[mrmincent]

To misuse a woodworking metaphor, I think we’re experiencing a shift from hand tools to power tools.

You still need someone who understands the basics to get the good results out of the tools, but they’re not chiseling fine furniture by hand anymore, they’re throwing heaps of wood through the tablesaw instead. More productive, but more likely to lose a finger if you’re not careful.

[forgotoldacc]

And we may get an ugly transitory period where a lot of programs go from being clearly hand made with some degree of care and some fine details that show the developer's craftsmanship, to awful prefab and brutalist software that feels inhuman, mass-produced, and nothing is really fit for the job but still shipped because it kind of works well enough.

People go to museums to admire old hand-carved furniture and travel to cities to admire the architecture of centuries past made with hand-chiseled blocks. While power tools do let people make things of equal quality faster, they're instead generally used to make things of worse quality much, much faster and the field has gone from being a craft to simply being an assembly line job. As bad as software is today, we're likely to hit even deeper lows and people will miss the days where Electron apps are good compared to what's yet to come.

There's already been one step in this direction with the Cambrian extinction of 90s/early 2000s software. People still talk about how soulful Winamp/old Windows Media Player/ZSNES/etc were.

[konart]

>nothing is really fit for the job but still shipped because it kind of works well enough.

This is true for most of the software these days (except for professional software like Photoshop and the like) without LLMs.

[trainerxr50]

Exactly. As a non-software engineer, people talk about software as some fine art on here while my experience as a user is that most software basically sucks in one way or another.

[steve_adams_86]

Your experience is a perfect reflection of reality. Most software is not well done.

In trades I found people were very opinionated about the Right Way to do things, but we tended to cut corners constantly there as well. People who work in a craft seem to like the idea of doing things right more than they actually do things right in practice. We end up with gaps in our flooring, ugly solder joints in our plumbing, creaking decks, cracked concrete, and a cookie disclaimer that returns every time you refresh the page.

[1dom]

> In trades I found people were very opinionated about the Right Way to do things,

My experience of moving from tech to doing a lot of home renovations and dealing with hundreds of trades people is that it was just like tech. 90% of people in 90% of environments are just trying to make it work so they can collect their pay-cheque and go home.

High quality output in any domain is a result of stumbling across the 10% of genuinely passionate people, and creating the 10% environment for them to want to be passionate in. If you don't luck out with that, everything will still work, it'll just be a bit rough round the edges.

[rustyboy]

Amen - As a SWE and i've come to realize that no one pays for me to treat code as craftman quality so I don't. The whole agile mindset is get something out that demonstrates value and fix it things while you go. And in ten years i've also realized that my ability to sit down and make something really special the first time through is - shit. This is the first time i've been able to meet timelines while still producing a better product.

[rolisz]

I think it's going to go the opposite way: we'll get a lot more custom made software, that fits exactly what a small customer needs. The code might be utter crap, the design might not be award winning, but it will be custom made to a degree that you can't customize your average Savas.

[bluefirebrand]

This was the promise of "no code" / "low code" solutions in the past

It has never worked in the past, I'm not entirely convinced that it will work now

[himeexcelanta]

Agreed. Trying to live in a high level of abstraction without understanding the components of the system will cause the project to fail after a certain point.

[pseudosavant]

I think the kind of people, who in the past constructed extremely useful (if brittle) solutions with Excel, will be creating all sorts of AI bespoke and very useful tools.

It won't bother them at all what the code looks like under the hood. Not that the code will look worse that what an "average" developer produces. Claude and ChatGPT both write better code than most of the existing code I usually look at.

[Zopieux]

Beautifully formatted, exquisitely incorrect code that provides the simulacra of a feature on the happy path and subtly fails in all other scenarios with hard to detect, impossible to debug errors. Can't wait (it's already there to be honest).

[pseudosavant]

Better than poorly formatted code, making basic mistakes like SQL query string concatenation, from someone who didn't bother to write any tests. You just have to treat it like code you got from someone else. It would be hard for AI to produce more magical errors that are harder to debug than what humans write. LLMs are one of the best debugging tools out there too.

