6 ms·

The thing is I totally, 100% get this. The other thing I can't help but see though is how excited my non-programmer friends are to finally be able to make softw

by ctoth 4mo ago

The thing is I totally, 100% get this. The other thing I can't help but see though is how excited my non-programmer friends are to finally be able to make software. The sense of pride and accomplishment from non-coders who are finally able to make something work the way they wanted to. We almost need like ... noncanonical software? Not so much forks, but like ... Maybe software as like a cluster? an ecosystem? On-demand app store where features / forks are shared/upvoted/evolved by the community where the maintainers don't have to get burnt out, and when it inevitably becomes a ball of mud oh well it does the job? I really don't know! I hope we can think about some answers and not get tribal though because this is really a huge problem and also a huge opportunity and so a minor reminder that there is a baby in that bathwater?

dude250711 4mo ago
When they shoot a little artistic clip with their nice modern iPhone camera, it does not mean they get to insert it into a Hollywood movie.
- happyopossum 4mo ago
  [dead]
- awhitty 4mo ago
  This analogy makes no sense to me and honestly skews pretty elitist in vibe. iPhone is regularly used in professional videography now. Like, 28 Years Later was shot on iPhone. Indie filmmakers have been using iPhone to break into the industry for years.
  - satisfice 4mo ago
    Films aren’t open open to random contributions by casual volunteers. It’s not about iPhones.
  - fantasizr 4mo ago
    the analogy would be that your LLM/agent has a pass at a Spielberg script and peppers his inbox with inane production notes. A system like that would be untenable for all involved.
    - hext 4mo ago
      I think the attitude frequently adopted by open source maintainers - comparing themselves to Spielberg - has been a major roadblock to anyone looking to contribute to open source projects for years.
      - fantasizr 4mo ago
        Agree that even prior to LLMs those projects weren't terribly welcoming as per Linus' famous email comments (chalk it up to cultural communication differences :) )
        hext 4mo ago
        I don’t know if it’s just me, and these days I do understand it given the widespread adoption of LLMs, but I’ve always detested the idea that I need to reach out and have a conversation with the maintainer before opening a PR. Especially (mainly) when the PR is simply addressing an approved GH issue. I’ve had so many perfectly acceptable PRs rejected over the years simply because they didn’t “fit the vision” of the maintainer, despite being +1’d by many members of the community or even other contributors. I don’t even mean to imply they were rude or anything, just uninterested in actually merging anything where they didn’t architect the changes themselves upfront. On one hand I get it, you’ve spent so much time building something it’s fair to want to hold on tightly to that level of control, but to me it's just always felt antithetical to the entire idea of open source. Makes me feel like I’m not contributing to a true open source project, just doing free labor for someone.
      - skydhash 4mo ago
        Why are you looking to contribute to open source projects? If you have a fix or a new feature, you can share the diff in variety of ways. The maintainers are not obligated to review, discuss, and accept your changes.
  - ben_w 4mo ago
    If you think filming is the only skill needed to make a film, may I suggest looking at the very long list of names that appears at the end of the film of which only a few actually do filming? Takes a lot to know what to film, and how to be good at using the tools you have. Similar is true for a lot of software. Credit list on video games… I don't want to say it "mostly" isn't coders, but only because I've not done an exhaustive study. My guess is the top will either be QA or art.
    - DrewADesign 4mo ago
      Artists of all stripes (including audio, animation, cinematographers, lighting, environment, textures, etc,) including tech artists, designers, writers, musicians… the ratio of functionality to look-and-feel is dramatically different than in non-entertainment products, and the labor involved reflects that. It’s a real shame that some of the people that contribute most to what makes a game great are often the first to get dropped when people talk about how the game is made, (but most are perfectly happy to fly under the radar when a bunch of entitled kids start raging about the “lazy devs.” ;)
  - troupo 4mo ago
    "You are not a photographer just because you have a camera" has been a standard saying since forever, and has nothing to do with elitism. Those professionals are professionals not because they own an iPhone and use it to shoot something.
    - projektfu 4mo ago
      Professionals are professional because someone pays them, that is all.
      - troupo 4mo ago
        The word has other meanings, too ;) E.g. "professional conduct" isn't one that is paid for: 1a. of, relating to, or characteristic of a profession 1c.1. characterized by or conforming to the technical or ethical standards of a profession 3. following a line of conduct as though it were a profession
        projektfu 4mo ago
        Professionals can be unprofessional, and amateurs can show professionalism, but only one gets paid.
    - awhitty 4mo ago
