[api]

I see a stratified software market in the future.

There will be vibe and amateur banged out hustle trash, which will be the cheap plastic cutlery of the software world.

There will be lovingly hand crafted by experts code (possibly using some AI but in the hands of someone who knows their shit) that will be like the fine stuff and will cost many times more.

A lot of stuff will get prototyped as crap and then if it gets traction reimplemented with quality.

[bitwize]

Back in the day, if you went to a website you could always tell who wrote their HTML by hand and who used a tool like GruntPage, Dreamweaver, etc. even without looking at the META tags. The by-hand stuff was like a polished jewel that had only as much layout, styling, and markup as needed to get the desired effect. The proprietary web editor stuff was encrusted with extraneous tags and vendor-specific extensions (like mso: attributes and styles in GruntPage).

Then as now, if you let the machine do the thinking for you, the result was a steaming mess. Up to you if that was accessible (and for many, it was).

[wffurr]

You can make the same claim about compiled code vs hand written assembly, and yet the vast majority of software is compiled or interpreted.

[dgfitz]

A compiler is written by very smart humans to a spec written by humans, also probably smart but I don’t know enough to claim that bit.

An LLM is just displaying the next statistical token.

Completely different.

[bitwize]

Or, as I like to put it, pulling out the next refrigerator poetry tile from a stochastic bag of holding.

[DowsingSpoon]

In the past, hand-crafted assembly code was common because it was easy to beat the compiler. This is still true today in some niches.

[Miraste]

Where's the part where it's different from the existing market?

[api]

What I meant was that the contrast will become much more extreme, like the difference between fine silverware and bulk plastic cutlery from Wal-Mart.

Pre-vibe-coding it was more like the difference between fine silverware and cheap stamped metal stuff.

[doesnt_know]

This was said about large frameworks like electron on the desktop, but outside of some specific technical niches it literally doesn’t matter to end users.

[kbelder]

It does matter and they do care; they just don't have the specific technical knowledge to pinpoint why their computer sucks now.

[whatevertrevor]

And why it takes months to years to fix basic bugs that have been acknowledged by the developer.

[robocat]

A beautiful vision.

If the vision were true, we should see it happen with normal goods too. Quality physical goods do not beat the shit goods in the market : crap furniture is the canonical example (with blog articles discussing the issue).

Software (and movies) is free for subsequent copies, so at first sight you might think software is completely different from physical goods.

However for most factory produced goods, designing and building the factory is the major cost. The marginal cost of producing each copy of an item might be reasonably low (highly dependent on raw materials and labor costs?).

Many expensive physical goods are dominated by the initial design costs, so an expensive Maserati might be complete shit (bought for image status or Veblen reasons, not because it is high quality). There's a reason why the best products are often midrange. The per unit 2..n reproduction cost of cheap physical goods is always low almost by definition.

Some parts of iPhone software are high quality (e.g. the security is astounding). Some parts are bad. Apple monetisation adds non-optional features that have negative value to me: however those features have positive value to Apple.

[api]

What happens is the price difference gets huge. Quality furniture does beat shit at the high end of the market, but a real quality bed or sofa costs over a thousand dollars and up from there. The price difference between shit and quality starts at 5-10X.

Tangent but -- one furniture hack I've found is that if you don't want to pay a lot go for the simplest design you can find made of basic wood or metal. It'll be... a wood or metal kit that assembles into the basic form of what is needed. Wood is often unfinished or minimally finished. That stuff is pretty durable. Things that look "fancy" but are cheap tend to be utter trash, made of the worst materials with poor tolerances. A more elaborate or artistic design plus quality equals expensive.

When I say minimal I mean minimal. A cheap quality bed frame is a rack the mattress sits on. A cheap quality dresser is basically bins on tracks.

Ironically places like Amazon is where you find this cheap quality minimal stuff. Furniture stores are complete trash unless they are artisan, often local, like I live in Ohio and there are artisan Amish furniture sellers that sell good (but $$$) stuff that is literally hand made. But find one that is actually sourcing or even tied to an Amish community. You don't have to look into the store, just the stuff inside. It will be solid and build via obvious craft joinery, etc., and will weigh a ton. (and you're supporting a local community)

So I wonder if software will start to look like that. Pay a lot (like enterprise prices) for highly regarded pro software or find something minimal "hand made" by a 1-5 person shop. The world of quality native Mac apps comes to mind for the latter.

[librasteve]

yeah this is it ...