[spicyusername]

What a time to be alive.

So much of the fundamental dynamics of the industry and the job have changed in so little time. Basically over night.

Some days I am so excited at how much I can do now. You can build anything you want, in basically no time! 100% of my software dreams can be a reality.

Some days I am terrified at what's going to happen to the job market.

Suddenly you can get so much with so little. The world only needs so much software.

Is every company that sells software as their core business model going to go out of business?

What will happen if only certain companies or governments get access to the best models?

[perlgeek]

> Is every company that sells software as their core business model going to go out of business?

Probably not, for a number of reasons:

* Some software suites are (probably still for a few years) too big to regenerate them through a coding LLM

* There's quite a lot of proprietary knowledge not just in the code itself, but in the requirements, industry knowledge etc. For example if you want to write a hospital management system, you need to know a lot about how hospital works, how they are billing their services in different legislatures, data protection rules etc.

* For some pieces of software (like computer-aided engineering), validation of the software is just as important as the software itself.

* Liability: suppose you build bridges, and you're on the hook if it fails too early. Do you really want to vibe-code your own software that validates the bridge's design? Will any insurance company cover that? Probably not in the near future...

* Currently, security and safety of LLM-generated code is still a pretty big concern. I guess this will get better as the LLM-Coding industry matures.

[keeda]

> The world only needs so much software.

Around the time of the dot com crash, there was a decent amount of rhetoric advising students and job seekers against getting into the software industry, because it was getting "too saturated." The thinking was there's just not that much work to go around, especially for the number of people flocking to the field. And the crash just reinforced that narrative.

But even as a student back then, I could tell that there was unlimited scope for software. Pretty much any cognitive thing we do manually could be done in software. I once idly tried to enumerate those and quickly realized there was soooo much to do. Plus, I also understood that the more you do things a new way, a lot more things pop up that we haven't even imagined yet. The possibilities were countless. It was clear that the "saturation" narrative stemmed from a lack of people's imagination and understanding of what software really was.

I just knew that this field would never get saturated because it was impossible to run out of things to write software for.

But these days...

I mean, I know we will always have new software to build as things evolve, which they will do faster than ever with AI. But these days, I wonder if it's now possible to write software faster than we can imagine new things to do.

[EMIRELADERO]

> Pretty much any cognitive thing we do manually could be done in software.

Yes, although I suggest being careful with that kind of thinking.

https://www.orwell.ru/library/novels/The_Road_to_Wigan_Pier/...

[keeda]

Ooh, I hadn't read that one, have put on my list. I couldn't read the page properly because ads keep popping up and making the page jump around... but it seems the linked section was be about displacement of workers? If so, that's always been true of all technology, but that's less a problem with technology and more with the social system it is applied in. I just posted this comment elsewhere that may be relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48078930

[EMIRELADERO]

It's not about the displacement of workers. It talks about a fundamental principles-level objection to unbounded "progress". It's not an absolute argument and Orwell himself says so, but it is worth keeping in mind.

Try reading it here: https://www.george-orwell.org/The_Road_to_Wigan_Pier/11.html

[vb-8448]

Let's take a SW business like a ticketing system.

Do you think 100 enterprises with 1 bln of tokens are going to make a better product than specialized vendor with 100bln of tokens?

For sure SW vendors and SAAS like "logo creator" are already dead, but unless the next generation of LLMs aren't going to have an embedded ticketing system the ticketing system vendor will be fine(maybe less headcount, but not sure).

[perlgeek]

> Do you think 100 enterprises with 1 bln of tokens are going to make a better product than specialized vendor with 100bln of tokens?

I'm not sure if this is sound reasoning, because "better product" is very context-dependent.

My currently employer has migrated away from RT to OTRS as ticket system, and now moving to servicenow.

The RT instance was heavily patched/customized.

The OTRS instance was heavily patched/customized.

We try not to customize servicenow quite as much, but the less we customize it, the more we have to change the workflows in our company. And humans are slow to adapt.

With this experience in mind, the question is more: do we want to spend lots of money on a vendor-supplied ticket system, and then spend lots more LLM tokens to customize it, or do we LLM-build it from the ground-up?

If we started a new ticket system migration project today, maybe the best answer would be to start with an easily-customizable Open Source ticket system, and then throw LLM-power at customizing it.

[vb-8448]

> or do we LLM-build it from the ground-up?

But in this case you don't spend tokens only on your workflows: you have to patch it constantly, perform vulnerability scans, check and adapt for law changes(eg. if you in europe: GDPR or DORA), create and maintain (again security) integrations with other systems and so on.

And, most importantly, you as a corporate need an internal team to do the work and that means it's a liability to you as a corporate ... and we all know it's better to have some else to blame.

Just imagine the CTO or CISO explaining to the CEO that the data breach they had last week and that cost them millions was due to some customization they did on top of an open source ticketing system.

[wolttam]

Certainly companies and governments will have access to better models than the public (in fact, that's already the case with Mythos). The public will still be able to help themselves with models that are behind the frontier.

[zurfer]

Maybe, or they use the same smartphones as everybody else. The mass market also wants the best model and will pay accordingly.

[tkiolp4]

It’s pure marketing. Don’t be naive