      Exactly - it's just a tool. So, trying to make the argument that someone's work is less-than because they used a cheaper/more amateur tool versus the tool the well-funded professionals are using _is_ elitist. You recognize that, but the comment I replied to centered on the tool, not the finer points of professionalism. But on that- whether folks have knowledge and taste, demonstrate responsibility for their impact, pay attention to their work quality, show up to the work environment with respect, etc. are all elements at the domain of human relations. This discussion is conflating how people use tools with how people work with each other. The tools don't matter here. I think we're sayin' the same thing.
      - troupo 4mo ago
  - ninkendo 4mo ago
    Using Apple’s preferred practice of using no article before iPhone (ie. never “an iPhone” or “the iPhone” or even “iPhones”) makes you come off as a shill, by the way. It’s like if you unironically put a trademark symbol after it.
- jrm4 4mo ago
  This is so good, I wonder if op did it on purpose. Orders of magnitude more people can now make an absolutely "Hollywood quality" movie, precisely due to their nice modern iPhone cameras. The only question now is, how do we make it so more people can see the good ones?
- utopiah 4mo ago
  Art isn't craftsmanship. You can make art with a literally piece of shit, or a toilet if you want to be more traditional, at least in 1917. You can't be a craftsperson without mastery of your domain and its tool. You can be a artist without craftsmanship and vice versa. You can also be popular without any or both of these. There is a lot to entangle there but the point is that it depends on your goal. You can judge others based on your own value system but there goals might not be yours.
- dgellow 4mo ago
  I think a better analogy would be commissioning an artist to create a painting. Yes you provided instructions and decided which style you preferred, and maybe pointed some corrections you wanted. And you can be proud of owning that specific, unique painting. No you didn't create anything.
marcosdumay 4mo ago
> We almost need like ... noncanonical software? You mean some modern version of vb or php? That is the entire point of low-code and no-code.
joseda-hg 4mo ago
An ecosystem on shared formats can exist hapily There's a billion ways of opening a markdown and doing things with it and generally they all coexist hapily
beering 4mo ago
I agree. For many people, LLMs are the first time that computers do what they tell them to. Not what some big tech PM has decided is or isn’t possible. At the same time, OP is in the right to reject contributions they don’t want. Nobody providing open-source software is under any obligations to take changes. Forking is still a viable option in 2026. And I don’t think we need an on-demand app store either because the trust issues will still exist for good reason. We can have highly produced software coexisting with LLM agents.
- tomxor 4mo ago
  > For many people, LLMs are the first time that computers do what they tell them to. Not what some big tech PM has decided is or isn’t possible. The crux is here somewhere. A massive group of people (A), don't fully understand or care about code, but they care about arbitrary specific outcomes that serve their needs and desires VS a tiny group of people (B), who initiate, architect and maintain successful projects, who care deeply about the health and cohesion of the codebase over it's lifetime, because that serves everyone. Group-A is now liberated for better and worse. For the first time they can force their will upon a codebase without understanding. They are making selfish changes, and that's fine, this is hacking for the masses. The problem is they still don't realise these are selfish changes, because they have not been forced to tread the path of the programmer to understand they are selfish changes. The response from FOSS maintainers seems inevitable from this perspective... But I think what's going to be more interesting is watching how Group-A over time respond to creating their own personal hell. As group-A accrete more and more unsupervised selfish changes into their forks - at what point will they implode and turn into LLM-token-tarpits, at what point will Group-A notice, and I wonder what their response will be.
janalsncm 4mo ago
What is the kind of person who would use such software? What you’re describing is the need for a two sided market where really only one side exists. A user would have to be someone who doesn’t have access to an LLM to make bespoke software themselves, and isn’t able to use existing software. I think that’s a vanishingly small segment of people.
- navane 4mo ago
  Sounds like the user could just ammend the software to his need with the LLM, but instead of sending that update to the maintainer with a pull request, just keep it to himself, to the users version.
- rpdillon 4mo ago
  You're assuming that everybody will be equally skilled in using an LLM to create software. I don't think anything in my experience indicates that this is true.
mostlysimilar 4mo ago
> sense of pride and accomplishment What? Pride of what? What accomplishment?
- Trasmatta 4mo ago
  People are very proud of their prompts I guess It's like people being proud of the AI slop art they produce
- unacorner 4mo ago
  Maybe building something? It doesn't matter much that the programming language was English and built by an LLM and a harness. They created something they wanted that wasn't there before.
  - mostlysimilar 4mo ago
    It does matter. Drawing a stick figure and having a machine print over it with a realistic image doesn't make you an artist, and no, you shouldn't be proud of it.
    - senordevnyc 4mo ago
      Or we could, you know, let people feel proud of whatever they want?
      - mostlysimilar 4mo ago
        Call me old fashioned but I take pride in things I work hard to achieve. I think it's embarrassing to be proud of AI output of any kind, be it software or art or writing.
        rpdillon 4mo ago
