[gyomu]

> Vendors of small utilities could be in trouble

This is a mix of the “in the future, everyone will have a 3D printer at home and just 3D print random parts they need” and “anyone can trivially build Dropbox with rsync themselves” arguments.

Tech savvy users who know how to use LLMs aren’t how vendors of small utilities stay in business.

They stay in business because they sell things to users who are truly clueless with tech (99% of the population, which can’t even figure out the settings app on their phone), and solid distribution/marketing is how you reach those users and can’t really be trivially hacked because everyone is trying to hack it.

Or they stay in business because they offer some sort of guarantee (whether legal, technical, or other) that the users don’t want to burden themselves with because they have other, more important stuff to worry about.

[CamperBob2]

I don't know. It's one thing to tell Joe or Jane User to "Get an FTP account, mount it locally with curlftpfs, and then use SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem." But if Joe or Jane can just cut-and-paste that advice into a prompt and get their own personal Dropbox...

[whiplash451]

Except when that new Dropbox fails Joe or Jane on that Saturday evening, their only recourse is to ask the AI for help, and the AI starts spinning “oh yeah, mmm, I think I found where the problem is. Cut and paste these debugging lines in that function and let me know what the output is…”

[CamperBob2]

Meanwhile, this year, that happens less often than it did last year... and it actually isn't how AI-assisted development works at all. Agentic models do the cutting-and-pasting by themselves, evaluate the results by themselves, and almost always succeed at fixing the problem by themselves.

[whiplash451]

Fair

[markb139]

Im definitely going to build some small tools when I need them. One tool I use occasionally, but not so often I want to subscribe is Insomnia.