[slow_typist]

Problem is, the way economic activity is organised in general, there is no transition path from complex bloated systems to well designed completely human auditable systems. For example given the inherent (and proven) security risks of the Wordpress ecosystem, nobody should run WP anymore.

[PunchyHamster]

I'd hazard a guess 90% of WP instances could be replaced by static site generator + some tiny app to handle forms, and the 9/10th of remaining ones with static gen + form + some external commenting system, whether in cloud or something like commento.

[balamatom]

Correct. And yet, people are not doing it.

[tekacs]

Right, but until now, and even today, in most people's early and primitive use of AI, it's been relatively difficult to make that change. To the extent that later this year and next year, people are able to point an agent at a WordPress instance, and iterate with it until it has a parity version of their surface in a custom form, things might start to change.

To be clear, I'm not one of the people who believes that software is going away or that UX is going away. I think those are both still very important. But I do think that a lot of legacy software can be replaced, and then we'll end up with a new level of software in the longer term.

[balamatom]

Or maybe the majority of those people have crappy WordPress websites because they got some social proof that having a website equals making more money, so they scammed some freelancer out of some hours and hey presto.

Then the social proof moved to proprietary darknets, e.g. Facebook pages, which is easier - you don't have to learn anything.

I've seen no local small business care about its webpage, but I've seen a lot of them painfully struggle with crappy LOB smartphone apps.

I expect software and UX to only decline in quality.

[nostrademons]

Gall's Law applies here: "A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system."

Usually the way this happens in practice is that you take what has been learned about the market and the requirements from older, bloated, not-working-anymore products, and then start a new company and a new product that is simpler and hits 80% of the use cases with 20% of the complexity. There's even a name for this in business: "Disruptive Innovation". The simple product will eventually become bloated and complex and fail once it gets popular and lots of people start working on it, but then you start the cycle anew.

The economy is actually very well structured to accommodate this. One of the great parts of capitalism and market economies is that it tolerates partial failures extremely well: you just buy from a different supplier. This is in contrast to other systems like fascism, communism, socialism, bureaucracy, and state capitalism where the failure of the system usually means the failure of the state as well, because there is no way to replace parts of the system without a revolution.

There is arguably a problem with the current U.S. economy where the government has become overly involved in certain "too big to fail" industries, thus creating a system much closer to state capitalism that can no longer tolerate partial failures and so is condemned to one huge failure. This is unfortunate, but the eventual resolution is the same: throw it out and start again.