        But you're acting like everything that you use AI to build is easy to achieve, and that doesn't seem to be true.
Trasmatta 4mo ago
> The other thing I can't help but see though is how excited my non-programmer friends are to finally be able to make software. The sense of pride and accomplishment from non-coders who are finally able to make something work the way they wanted to. There was nothing stopping them from making software before... Over the past ~15 years, the amount of resources to learn programming, and to make the whole process approachable, is staggering. It just took some time and effort. People are just excited that they can skip past the effort part now. But we've lost something in the process.
- jackp96 4mo ago
  I mean, I largely agree with the sentiment (friction is important for growth/happiness, after all). But even as a developer, I'm able to quickly whip up custom personal apps that I just wouldn't be able to justify the time for previously. Our CEO just took a design mock-up of a new landing page and threw it into Fable, and it spit out an objectively better iteration of the component's design. The hierarchy made more sense, the typography was more polished, and it naturally incorporated some elements we hadn't added yet. We won't implement everything it changed of course, but it's the first time I've seen a model take a decent draft of a webpage mockup and improve it in a way that feels like a more evolved version of the original instead of just LLM-ifying it.
- fragmede 4mo ago
  Huh? The difficulty and the cost was stopping them before. It was really difficult, took a ton of time and money, and you had to deal with another person.
lwyrup 4mo ago
So I am thinking this is like an army of plebs going to Home Depot, buying power tools, and building a house with no experience. Oh what fun—we can finally build a house the barrier has been broken. I don’t want software written by plebs.
surgical_fire 4mo ago
> I hope we can think about some answers and not get tribal though because this is really a huge problem and also a huge opportunity and so a minor reminder that there is a baby in that bathwater? I think no answers are needed. If anyone can build the software they need, no ecosystem will be needed. There will be no maintainers because no one will be using his thing. If it makes sense (economical, but no limited to it), then it will progress in that direction. If it makes no sense it is a fad that eventually dies out. There may or may not be a baby in the bathwater. In truth nothing in this bathtub matter too much.
- skybrian 4mo ago
  I think this makes sense for apps, but the apps will still need infrastructure and common protocols to interoperate. It still won’t make sense to implement your own cryptography.
  - surgical_fire 4mo ago
    Why not? If you can vibecode your app, you can vibecode your cryptography as well. You may object to it but that, too, would be elitism. And the person vibecoding has no idea why proper cryptography matters anyway. Or why proper anything matters. This is the ultimate realization of "my ignorance is as good as your knowledge". I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing.
    - skybrian 4mo ago
      Because doing enough security reviews to remove all the security bugs gets expensive, and if you use well-reviewed code, it's already been done.
oytis 4mo ago
Who gets a sense of accoplishment from prompting an LLM? Do you get a sense of accomplishment when AI draws a picture or writes a poem for you? I guess there are some minds I'll never be able to comprehend
- AndrewKemendo 4mo ago
  You should see the non AI trash that people are proud of Someone having pride doesn’t mean what they did has value
- zephen 4mo ago
  After trying and failing multiple times to get any LLM to create exactly the picture that I was trying to make, I have to admit that, at one point, if one of them had succeeded, I would have felt a quantum of accomplishment. But, since I'm not that much of a slot machine aficionado, I just completely stopped pulling the lever. However, I can see that for the right people, this level of difficulty might encode or mimic, purposely or not, many of the features that are collectively termed "gamification."
- keiferski 4mo ago
  Don’t think of it as creating art, but as solving a frustrating computer problem. For people that aren’t technical, computers are often irritatingly obtuse and unclear if you’re trying to get something to work in a particular way.
- seanlinehan 4mo ago
  One can reason by analogy here. In a pre-LLM world, a classic software team would have PMs, designers, and engineers. Of those three, the PM wouldn't have any real role in writing code. And they would rarely contribute a ton to the design. What they would be contributing is ideas, market insights, coordination, prioritization, etc. When the product ships, one would expect the PM to feel a real sense of accomplishment. They helped this idea become a _real thing_! All of that pride, despite not writing a single line of code nor polishing any pixels themselves. And I don't think anybody would reasonably look down on them for that feeling. Same thing with using LLMs. Sure, you didn't write the code. But you caused the thing to exist! That's exciting!
doctorpangloss 4mo ago
it's called plugins, lots of end user facing OSS have vibrant plugin ecosystems. maintainers like the sense of power and it's not really more complicated than that. perfectly valid emotion to chase!
jrm4 4mo ago
I do a bit in my IT classes where I show a "spectrum" of computer activities, from "changing a screensaver" to "Assembly" and then challenge people to find the line where "using a computer" stops and "programming a computer" starts. It was already very fuzzy (Excel?). Soon, this line be non-existent.