[mstipetic]

Yeah and then you’ll get hundreds of slightly different protocols formats and standards and nothing will talk to each other anymore without bespoke integration

[rolisz]

LLMs can do that integration :)

[voiper1]

But "utter crap" isn't just an aesthetic issue - that can mean all kinds of bugs and malfunctions!

[isoprophlex]

And infinite job security for those who know how to turn on a debugger

[txs]

Or people will just throw the product away and buy a replacement because it’s cheaper than fixing it, much like we no longer mend clothes

[torginus]

I kinda feel differently - it's more like how nowadays you have access to high-quality power tools at cheap prices, and tons of tutorials on Youtube that teach you how to do woodworking, and even if you can't afford the masterwork furniture made by craftsmen, you don't have to buy the shitty mass produced stuff - sure yours won't be as good, but it will be made to your spec.

Moving on into a concrete software example, thanks to AI productivity, we replaced a lot of expensive and crappy subscription SaaS software with our homegrown stuff. Our stuff is probably 100x simpler (everyone knows the pain of making box software for a diverse set of customer needs, everything needs to be configurable, which leads to crazy convoluted code, and a lot of it). It's also much better and cheaper to run, to say nothing of the money we save by not paying the exorbitant subscription fee.

I suspect the biggest losers of the AI revolution will be the SaaS companies whose value proposition was: Yes you can use open source for this, but the extra cost of an engineer who maintains this is more than we charge.

As for bespoke software, 'slop' software using Electron, or Unity in video games exists because people believe in the convenience of using these huge lumbering monoliths that come with a ton of baggage, while they were taught the creed that coding to the metal is too hard.

LLMs can help with that, and show people that they can do bespoke from scratch (and more importantly teach people how to do that). Claude/o3/whatever can probably help you build a game in WebGL you thought you needed a game engine for.

[forgotoldacc]

Hence the transitory period.

We went through decades of absolutely hideous slop, and now people are yearning for the past and learning how to make things that are aesthetically appealing, like the things that used to be common.

I think we're looking at at least a decade of absolute garbage coming up because it's cheap to make, and people like things that are cheap in the short term. Then people will look back at when software was "good", and use new tools to make things that were as good as they were before.

And not limited to AI and power tools, it happened with art as well. Great art was made with oil paints, watercolors, and brushes. Then digital painting and Photoshop came around and we had a long period of absolute messes on DeviantArt and a lot of knowledge of good color usage and blending was basically lost, but art was produced much faster. Now digital artists are learning traditional methods and combining it with modern technology to make digital art that can be produced faster than traditional art, but with quality that's just as good.

2005 digital paintings have a distinct, and even in the hands of great artists, very sloppy and amateurish feel. Meanwhile 2020s digital artists easily rival the greats of decades and centuries past.

[danielbln]

Don't talk about AI with those digital artists though, they will slaughter you for it. The discourse on GenAI in the digital art world (and gaming world, for that matter) has reached an absolutely deranged fever pitch that far outpaces the original valid points about copyright, compensation and intent that were there before. Now it's just screeching.

[conception]

Feels more like photography. Everyone will “soon” have a tool that lets you take pretty great photos - surpassing professional of thirty years ago.

If you want professional work done you’ll still hire someone but that person will also use a lot of professional grade computer tooling with it.

But there definitely won’t be as many jobs as before - especially on the low skill end.

[steve_adams_86]

I like this metaphor because power tools didn’t lead to more sophisticated craftspeople despite the increase in efficiency and potential. I think it will be the same with code. More outputs, not necessarily more refined or better in any way, but not innately bad either.

[SkepticalWhale]

Great analogy.

Although I still wonder how long we're in this phase and how ubiquitous it will be, because didn't power tools coincide with improved automation in factories eliminating manufacturing jobs?

[otterley]

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like your thumb.

[floriferous]

Great metaphor, exactly how it feels to me too!