is what most programmers are employed to do, in other words, you won't directly see it at all. And no, digital cameras didn't change the field 18 months after the first somewhat-usable one was released - it took quite a while for the technology to become good enough and cheap to democratize filmmaking).
foobarchu 7mo ago
> the low cost of $20/month? At what threshold does this stop being true? AI firms are famously hemorrhaging money and it will not last.
- weakened_malloc 7mo ago
  When the small local models catch up I would think
- deaux 7mo ago
  It will keep being true. A few months ago the bar was Sonnet 4.0 performance. Literally just a few months ago. Now we have open weights models that reach that level.
mingyeow 7mo ago
“ 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.” Curious on this - why?
- HeWhoLurksLate 7mo ago
  AI Agents can write and modify base Python / C++ / Rust / whatever pretty well, and thus users aren't limited by "sorry the building blocks only go together in this one particular manner". It's like the difference between an EZ-Bake oven and a fully furnished kitchen. The EZ-Bake oven can get some stuff done but its limits are much more severely obvious than the kitchen's, and the kitchen's first limiting factor in what can be produced is usually the human cooking in it
  - d4lt4 7mo ago
    There is a paper [0] that shows that LLMs, in fact, cannot write and modify ‘whatever’ pretty well. [0] A Survey on Large Language Models for Code Generation: https://dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/3747588 https://dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/3747588
jimbokun 7mo ago
Sure but maybe we’re all better off spending more time going for walks, learning to cook, playing sports , talking to friends and family, participating in spiritual communities, and making love (to other people!)
- HeWhoLurksLate 7mo ago
  This line of reasoning applies to nearly any way to spend time - "why are you playing videogames? Learn X instead!" or "why are you bothering with X when Y exists?" or "what, you don't know how to make sourdough? Silly goose!" At the end of the day, we all have only finite time on this earth, and how one chooses to spend the meager time between eat, sleep, and fend for self is up to them. If a person is content to play sports in their free time, more power to them. If they want to play videogames, and find satisfaction in that, great! Broadly, I like to create. Most of my creations are engineering-adjacent much more than they art. That's fine, and I'm happy. I do everything you named on that list in addition to building stuff. While using AI, I have caused things to exist that I want much faster than I could have otherwise - I know how to program, but I'm not very fast and I have to have the docs open all the time because the things I want to do are so broad and varied that one week it's bash SLURM scripts and the next it's adding things to my k8s config and the one after that it's something in Python and I don't have enough brain cells to keep track of seven different languages well enough to not accidentally put semicolons at the end of my Python scripts or use the wrong syntax but boy at least I have a bunch of stuff that actually works in the time frame and attention span that I have left after the rest of my life for that day occurs. It's not like I wasn't programming before AI - I've been doing bash scripts and Arduino stuff since middle school - but I have a lot more to show for the little free time I have to work with in the last year or so. And, for the people who don't really know how to code, the incredible power of their computers is now much closer to their fingertips and usable for more than Electron apps. Want to have a thing happen? Ask, Wait, Iterate. All for cheaper than fiverr, and you might learn a few things before you finish.
  - jimbokun 7mo ago
    Sure but today many of us are spending huge amounts of time every day staring at screens and the evidence suggests it’s damaging our mental health. Creation on screens is better than mere consumption, but probably still not as good as having less screen time in our days.

nizsle 7mo ago

Agree. Productivity tools all the way down.

didgetmaster 7mo ago

I see the next really big task for software as the ability to separate the signal from the noise. Sifting the wheat from the chaff has gone from a 'nice to have' to 'rescue my sanity'. Maybe agents and AI in general will help with that. Maybe it will just make the problem worse.

chickensong 7mo ago

> But it's largely done now Somehow I doubt that. The monkey is never satisfied.

jimbokun 7mo ago
If that were true there wouldn’t be so many layoffs in the industry. Sure there is still some residual need for new software or modifying existing software. But it’s far less than it was say 30 years ago.
- chickensong 7mo ago
  I suspect the layoffs are for financial reasons, not because software is "done". It still takes incredible amounts of resources just to build and operate even modest piles of spaghetti. The industry is basically just layers of duct tape being applied all the time to hold things together. The average user can barely operate a computer. There's no consensus for handling identity or distributed computing. We still have a long way to go.

code4life 7mo ago

I’m not sophisticated enough to enjoy abstract art. Maybe AI will bring abstract software projects to the world next. I can imagine all the people staring at these software projects amazed at the genius it must have taken to create them. :)

paganel 7mo ago

> What value is left to provide for users? A spreadsheet editor with at most a couple of hundred MBs in size that can compete against Excel, for example. While also not eating from RAM resources. The same goes for a new browser and a new browser engine, it's time for Chrome to have a real competitor, it has become a mess. I can of other such examples, but these are the 2 biggest ones.

whattheheckheck 7mo ago
None of that is blocking money from being made
jimbokun 7mo ago
Ok it’s useful to have a few developers working with LLMs to make existing software more efficient, granted.

therealdrag0 7mo ago

Not all software is competing for attention. The big win of automation is it frees your attention to do other things!

0xbadcafebee 7mo ago

> 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? I know a half dozen people who've created working software in the past month to solve a problem nothing else solved as well as what they made themselves. Software developers have finally automated themselves out of a job. (I still think it's interesting that this requires pre-existing languages, libraries, etc, so this might not work in the future. But at least for now, we now have "Visual Basic" without the need for the visual part)

econ 7mo ago

> the ability to find essentially any information ever created by anyone anywhere at anytime, Except from. You know, books. And all the websites die pretty fast. At an insane rate. > the ability to communicate with anyone on Earth over any distance instantaneously in audio, video, or text, https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jimbokun https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jimbokun No contact info, intentionally. >* the ability to order any product made anywhere and have it delivered to our door in a day or two, You can buy the same things from a thousand stores with 99% asking many times what it costs. >* the ability to work with anyone across the world on shared tasks and projects, with no need for centralized offices for most knowledge work. Again, in theory yes. I wish it was all true, and it should be. But it isn't, sadly.

adammarples 7mo ago
Yes, you can get books. I have hundreds of ebooks on my Kindle with pretty much any other book a moment's download away. Even LLMs can regurgitate 95% of Harry Potter with a single prompt.

LoganDark 7mo ago

> 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? In the past two or three days I generated an interactive disk usage crawler tailored to my operating system and my needs. I have audited essentially none of the code, merely providing vision and detailed explanations of the user experience and algorithms that I want, and yet got back an interactive TUI application that does what I want with tons of tests and room to easily expand. I plan to audit the code more deeply soon to get it into a shape I'd be more comfortable open-sourcing. One thing agents suck at is meaningful DRY.

ElFitz 7mo ago

> What value is left to provide for users? Everything and anything people actually want or need, whether it’s every day or just for five minutes, that nobody else could be bothered to make. Today most won’t know what to do with it, just like they didn’t know what to do with a web browser. But that won’t last.

YZF 7mo ago

"Everything That Can Be Invented Has Been Invented" https://quoteinvestigator.com/2023/06/23/invented/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2023/06/23/invented/ The actual quote from 1884 seems to have been: "The advancement of the arts, from year to year, taxes our credulity, and seems to presage the arrival of that period when human improvement must end." - Henry L. Ellsworth Either way we have a lot of things but it's not quite STTNG yet. There's no limit to how much more we can do.