- skydhash 4mo ago
  As soon as you’re specifying instructions for the computer to do a task automatically, you’re programming it. It can be recording a macro, writing a script, describing it in something like Shortcuts,… The core thing is automation.
  - jrm4 4mo ago
    Not convinced this is clear at all? I'm typing a document in, lets say -- word. I want it to say "Come to my awesome awesome awesome party." If I type it out, it's not programming, but if I ctrl-c + then ctrl-v twice, it is?
    - skydhash 4mo ago
      Copy-pasting is not programming, no more than clicking the save button is. But text expansion may be seen as such, especially when it involves dynamic elements (like current date and time). It may not be a clean delineation but, IMO, it's the difference between writing a recipe and doing the dish. Copy-pasting twice is making a dish. Creating a button that let the computer do it is writing a recipe.
ramses0 4mo ago
...maybe some sort of "Software Bazaar", where the users of the software can edit their own software and make local modifications that they need to it, probably with NO WARRANTY FOR THE PROGRAM, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License It'd also be really nice that if you received some such software that you'd have the right to run the program as you wish, study how the program works and change it to make it do what you wish, and the freedom to redistribute either the original, or your modifications to the software? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Free_Software_Definition#The_Four_Essential_Freedoms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Free_Software_Definition#T... ...we can dream though, can't we?
nihakue 4mo ago
https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/ https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/ This has never been truer than right now. What we need isn't app store ecoystems but to eliminate the friction for distributing apps to your inner circle. We're entering the WhatsApp era of software, where everyone is going to be using a home cooked version of every piece of software that can conceivably exist on an island, and it's going to be a vibe coded mess, but it's going to be lovingly maintained by the people that use it every day. This is why I'm bullish on things like https://sprites.dev/ https://sprites.dev/ (not affiliated, just a customer). I have a little self replicating starter template that lets me quickly stand up new sprites with all my stuff logged in, ttyd + tmux so I can run claude code in the browser from my phone, and a caddy reverse proxy so I can also host a little starter app behind the fly io relay that sprites get out of the box so I don't have to do any extra work to have a publicly accessible https url I can send to people. Using this set up I've created dozens of little silly web applications for my family and friends, none of them were more complicated than little sketches but we've gotten some real pleasure out of them. There's still quite a bit of friction here though and I think if someone can really make this seamless for people they'll have something really special. As an example, the android options for printing to my outdated brother printer were all terrible (ad supported nokoprint for example), so I used my template to create https://print.walden-gabrielw.workers.dev/ https://print.walden-gabrielw.workers.dev/ (This one a put a cloudflare worker in front of because it's just a static html+js page and I didn't want to pay for uncached traffic but the principal is basically the same). No one will likely ever use this but me and my wife, but the cost to keep it up is basically 0, the cost to build it was very reasonable, and if it ever breaks I'm fairly confident the latest LLM will be able to debug it without too much trouble.
thisisit 4mo ago
If you scroll through any personal finance forum every year someone will discover the forum and excitedly share their customised budget tracking sheet they built from scratch and it works exactly as they wanted to. How many do you think even get 1 upvote? Everyone building a software will just mean people can produce code which others might not really care for and might even be particularly be mean. That’s how the Internet works unfortunately. The current logic seem to be confusing two things. One AI as a technology and wisdom of the crowd using AI. One might ground breaking tech and improve over time while the other might not move the needle at all.
- LuckyAbe 4mo ago
  Very well framed.
- xboxnolifes 4mo ago
  A customized budget tracking sheet is the personal finance equivalent of a programmer showcasing their TODO webapp. Obviously it's going to be incredibly unpopular. Yet, there are popular tools people have shared in personal finance communities.
austin-cheney 4mo ago
> The thing is I totally, 100% get this. The other thing I can't help but see though is how excited my non-programmer friends are to finally be able to make software. The sense of pride and accomplishment from non-coders who are finally able to make something work the way they wanted to. You absolutely don't need LLMs for that. Its the very description of most corporate JavaScript developers, and probably most Java developers. I say that as somebody who wrote corporate JavaScript full time from 2008-2023. Most of these people had no idea what they are doing. They could throw something together using their favorite abstraction library/framework but then struggled to maintain it. If there were performance or accessibility problems that came up there were only three outputs: hostility, crying, or starting over from scratch. The insecurity was real. You can still see it today. As an experiment take React away and note the response.

