[maddmann]

Can you specify? I am personally using ai coding tools to replace subscription tools. While it’s valuable to me, in aggregate it would be a potential decline in economic activity for traditional services (this would only play out years from now in aggregate). We need to keep in mind that good ai coding tools like Claude code or to some extent,lovable, have barely come into existence.

[t0mas88]

I've mostly seen this done for things where there is no prefect commercial tool because it's a small market.

For example a flight school that I work with has their own simple rental administration program. It's a small webapp with 3 screens. They use it next to a SaaS booking/planning tool, but that tool never replaced their administrative approach. Mainly because it wouldn't support local tax rules and some discount system that was in place there. So before the webapp they used paper receipts and an spreadsheet.

I think the challenge in the future with lots of these tools is going to be how they're maintained and how "ops" is done.

[conartist6]

It just doesn't seem that different to me. The difficulty of building and maintaining a 3 screen webapp hasn't changed significantly. Flight schools are a niche sure (and I've been around them; I'm a private pilot) but really all the innovation that lets a flight school own a webapp has nothing to do with AI, it happened in web browsers and in React and lots of investment in abstractions until we made it pretty trivial to build and own a simple webapp.

Somehow AI took over the narrative, but it's almost never the thing that actually created the value that it gets credit for creating.

[maddmann]

Are you arguing that the difficulty of producing a fully functioning poc is no different today than 2-3 years ago?!

Personally, I’ve been writing software for 10 years professionally. It is much easier, especially for someone with little coding experience, to create a quite complex and fully featured web app.

It makes sense that ai models are leveraging frameworks like next js/react/supabase, they are trained/tuned on a very clear stack that is more compatible with how models function. Of course those tools have high value regardless of ai. But ai has rapidly lowered the barrier to entry, and allows be to go much much farther, much faster.

[conartist6]

No, I'm arguing that it's gotten steadily easier and easier to build high-level projects all the time over the last 20 years. React is obviously a huge part of that. There's a zillion React tutorials out there, so the value of making React accessible to beginners -- once again, that value was not created by AI, but rather by bloggers and youtubers and conversational evangelists.

I also just don't think "going fast" in that sense is such a big a deal. You're talking about frantic speed. I think about speed in terms of growth. The goal is to build sturdy foundations so that you keep growing on an exponential track. Being in a frantic hurry to finish building your foundations is not a good omen for the quality of what will be built on them.

[maddmann]

New software may end up being less about legacy foundations and more about bespoke software, fast iteration, throw away single purpose code, etc.

AI is likely to change fundamental paradigms around software design by significantly decreasing the cost of a line of code/feature/bugfix/and or starting from scratch and enabling more stakeholders to help produce software.

[ponector]

3 years ago you throw hundreds of dollars to the Upwork and have an app in result. Nowadays it's much cheaper/faster with LLM, but the difficulty is pretty much the same.

[t0mas88]

It made the group of people that could do it much larger. A tech savvy person they knew some HTML was not able to create such an app from scratch in an afternoon before AI, it would take them weeks of googling and figuring things out with a high likelihood of getting stuck. Now that same type of person using Claude Code writes an app in an afternoon.

Reading things Claude creates and asking some critical questions is much easier than writing the same code from scratch.

Quality may not be amazing, but this whole thing is less than 2 years old. It's not hard to imagine that quality will go up further and more people will learn to use it well.

[conartist6]

AI usually costs you the ability to pursue the right work. It blinds you and it numbs you. It will feed your ego while guiding you to spend your time doing ordinary stuff, the same ordinary stuff it is guiding everyone to do. People just can't see it because they all spend their time talking to AI now instead of talking to each other -- that's the blindness.

[maddmann]

I was asking you a specific question and am curious of your answer. The impact of ai “blinding” people isn’t an “economic indicator” and hardly something that has been proven. Of course there are major issues with how people use ai just like any technology.

The aggregate impact isn’t known yet and the tech is still in its infancy.

[conartist6]

The economy looks normal-ish in graphs if you don't consider that the graph shows the AI sector thriving while all other sectors are in recession. It's the kind of graph you'd expect to see if there were one sector leeching the life out of all the others.