[ofalkaed]

Personally I think AI is going to turn software into a cottage industry, it will make custom software something the individual can afford. AI is a very long ways off from being able to allow the average person to create the software they want unless they are willing to put a great deal of time into it, but it is almost good enough that the programmer can take the average person's idea and execute it at an affordable price. Probably only a year or two from when a capable programmer will be able to offer any small buisness a completely customized POS setup for what the cost of a canned industrial offering today; I will design your website and build you a POS system tailored to your needs and completely integrated with the website, and for a little more I can throw in the accounting and tax software. A bright dishwasher realizing they can make things work better for their employer might be the next billionaire revolutionizing commerce and the small buisness.

I have some programming ability and a lot of ideas but would happily hire someone to realize those ideas for me. The idea I have put the most time into, took me the better part of a year to sort out all the details of even with the help of AI, most programmers could have probably done it in a night and with AI could write the software in a few nights. I would have my software for an affordable price and they could stick it in their personal store so other could buy it. If I am productive with it and show its utility, they will sell more copies of it so they have an incentive to work with people like me and help me realize my ideas.

Programming is going to become a service instead of an industry, the craft of programming will be for sale instead of software.

[elAhmo]

> and for a little more I can throw in the accounting and tax software

As someone who has worked in two companies that raised millions of dollars and had hundred people tackling just half of this, tax software, you are in for a treat.

[ofalkaed]

Sure, that is still a ways off, but being able to hire a programmer to meet my personal modest software needs is almost there. Also, the needs of any company that required a hundred people and millions of dollars is very different from the needs of a small restaurant or the like; anyone with enough ambition to run a small restaurant can manage the accounting and taxes for that restaurant, the same can not be said for the sort of buisness you are describing. You are comparing an apple to an orange orchard.

Edit: Just noticed I said "any buisness", that was supposed to be "any small buisness." Edited the original post as well.

[tosapple]

Business*, if your "tax-accounting" manager made THAT mistake with numbers you would be screwed.

[ofalkaed]

Occasionally when right clicking on a misspelled word to correct it, I bump the track pad and accidentally add the misspelled word to my dictionary. Business is one of those words I apparently did that with. I have never been able to figure out how to remove words from my dictionary, but honestly never looked that hard, for some ridiculous reason I think people will focus on what was said instead of looking for nits to pick despite all the evidence suggesting otherwise.

[tosapple]

I considered it may be a dictionary correction issue but i am sort've railing against the suggestion of current level LLMs being used for tax-software and POS design.

Edit: And if I was using C or C++ above my lack of capitalization would either evoke an error too OR passably continue foward referencing the wrong variable and result in a similar error to your transposition.

[ofalkaed]

I said that was something which would happen in the future, as in not the current level LLMs. But this is what people will pay the programmer for, the programmer will (hopefully) know when and where the LLM can be used to offload the grunt work and where they should just skip the LLM and hand code it, those things the average person will not know, the full system and this applies to current level LLMs

[ofalkaed]

I find it interesting but not surprising that this got downvoted. Sure my idea of the craft is different than the article's and of many people but if the craft only there if it is pure hand written code then it is a craft which the vast majority can not afford. I can pay a luthier a few thousand and get my dream guitar and would happily spend that sort of money on getting custom software but that is not going to happen if I insist on 100% handwritten code, just as getting my dream guitar would not happen if I insisted on the luthier only using hand tools.