by ctoth 4mo ago

dude250711 4mo ago

When they shoot a little artistic clip with their nice modern iPhone camera, it does not mean they get to insert it into a Hollywood movie.

happyopossum 4mo ago
[dead]
awhitty 4mo ago
This analogy makes no sense to me and honestly skews pretty elitist in vibe. iPhone is regularly used in professional videography now. Like, 28 Years Later was shot on iPhone. Indie filmmakers have been using iPhone to break into the industry for years.
- satisfice 4mo ago
  Films aren’t open open to random contributions by casual volunteers. It’s not about iPhones.
- fantasizr 4mo ago
  the analogy would be that your LLM/agent has a pass at a Spielberg script and peppers his inbox with inane production notes. A system like that would be untenable for all involved.
  - hext 4mo ago
    I think the attitude frequently adopted by open source maintainers - comparing themselves to Spielberg - has been a major roadblock to anyone looking to contribute to open source projects for years.
    - fantasizr 4mo ago
      Agree that even prior to LLMs those projects weren't terribly welcoming as per Linus' famous email comments (chalk it up to cultural communication differences :) )
      - hext 4mo ago
        I don’t know if it’s just me, and these days I do understand it given the widespread adoption of LLMs, but I’ve always detested the idea that I need to reach out and have a conversation with the maintainer before opening a PR. Especially (mainly) when the PR is simply addressing an approved GH issue. I’ve had so many perfectly acceptable PRs rejected over the years simply because they didn’t “fit the vision” of the maintainer, despite being +1’d by many members of the community or even other contributors. I don’t even mean to imply they were rude or anything, just uninterested in actually merging anything where they didn’t architect the changes themselves upfront. On one hand I get it, you’ve spent so much time building something it’s fair to want to hold on tightly to that level of control, but to me it's just always felt antithetical to the entire idea of open source. Makes me feel like I’m not contributing to a true open source project, just doing free labor for someone.
    - skydhash 4mo ago
      Why are you looking to contribute to open source projects? If you have a fix or a new feature, you can share the diff in variety of ways. The maintainers are not obligated to review, discuss, and accept your changes.
- ben_w 4mo ago
  If you think filming is the only skill needed to make a film, may I suggest looking at the very long list of names that appears at the end of the film of which only a few actually do filming? Takes a lot to know what to film, and how to be good at using the tools you have. Similar is true for a lot of software. Credit list on video games… I don't want to say it "mostly" isn't coders, but only because I've not done an exhaustive study. My guess is the top will either be QA or art.
  - DrewADesign 4mo ago
    Artists of all stripes (including audio, animation, cinematographers, lighting, environment, textures, etc,) including tech artists, designers, writers, musicians… the ratio of functionality to look-and-feel is dramatically different than in non-entertainment products, and the labor involved reflects that. It’s a real shame that some of the people that contribute most to what makes a game great are often the first to get dropped when people talk about how the game is made, (but most are perfectly happy to fly under the radar when a bunch of entitled kids start raging about the “lazy devs.” ;)
- troupo 4mo ago
  "You are not a photographer just because you have a camera" has been a standard saying since forever, and has nothing to do with elitism. Those professionals are professionals not because they own an iPhone and use it to shoot something.
  - projektfu 4mo ago
    Professionals are professional because someone pays them, that is all.
    - troupo 4mo ago
      The word has other meanings, too ;) E.g. "professional conduct" isn't one that is paid for: 1a. of, relating to, or characteristic of a profession 1c.1. characterized by or conforming to the technical or ethical standards of a profession 3. following a line of conduct as though it were a profession
      - projektfu 4mo ago
        Professionals can be unprofessional, and amateurs can show professionalism, but only one gets paid.
  - awhitty 4mo ago
    Exactly - it's just a tool. So, trying to make the argument that someone's work is less-than because they used a cheaper/more amateur tool versus the tool the well-funded professionals are using _is_ elitist. You recognize that, but the comment I replied to centered on the tool, not the finer points of professionalism. But on that- whether folks have knowledge and taste, demonstrate responsibility for their impact, pay attention to their work quality, show up to the work environment with respect, etc. are all elements at the domain of human relations. This discussion is conflating how people use tools with how people work with each other. The tools don't matter here. I think we're sayin' the same thing.
    - troupo 4mo ago
- ninkendo 4mo ago
  Using Apple’s preferred practice of using no article before iPhone (ie. never “an iPhone” or “the iPhone” or even “iPhones”) makes you come off as a shill, by the way. It’s like if you unironically put a trademark symbol after it.
jrm4 4mo ago
This is so good, I wonder if op did it on purpose. Orders of magnitude more people can now make an absolutely "Hollywood quality" movie, precisely due to their nice modern iPhone cameras. The only question now is, how do we make it so more people can see the good ones?
utopiah 4mo ago
Art isn't craftsmanship. You can make art with a literally piece of shit, or a toilet if you want to be more traditional, at least in 1917. You can't be a craftsperson without mastery of your domain and its tool. You can be a artist without craftsmanship and vice versa. You can also be popular without any or both of these. There is a lot to entangle there but the point is that it depends on your goal. You can judge others based on your own value system but there goals might not be yours.
dgellow 4mo ago
I think a better analogy would be commissioning an artist to create a painting. Yes you provided instructions and decided which style you preferred, and maybe pointed some corrections you wanted. And you can be proud of owning that specific, unique painting. No you didn't create anything.

