[mixdup]

Unlikely. The future will be some people will do this, but honestly I think it will largely be people who were already tinkering with building things, whether full on software development or not

My mom and dad, my brother who drives a dump truck in a limestone quarry, my sister-in-law, none of them work in tech or consider themselves technical in any way. They are never, ever going to write their own software and will continue to just download apps from the app store or sign up for websites that accomplish the tasks they want

[bmurphy1976]

Some of us will do this, and it will be great for us for a period of time. That is, until others build another giant ball of shit 10,000x bigger than the npm/nodejs/javascript/java/cobol/c++/whatever else garbage pile we have today.

We'll be right back here in no-time.

[pjmlp]

No we won't, that was our hope when software development experience started going downhill with cheap offshoring teams.

The best we could achieve were the projects that got so burned that near shore started to become an alternative, but never again in-house.

[bmurphy1976]

I really don't understand your reply. What exactly are you disagreeing with?

[pjmlp]

That businesses will eventually care about quality.

As proven by offshoring, it is a race to the bottom, as long as software kind of works.

[bmurphy1976]

Hmm. I think you misread my comment. I never said anything about businesses caring about quality. I meant strong engineers will care about quality but we'll eventually be drowned out by those (individuals and businesses) who don't. Actually think we agree on this.

[DaanDL]

Correct, my ex couldn't even be bothered to update the notification settings on her iPhone, let alone she'd be generating and deploying an app using an LLM. Most people just don't want to have anything to do with tech, they just want it to work and get out of their way.

I did the same with my car, technically I could do maintenance myself and troubleshoot and what not, but I just couldn't be arsed, so I outsource it at a premium price.

[tclancy]

Yeah, I think (completely biased as a long-time developer who is happily playing with AI for building stuff) people using AI to build their own tooling will be like a hot rod scene from the '60s. Lots of buzz, definitely some cool stuff, but in reality probably physically smaller than the noise around it.

Off to bust my virtual knuckles on something.

[miki123211]

They won't think about it in terms of building software, just like many house buyers don't think in terms of building houses, even though somebody has effectively built a house just for them.

They'll just ask their bank to help them fill out a family income form based on last year's earnings. They'll get the numbers back, without thinking about the Python script that used Pandas and some web APIs to generate those numbers. They'll think about it in terms of "that thing that Chat GPT just gave me to compare truck from nearby local dealers", without realizing that it's actually a React app, partially powered by reverse-engineered APIs, partially by data that their agent scraped off Facebook and Craigslist.

[mixdup]

I think it's just much more likely that all of those things become features on the bank's website and Ford's website, I doubt that my non-technical family members will go to ChatGPT as the everything app and ask it to do everything, because they won't actually know how to ask it in a way that they'd trust, or that gets a good outcome vs. trusting a vendor in a specific vertical

[alwillis]

> Unlikely. The future will be some people will do this, but honestly I think it will largely be people who were already tinkering with building things, whether full on software development or not

Billions of dollars of stock market value disappeared because of the concern AI can create core SaaS functionality for corporations instead of them spending millions of dollars in licensing fees to SAP, Microsoft, etc.

This not about tinkering.

SaaS As We Know It Is Dead: How To Survive The SaaS-pocalypse! - https://www.forrester.com/blogs/saas-as-we-know-it-is-dead-h...

Why SaaS Stocks Have Dropped—and What It Signals for Software’s Next Chapter - https://www.bain.com/insights/why-saas-stocks-have-dropped-a...

Jim Cramer says AI fears have made the stock market fragile - https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/23/jim-cramer-says-ai-fears-hav...

[jdub]

Did you see the network security stock sell-off after Anthropic announced a code security analysis feature? There's a sliver of nothing between mob mentality and wisdom of the crowd.

[scuff3d]

It's too soon to bother making predictions. Shits gonna be wild for the next few years, then some type of market correction will happen, and we'll start to get an idea of how things will actually look.

[luckman212]

Can we please have some calm, stable, boring years please, before I'm dead? The last 5 years have already been "wild" enough. The world is unrecognizable. I'm unprepared for further wildness.

[scuff3d]

Excluding the batshit insane political side, I don't actually think it's been as nuts as people think, or at least not uniformly so.

I have a lot of friends in the tech sector, but outside the FANNG/silicone valley/startup bubbles. It's been largely business as normal across the board. Twitter and social media warps our perspective I think.

