4 ms·

> It will become very easy to build most software We keep hearing this, but where is the Photoshop killer written by a gas station attendant? Where is the PayP

> It will become very easy to build most software We keep hearing this, but where is the Photoshop killer written by a gas station attendant? Where is the PayPal alternative written by a retired nurse? Over and over we're told that software is now trivial to write, and Claude is evidently writing some billions of lines of code a day, but where are the results? Where is the vibe coded app toppling the legacy hand-coded monster product from 20 years ago?

confidantlake 2mo ago
Software wins because of the sales team and the network effects. You could already create a better twitter or facebook that no one would use long before llms.
mikert89 2mo ago
the future is already here, its just not evenly distributed
pydry 2mo ago
In the "iceberg" of boring company systems I see working day to day I actually think delivery of production software has been slowed down. The cost of "writing" code went down a bit, while validation costs positively exploded. There are definitely more apps developed these days but I haven't seen anything much vibe coded which actually seems to have staying power. Everything is prototype quality.
- deaton 2mo ago
  Now you can make a prototype without understanding what's going on internally or why the prototype wasn't good enough!
threatofrain 2mo ago
Why ask such extreme stuff? Why not ask about the solo entrepreneur who creates a convincing iOS app without a programming background? Advantage the problem on the side of ML and look for winning scenarios today.
- mrbombastic 2mo ago
  because this comment is responding to: "I think the field is basically over as a long term career unless you are truly exceptional. It will become very easy to build most software" photoshop, paypal, and many more companies etc. have software of vast complexity that cannot be reproduced or maintained today solely with llms, ipso facto you still need software developers or some similar role to build and maintain the complexity of _yesterday_ some guy shipping an iOS app to zero users doesn't change that. although i think it is good we can have more bespoke software.
  - mikert89 2mo ago
    You aren’t getting it. They can pay their engineers half what they used to, you don’t need the same level of skill to build photoshop. Yes, you need a bunch of engineers, but they will be driving coding agents, not writing code by hand. They can be hired and fired for cheap
    - jkman 2mo ago
      Until the VC subsidies stop and the human devs are half the cost of the claude tokens lol
      - mikert89 2mo ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law
        Banditoz 2mo ago
        Moore's Law covers transistors, not LLMs.
        mrguyorama 2mo ago
        Moore's Law hasn't covered transistors in quite some time. We get about 10% YoY now, which is actually impressive, but not even close to the past experiences. Computing power used to take 18 months to double, and was being attacked at a bunch of different angles. Now we are literally out of tricks, to the point where we had to undo some of those tricks because they were fundamentally flawed, and it takes 100x the engineering investment to get that 10% YoY, or sometimes only every other year, and that isn't going to continue for much longer. We can't increase clock speed much. We can't increase density much. We are out of clever tricks. It takes an entire earth's worth of human talent just to produce the machine that produces the chips. How the hell are people still insisting that computing power continues to follow Moore's Law? Several of the limits we've hit are fundamental matters of physics. Meanwhile, LLMs ask for orders of magnitude more compute than is cheap and cheerful right now. Do we even have a single order of magnitude left for compute?
ex-aws-dude 2mo ago
Every time I see people say this I think: show me the money? If its so good why aren't you rich?
- SoftTalker 2mo ago
  Why would anyone get rich doing something easy?
  - mrbombastic 2mo ago
    Because the companies everyone claims are now obsolete are making a lot of money still doing the supposedly obsolete things?
    - codexon 2mo ago
      Many of those companies like duolingo have already collapsed in stock price with YoY growth dropping off a cliff. It is happening, it just isn't instant.
      - batshit_beaver 2mo ago
        And yet those companies aren't collapsing because it became easier to rewrite their software, but because llms themselves have replaced a core part of their business (such as translation or simple art). Seems like so far the market is not convinced at all that SaaS companies as a whole are any more disruptable than before.
        StrangeWill 2mo ago
        That and talking to a lot of users, Duolingo reduced the quality of their service moving to LLM generated content -- a lot of people moved to other apps.
    - bossyTeacher 2mo ago
      No one buys CDs but Taylor Swift still makes a lot of money from her music. Doesn't negate that making music is economically worse than ever. Most people book flights online, travel agents still make a lot of money. Doesn't negate that travel agency as a business is economically worse than ever. Most people have cameras in their pockets that can take good photos, photographers still make a lot of money. Doesn't negate that being a photographer is economically worse than ever. Hopefully, you see the pattern. You don't remember that companies that are no longer around.
deaton 2mo ago
See this is the big issue I've been seeing. The only vibe coded product I can think of off the top of my head that's succeeding at all is Bun, and maybe I'm behind the times but it feels like Bun's success is mostly being pushed by Anthropic; I've yet to see much other than Claude Code use it.
- codexon 2mo ago
  There's very little incentive for people to advertise that their product was vibe coded. In fact there's many incentives to hide it. Many people hate AI and why would you invite more competition? Bun gets a lot of hate for vibe coding. I vibe coded to modernize one of my old hobby websites (so not even vibe coding from scratch) and I immediately got anti-AI comments, and I didn't even say I used AI.
  - johnnyanmac 2mo ago
    Hope it keeps up, then. Social shaming is one of the last real hopes against this since government regulators are compromised.
    - codexon 2mo ago
      There's nothing wrong with vibe coding as long as the quality is good.
      - johnnyanmac 2mo ago
        >as long as the quality is good. Well that's where we're seemingly at an impasse, no? I don't even like the term "good vibecoding". The term was implied as a means to just let the computer type its own code and "go with the vibes". i.e. you have no deeper idea on how it works underneath. Now, AI-assisted coding? It can be good. It can be a rush job. But the idea is that LLM's are in the passenger's seat, not the diver's. Much smaller chance where you have no idea where you're going since you're at the wheel.
        2mo ago
tossandthrow 2mo ago
My non technical wife asked ai to brush up the photo for her cv. Ai did that with whatever cli tools were available and what it would write itself. Ai is not a faster horse. It is a phase shift. We won't see a gas station clerk write photoshop because we won't need a photoshop.
- squidsoup 2mo ago
  The majority of artists abhor AI, this is a particularly bad example.
  - mitchdoogle 2mo ago
    Says who?
- bossyTeacher 2mo ago
  > We won't see a gas station clerk write photoshop because we won't need a photoshop. 100% agree. People are looking at the future through the lenses of the current paradigm just like when people from the past imagined the future (our present) in a way which we now find hilarious. Most of the time, the future doesn't bring developments which improve an action in a scalar way (faster, shorter, stronger, etc) but instead fundamentally change the nature of that action (handwritten letter communication vs video calls) or completely override the need for it (telephone boxes vs mobile phones).
  - johnnyanmac 2mo ago
    And the issue here is that this future is bringing fundamental change to the nautre of labor without overriding the need for compensation in order to house and feed the populace. Hence the rejection.
    - pickleRick243 2mo ago
      I notice your two comments straddle the contradiction "It's definitely not happening, but also it's terrible that it is."
codexon 2mo ago
There are multiple "photoshop killers" already available, even for free like photopea. I would bet that you can ask AI to make a clone of it. People just haven't done it because there's no need to waste tokens on that.
- eudamoniac 2mo ago
  Then why isn't Photoshop killed?
  - codexon 2mo ago
    Marketing? Who knows? I haven't used photoshop a single time ever since I found out about photopea.
matheusmoreira 2mo ago
> Where is the PayPal alternative written by a retired nurse? I'm a doctor and I'm building my own EMR system. I've also been a hobbyist programmer for over a decade, but the point still stands because without LLMs I wouldn't have the time to even try it.
ChrisMarshallNY 2mo ago
Extremely bad software is now easy to write. Sadly, we have trained software users to pay for shit code.