marcosdumay 4mo ago

> We almost need like ... noncanonical software? You mean some modern version of vb or php? That is the entire point of low-code and no-code.

joseda-hg 4mo ago

An ecosystem on shared formats can exist hapily There's a billion ways of opening a markdown and doing things with it and generally they all coexist hapily

beering 4mo ago

I agree. For many people, LLMs are the first time that computers do what they tell them to. Not what some big tech PM has decided is or isn’t possible. At the same time, OP is in the right to reject contributions they don’t want. Nobody providing open-source software is under any obligations to take changes. Forking is still a viable option in 2026. And I don’t think we need an on-demand app store either because the trust issues will still exist for good reason. We can have highly produced software coexisting with LLM agents.

tomxor 4mo ago
> For many people, LLMs are the first time that computers do what they tell them to. Not what some big tech PM has decided is or isn’t possible. The crux is here somewhere. A massive group of people (A), don't fully understand or care about code, but they care about arbitrary specific outcomes that serve their needs and desires VS a tiny group of people (B), who initiate, architect and maintain successful projects, who care deeply about the health and cohesion of the codebase over it's lifetime, because that serves everyone. Group-A is now liberated for better and worse. For the first time they can force their will upon a codebase without understanding. They are making selfish changes, and that's fine, this is hacking for the masses. The problem is they still don't realise these are selfish changes, because they have not been forced to tread the path of the programmer to understand they are selfish changes. The response from FOSS maintainers seems inevitable from this perspective... But I think what's going to be more interesting is watching how Group-A over time respond to creating their own personal hell. As group-A accrete more and more unsupervised selfish changes into their forks - at what point will they implode and turn into LLM-token-tarpits, at what point will Group-A notice, and I wonder what their response will be.

janalsncm 4mo ago

What is the kind of person who would use such software? What you’re describing is the need for a two sided market where really only one side exists. A user would have to be someone who doesn’t have access to an LLM to make bespoke software themselves, and isn’t able to use existing software. I think that’s a vanishingly small segment of people.

navane 4mo ago
Sounds like the user could just ammend the software to his need with the LLM, but instead of sending that update to the maintainer with a pull request, just keep it to himself, to the users version.
rpdillon 4mo ago
You're assuming that everybody will be equally skilled in using an LLM to create software. I don't think anything in my experience indicates that this is true.

mostlysimilar 4mo ago

> sense of pride and accomplishment What? Pride of what? What accomplishment?

Trasmatta 4mo ago
People are very proud of their prompts I guess It's like people being proud of the AI slop art they produce
unacorner 4mo ago
Maybe building something? It doesn't matter much that the programming language was English and built by an LLM and a harness. They created something they wanted that wasn't there before.
- mostlysimilar 4mo ago
  It does matter. Drawing a stick figure and having a machine print over it with a realistic image doesn't make you an artist, and no, you shouldn't be proud of it.
  - senordevnyc 4mo ago
    Or we could, you know, let people feel proud of whatever they want?
    - mostlysimilar 4mo ago
      Call me old fashioned but I take pride in things I work hard to achieve. I think it's embarrassing to be proud of AI output of any kind, be it software or art or writing.
      - rpdillon 4mo ago
        But you're acting like everything that you use AI to build is easy to achieve, and that doesn't seem to be true.