[tehjoker]

there was a whole pandemic

[jcgrillo]

The market is losing its shit over this because people are operating on the thesis that "AI will be able to ..." rather than "AI can demonstrably do ...". At some point they're all gonna get margin called on their futurisms. It would be a lot better if, before getting excited, we ask to see experimental results. So you say you have a world-beating security tool? Show me something it can do that all the other ones can't. That would be worth getting excited about, not a vague blog post about vibes and dreams.

[tempodox]

But then the sellers wouldn’t find the useful idiots to sell their snake oil to.

[jcgrillo]

There are other businesses models than pump-and-dump, they could try it!

[samplatt]

>Billions of dollars of stock market value disappeared because of the concern

That's really the key, right there. The value disappeared because of concern, not of anything real.

When ungodly amounts of money is governed entirely by vibes, it's hardly surprising they lose ungodly amounts of money to vibe-coding.

The downside is the effects of all that money shifting is very real :(

[closewith]

> That's really the key, right there. The value disappeared because of concern, not of anything real.

The value also only existed in the first place because of belief, in future work, operations, profits, etc.

Like it or not, confidence in institutions is society. Concern that affects that confidence is as real as any other societal effect.

[mlrtime]

That's because of P/E and how future earnings work.

If the P/E = 1 then there would be no sell-off. Looks at utility stocks with divs, they don't sell off [as sharply] when there is AI news.

[mixdup]

Oh no Bain and Jim Cramer think software is dead. All that is is a signal to buy software stocks

[fragmede]

No judgement, but if my mom or dad had a problem I could solve with a couple hours a month, with an larger initial investment of time at the beginning, I'd be willing to make it for them.

To the matter of driving a truck though, if someone needs an app idea, blue collar workers are having to spend an hour after work logging what they did that day. If they could do it in their truck while driving home for the day, you could make a pile of cash selling an app that lets them do that.

[delfinom]

The future is either a regression of society from the resulting riots and massacres when 3/4 of the population is unemployed.

Or perpetual work camps for the masses.

[shermantanktop]

Can you name me another time when humanity has run out of useful work to do?

Was it when we tamed fire, invented the wheel, writing, or double entry bookkeeping? All of which appear more consequential than current AI.

We’ll always have something to do. And humans like doing things.

[majormajor]

The claim of the AI true-believers is that this time it will be different because of the "general" nature of it.

Fire can't build a house.

The wheel can't grow crops.

Writing can't set a broken bone.

Double entry bookkeeping can't write a novel.

If you believe that this AI+robotics wave will be able to do anything a human can do with fewer complaints, what would the humans move on to?

[nozzlegear]

Fighting the clankers, of course.

[nineteen999]

Perhaps you meant writing bad futuristic science fiction on HN rather than building something.

[nozzlegear]

I think it's a foregone conclusion that the clankers are the only ones building something in OP's scenario, leaving nothing left for us meatbags to do but fight the battery bloods and write bad science fiction.

[cess11]

A lot of people are being more or less coerced into doing abjectly useless stuff with their time.

David Graeber did a thing on the topic where he called the subset he was interested in "bullshit jobs".

[Kbelicius]

> Can you name me another time when humanity has run out of useful work to do? > > Was it when we tamed fire, invented the wheel, writing, or double entry bookkeeping? All of which appear more consequential than current AI. > > We’ll always have something to do. And humans like doing things.

History doesn't predict the future. I can't tell you about another time when humans ran out of usefull things to do. What I can tell you is that we humans are biological beings we limited cognitive and physical abiloties.

I can also tell you about another biological being whose cognitive and phyisical abilities were surpassed by technology. Horses. What happened to them then wasn't pretty. The hight of their population in US was in 1915.

And sure, humans like doing things and so do horses, but you can't live by doing things that aren't useful to others, at least not in the current system. If technology surpases our abilities, the only useful things left to do for vast majority of humans is the same thing that was left for horses to do. Entertainment in various forms and there won't be enough of those jobs for all of us.

[riffraff]

In the USA, the great depression, that is what "the grapes of wrath" is about. Or in all the dock towns when we shifted to containerized shipping.

(I don't think technological innovation leads to permanent job loss, but some people will lose)

[wiseowise]

> Can you name me another time when humanity has run out of useful work to do?

Can you name me another time when big swaths of highly paid population were laid off due to redundancy and how did it go for the population?

Also, another hint: I couldn’t care less what is going to happen to “humanity”. “Humanity” isn’t the one who pays my bills and puts food on my table.

[lproven]

> I couldn’t care less what is going to happen to “humanity”.

I would be profoundly ashamed to write such words on any public forum, myself.

However, I fear that probably, most people don't think like me, but feel the way you claim to. :-(