confidantlake 2mo ago

Software wins because of the sales team and the network effects. You could already create a better twitter or facebook that no one would use long before llms.

mikert89 2mo ago

the future is already here, its just not evenly distributed

pydry 2mo ago

In the "iceberg" of boring company systems I see working day to day I actually think delivery of production software has been slowed down. The cost of "writing" code went down a bit, while validation costs positively exploded. There are definitely more apps developed these days but I haven't seen anything much vibe coded which actually seems to have staying power. Everything is prototype quality.

deaton 2mo ago
Now you can make a prototype without understanding what's going on internally or why the prototype wasn't good enough!

threatofrain 2mo ago

Why ask such extreme stuff? Why not ask about the solo entrepreneur who creates a convincing iOS app without a programming background? Advantage the problem on the side of ML and look for winning scenarios today.

mrbombastic 2mo ago
because this comment is responding to: "I think the field is basically over as a long term career unless you are truly exceptional. It will become very easy to build most software" photoshop, paypal, and many more companies etc. have software of vast complexity that cannot be reproduced or maintained today solely with llms, ipso facto you still need software developers or some similar role to build and maintain the complexity of _yesterday_ some guy shipping an iOS app to zero users doesn't change that. although i think it is good we can have more bespoke software.
- mikert89 2mo ago
  You aren’t getting it. They can pay their engineers half what they used to, you don’t need the same level of skill to build photoshop. Yes, you need a bunch of engineers, but they will be driving coding agents, not writing code by hand. They can be hired and fired for cheap
  - jkman 2mo ago
    Until the VC subsidies stop and the human devs are half the cost of the claude tokens lol
    - mikert89 2mo ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law
      - Banditoz 2mo ago
        Moore's Law covers transistors, not LLMs.
        mrguyorama 2mo ago
        Moore's Law hasn't covered transistors in quite some time. We get about 10% YoY now, which is actually impressive, but not even close to the past experiences. Computing power used to take 18 months to double, and was being attacked at a bunch of different angles. Now we are literally out of tricks, to the point where we had to undo some of those tricks because they were fundamentally flawed, and it takes 100x the engineering investment to get that 10% YoY, or sometimes only every other year, and that isn't going to continue for much longer. We can't increase clock speed much. We can't increase density much. We are out of clever tricks. It takes an entire earth's worth of human talent just to produce the machine that produces the chips. How the hell are people still insisting that computing power continues to follow Moore's Law? Several of the limits we've hit are fundamental matters of physics. Meanwhile, LLMs ask for orders of magnitude more compute than is cheap and cheerful right now. Do we even have a single order of magnitude left for compute?

ex-aws-dude 2mo ago

Every time I see people say this I think: show me the money? If its so good why aren't you rich?