Trasmatta 4mo ago

> The other thing I can't help but see though is how excited my non-programmer friends are to finally be able to make software. The sense of pride and accomplishment from non-coders who are finally able to make something work the way they wanted to. There was nothing stopping them from making software before... Over the past ~15 years, the amount of resources to learn programming, and to make the whole process approachable, is staggering. It just took some time and effort. People are just excited that they can skip past the effort part now. But we've lost something in the process.

jackp96 4mo ago
I mean, I largely agree with the sentiment (friction is important for growth/happiness, after all). But even as a developer, I'm able to quickly whip up custom personal apps that I just wouldn't be able to justify the time for previously. Our CEO just took a design mock-up of a new landing page and threw it into Fable, and it spit out an objectively better iteration of the component's design. The hierarchy made more sense, the typography was more polished, and it naturally incorporated some elements we hadn't added yet. We won't implement everything it changed of course, but it's the first time I've seen a model take a decent draft of a webpage mockup and improve it in a way that feels like a more evolved version of the original instead of just LLM-ifying it.
fragmede 4mo ago
Huh? The difficulty and the cost was stopping them before. It was really difficult, took a ton of time and money, and you had to deal with another person.

lwyrup 4mo ago

So I am thinking this is like an army of plebs going to Home Depot, buying power tools, and building a house with no experience. Oh what fun—we can finally build a house the barrier has been broken. I don’t want software written by plebs.

surgical_fire 4mo ago

> I hope we can think about some answers and not get tribal though because this is really a huge problem and also a huge opportunity and so a minor reminder that there is a baby in that bathwater? I think no answers are needed. If anyone can build the software they need, no ecosystem will be needed. There will be no maintainers because no one will be using his thing. If it makes sense (economical, but no limited to it), then it will progress in that direction. If it makes no sense it is a fad that eventually dies out. There may or may not be a baby in the bathwater. In truth nothing in this bathtub matter too much.

skybrian 4mo ago
I think this makes sense for apps, but the apps will still need infrastructure and common protocols to interoperate. It still won’t make sense to implement your own cryptography.
- surgical_fire 4mo ago
  Why not? If you can vibecode your app, you can vibecode your cryptography as well. You may object to it but that, too, would be elitism. And the person vibecoding has no idea why proper cryptography matters anyway. Or why proper anything matters. This is the ultimate realization of "my ignorance is as good as your knowledge". I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing.
  - skybrian 4mo ago
    Because doing enough security reviews to remove all the security bugs gets expensive, and if you use well-reviewed code, it's already been done.

oytis 4mo ago

Who gets a sense of accoplishment from prompting an LLM? Do you get a sense of accomplishment when AI draws a picture or writes a poem for you? I guess there are some minds I'll never be able to comprehend

AndrewKemendo 4mo ago
You should see the non AI trash that people are proud of Someone having pride doesn’t mean what they did has value
zephen 4mo ago
After trying and failing multiple times to get any LLM to create exactly the picture that I was trying to make, I have to admit that, at one point, if one of them had succeeded, I would have felt a quantum of accomplishment. But, since I'm not that much of a slot machine aficionado, I just completely stopped pulling the lever. However, I can see that for the right people, this level of difficulty might encode or mimic, purposely or not, many of the features that are collectively termed "gamification."
keiferski 4mo ago
Don’t think of it as creating art, but as solving a frustrating computer problem. For people that aren’t technical, computers are often irritatingly obtuse and unclear if you’re trying to get something to work in a particular way.
seanlinehan 4mo ago
One can reason by analogy here. In a pre-LLM world, a classic software team would have PMs, designers, and engineers. Of those three, the PM wouldn't have any real role in writing code. And they would rarely contribute a ton to the design. What they would be contributing is ideas, market insights, coordination, prioritization, etc. When the product ships, one would expect the PM to feel a real sense of accomplishment. They helped this idea become a _real thing_! All of that pride, despite not writing a single line of code nor polishing any pixels themselves. And I don't think anybody would reasonably look down on them for that feeling. Same thing with using LLMs. Sure, you didn't write the code. But you caused the thing to exist! That's exciting!

doctorpangloss 4mo ago

it's called plugins, lots of end user facing OSS have vibrant plugin ecosystems. maintainers like the sense of power and it's not really more complicated than that. perfectly valid emotion to chase!

jrm4 4mo ago

I do a bit in my IT classes where I show a "spectrum" of computer activities, from "changing a screensaver" to "Assembly" and then challenge people to find the line where "using a computer" stops and "programming a computer" starts. It was already very fuzzy (Excel?). Soon, this line be non-existent.

skydhash 4mo ago
As soon as you’re specifying instructions for the computer to do a task automatically, you’re programming it. It can be recording a macro, writing a script, describing it in something like Shortcuts,… The core thing is automation.
- jrm4 4mo ago
  Not convinced this is clear at all? I'm typing a document in, lets say -- word. I want it to say "Come to my awesome awesome awesome party." If I type it out, it's not programming, but if I ctrl-c + then ctrl-v twice, it is?
  - skydhash 4mo ago
    Copy-pasting is not programming, no more than clicking the save button is. But text expansion may be seen as such, especially when it involves dynamic elements (like current date and time). It may not be a clean delineation but, IMO, it's the difference between writing a recipe and doing the dish. Copy-pasting twice is making a dish. Creating a button that let the computer do it is writing a recipe.

ramses0 4mo ago

...maybe some sort of "Software Bazaar", where the users of the software can edit their own software and make local modifications that they need to it, probably with NO WARRANTY FOR THE PROGRAM, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License It'd also be really nice that if you received some such software that you'd have the right to run the program as you wish, study how the program works and change it to make it do what you wish, and the freedom to redistribute either the original, or your modifications to the software? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Free_Software_Definition#The_Four_Essential_Freedoms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Free_Software_Definition#T... ...we can dream though, can't we?

nihakue 4mo ago

https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/ https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/ This has never been truer than right now. What we need isn't app store ecoystems but to eliminate the friction for distributing apps to your inner circle. We're entering the WhatsApp era of software, where everyone is going to be using a home cooked version of every piece of software that can conceivably exist on an island, and it's going to be a vibe coded mess, but it's going to be lovingly maintained by the people that use it every day. This is why I'm bullish on things like https://sprites.dev/ https://sprites.dev/ (not affiliated, just a customer). I have a little self replicating starter template that lets me quickly stand up new sprites with all my stuff logged in, ttyd + tmux so I can run claude code in the browser from my phone, and a caddy reverse proxy so I can also host a little starter app behind the fly io relay that sprites get out of the box so I don't have to do any extra work to have a publicly accessible https url I can send to people. Using this set up I've created dozens of little silly web applications for my family and friends, none of them were more complicated than little sketches but we've gotten some real pleasure out of them. There's still quite a bit of friction here though and I think if someone can really make this seamless for people they'll have something really special. As an example, the android options for printing to my outdated brother printer were all terrible (ad supported nokoprint for example), so I used my template to create https://print.walden-gabrielw.workers.dev/ https://print.walden-gabrielw.workers.dev/ (This one a put a cloudflare worker in front of because it's just a static html+js page and I didn't want to pay for uncached traffic but the principal is basically the same). No one will likely ever use this but me and my wife, but the cost to keep it up is basically 0, the cost to build it was very reasonable, and if it ever breaks I'm fairly confident the latest LLM will be able to debug it without too much trouble.

thisisit 4mo ago

If you scroll through any personal finance forum every year someone will discover the forum and excitedly share their customised budget tracking sheet they built from scratch and it works exactly as they wanted to. How many do you think even get 1 upvote? Everyone building a software will just mean people can produce code which others might not really care for and might even be particularly be mean. That’s how the Internet works unfortunately. The current logic seem to be confusing two things. One AI as a technology and wisdom of the crowd using AI. One might ground breaking tech and improve over time while the other might not move the needle at all.

LuckyAbe 4mo ago
Very well framed.
xboxnolifes 4mo ago
A customized budget tracking sheet is the personal finance equivalent of a programmer showcasing their TODO webapp. Obviously it's going to be incredibly unpopular. Yet, there are popular tools people have shared in personal finance communities.

austin-cheney 4mo ago

> The thing is I totally, 100% get this. The other thing I can't help but see though is how excited my non-programmer friends are to finally be able to make software. The sense of pride and accomplishment from non-coders who are finally able to make something work the way they wanted to. You absolutely don't need LLMs for that. Its the very description of most corporate JavaScript developers, and probably most Java developers. I say that as somebody who wrote corporate JavaScript full time from 2008-2023. Most of these people had no idea what they are doing. They could throw something together using their favorite abstraction library/framework but then struggled to maintain it. If there were performance or accessibility problems that came up there were only three outputs: hostility, crying, or starting over from scratch. The insecurity was real. You can still see it today. As an experiment take React away and note the response.