SoftTalker 2mo ago
Why would anyone get rich doing something easy?
- mrbombastic 2mo ago
  Because the companies everyone claims are now obsolete are making a lot of money still doing the supposedly obsolete things?
  - codexon 2mo ago
    Many of those companies like duolingo have already collapsed in stock price with YoY growth dropping off a cliff. It is happening, it just isn't instant.
    - batshit_beaver 2mo ago
      And yet those companies aren't collapsing because it became easier to rewrite their software, but because llms themselves have replaced a core part of their business (such as translation or simple art). Seems like so far the market is not convinced at all that SaaS companies as a whole are any more disruptable than before.
      - StrangeWill 2mo ago
        That and talking to a lot of users, Duolingo reduced the quality of their service moving to LLM generated content -- a lot of people moved to other apps.
  - bossyTeacher 2mo ago
    No one buys CDs but Taylor Swift still makes a lot of money from her music. Doesn't negate that making music is economically worse than ever. Most people book flights online, travel agents still make a lot of money. Doesn't negate that travel agency as a business is economically worse than ever. Most people have cameras in their pockets that can take good photos, photographers still make a lot of money. Doesn't negate that being a photographer is economically worse than ever. Hopefully, you see the pattern. You don't remember that companies that are no longer around.

deaton 2mo ago

See this is the big issue I've been seeing. The only vibe coded product I can think of off the top of my head that's succeeding at all is Bun, and maybe I'm behind the times but it feels like Bun's success is mostly being pushed by Anthropic; I've yet to see much other than Claude Code use it.

codexon 2mo ago
There's very little incentive for people to advertise that their product was vibe coded. In fact there's many incentives to hide it. Many people hate AI and why would you invite more competition? Bun gets a lot of hate for vibe coding. I vibe coded to modernize one of my old hobby websites (so not even vibe coding from scratch) and I immediately got anti-AI comments, and I didn't even say I used AI.
- johnnyanmac 2mo ago
  Hope it keeps up, then. Social shaming is one of the last real hopes against this since government regulators are compromised.
  - codexon 2mo ago
    There's nothing wrong with vibe coding as long as the quality is good.
    - johnnyanmac 2mo ago
      >as long as the quality is good. Well that's where we're seemingly at an impasse, no? I don't even like the term "good vibecoding". The term was implied as a means to just let the computer type its own code and "go with the vibes". i.e. you have no deeper idea on how it works underneath. Now, AI-assisted coding? It can be good. It can be a rush job. But the idea is that LLM's are in the passenger's seat, not the diver's. Much smaller chance where you have no idea where you're going since you're at the wheel.
      - 2mo ago

tossandthrow 2mo ago

My non technical wife asked ai to brush up the photo for her cv. Ai did that with whatever cli tools were available and what it would write itself. Ai is not a faster horse. It is a phase shift. We won't see a gas station clerk write photoshop because we won't need a photoshop.

squidsoup 2mo ago
The majority of artists abhor AI, this is a particularly bad example.
- mitchdoogle 2mo ago
  Says who?
bossyTeacher 2mo ago
> We won't see a gas station clerk write photoshop because we won't need a photoshop. 100% agree. People are looking at the future through the lenses of the current paradigm just like when people from the past imagined the future (our present) in a way which we now find hilarious. Most of the time, the future doesn't bring developments which improve an action in a scalar way (faster, shorter, stronger, etc) but instead fundamentally change the nature of that action (handwritten letter communication vs video calls) or completely override the need for it (telephone boxes vs mobile phones).
- johnnyanmac 2mo ago
  And the issue here is that this future is bringing fundamental change to the nautre of labor without overriding the need for compensation in order to house and feed the populace. Hence the rejection.
  - pickleRick243 2mo ago
    I notice your two comments straddle the contradiction "It's definitely not happening, but also it's terrible that it is."

codexon 2mo ago

There are multiple "photoshop killers" already available, even for free like photopea. I would bet that you can ask AI to make a clone of it. People just haven't done it because there's no need to waste tokens on that.

eudamoniac 2mo ago
Then why isn't Photoshop killed?
- codexon 2mo ago
  Marketing? Who knows? I haven't used photoshop a single time ever since I found out about photopea.

matheusmoreira 2mo ago

> Where is the PayPal alternative written by a retired nurse? I'm a doctor and I'm building my own EMR system. I've also been a hobbyist programmer for over a decade, but the point still stands because without LLMs I wouldn't have the time to even try it.

ChrisMarshallNY 2mo ago

Extremely bad software is now easy to write. Sadly, we have trained software users to pay for shit code.