At the moment, LLM products are like Microsoft Office, they primarily serve as a tool to help solve other problems more efficiently. They do not themselves solve problems directly.

Nobody would ask, "What new Office-based products have been created lately?", but that doesn't mean that Office products aren't a permanent, and critical, foundation of all white collar work. I suspect it will be the same with LLMs as they mature, they will become tightly integrated into certain categories of work and remain forever.

Whether the current pricing models or stock market valuations will survive the transition to boring technology is another question.

▲ kragen 4 days ago | parent [-]

Where are the other problems that are being solved more efficiently? If there's an "explosive change" in that, we should be able to see some shrapnel.

Let's take one component of Microsoft Office. Microsoft Word is seen as a tool for people to write nicely formatted documents, such as books. Reports produced with Microsoft Word are easy to find, and I've even read books written in it. Comparing reports written before the advent of WYSIWYG word processing software like Microsoft Word with reports written afterwards, the difference is easy to see; average typewriter formatting is really abysmal compared to average Microsoft Word formatting, even if the latter doesn't rise to the level of a properly typeset book or LaTeX. It's easy to point at things in our world that wouldn't exist without WYSIWYG word processors, and that's been the case since Bravo.

LLMs are seen as, among other things, a tool for people to write software with.

Where is the software that wouldn't exist without LLMs? If we can't point to it, maybe they don't actually work for that yet. The claim I'm questioning is that, "within tech, there seem to have been explosive changes and development of new products."

What new products?

I do see explosive changes and development of new spam, new YouTube videos, new memes (especially in Italian), but those aren't "within tech" as I understand the term.

▲ mmargenot 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

I do agree that there's a lot of garbage and navel-gazing that is directly downstream from the creation of LLMs. Because it's easier to task and evaluate an LLM [or network of LLMs] with generation of code, most of these products end up directly related to the production of software. The professional production of software has definitely changed, but sticky impact outside of the tech sector is still brewing.

I think there is a lot of potential, outside of the direct generation of software but still maybe software-adjacent, for products that make use of AI agents. It's hard to "generate" real world impact or expertise in an AI system, but if you can encapsulate that into a function that an AI can use, there's a lot of room to run. It's hard to get the feedback loop to verify this and most of these early products will likely die out, but as I mentioned, agents are still new on the timeline.

As an example of something that I mean that is software-adjacent, have a look at Square AI, specifically the "ask anything" parts: https://squareup.com/us/en/ai

I worked on this and I think that it's genuinely a good product. An arbitrary seller on the Square platform _can_ do aggregation, dashboarding, and analytics for their business, but that takes time and energy, and if you're running a business it can be hard to find that time. Putting an agent system in the backend that has access to your data, can aggregate and build modular plotting widgets for you, and can execute whenever you ask it a question is something that objectively saves a seller's time. You could have made such a thing without modern LLMs, but it would be substantially more expensive in terms of engineering research, time, and effort to put together a POC and bring it production, making it a non-starter before [let's say] two years ago.

AI here is fundamental to the product functioning, but the outcome is a human being saving time while making decisions about their business. It is a useful product that uses AI as a means to a productive end, which, to me, should be the goal of such technologies.

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kragen 4 days ago | parent [-]

Yes, but I'm asking about new non-AI products. I agree that lots of people are integrating AI into products, which makes products that wouldn't have existed otherwise. But if the answer to "where's the explosive changes and development of new products?" is 100% composed of integrating AI into their products, that means current AI isn't actually helping people write software, much. It's just giving them more software to write.

That doesn't entail that current AI is useless! Or even non-revolutionary! But it's a different kind of software development revolution than what I thought you were claiming. You seem to be saying that the relationship of AI to software development is similar to the relationship of the Japanese language, or raytracing, or early microcomputers to software development. And I thought you were saying that the relationship of AI to software development was similar to the relationship of compilers, or open source, or interactive development environments to software development.

It also doesn't entail that six months from now AI will still be only that revolutionary.

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mmargenot 4 days ago | parent [-]

For better or for worse, AI enables more, faster software development. A lot of that is garbage, but quantity has a quality all its own.

If you look at, e.g. this clearly vibe-coded app about vibe coding [https://www.viberank.app/], ~280 people generated 444.8B tokens within the block of time where people were paying attention to it. If 1000 tokens is 100 lines of code, that's ~444M lines of code that would not exist otherwise. Maybe those lines of code are new products, maybe they're not, maybe those people would have written a bunch of code otherwise, maybe not. I'd call that an explosion either way.

	▲	kragen 3 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Plausibly most of those lines of code don't exist now either, if people threw them away. And the others might not be any good. Or they might be things that already did exist—either because the AI generate them previously or because it memorized part of its training set. I spent a lot of the morning talking to GPT-5o Mini about desiccants, passive solar collectors, and candidate approaches to 3-D printing of glass and ceramics, and it generated many pages of text, but most of those pages of text will get deleted without anyone else reading them; large parts of them are just wrong, and I'll need to check the non-wrong parts against the research literature and rewrite them from my own perspective so they don't sound like an impatient sales pitch. It did give me some pretty good ideas, though: - Nitrates (of magnesium, calcium, yttrium, lanthanum, etc.) are good precursors for metal oxides for bonding ceramics, and have special virtues for SHS. - Zirconyl chloride is the usual water-soluble precursor for zirconia for this purpose. - Titanium oxysulfate is the usual water-soluble precursor for titania for this purpose. - Advection of supercritical steam through a crucible with salt may be a viable way to salt-glaze ceramics if you can mitigate the HCl problem. - Acidification of an object molded from zirconia-filled waterglass may be able to leach out the alkali, making it possible to sinter the shape into a continuous zircon object. - When acid-leaching iron out of a heap of crushed terra cotta, sulfuric acid has the problem that it can clog the heap with gypsum particles, if calcium is present. - You can electrodeposit iron at an acidic pH as well as a basic pH. Like, none of these are novel, right? But they were new to me, and they turn out to be correct.
	▲	dgfitz 4 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> For better or for worse, AI enables more, faster software development. So, AI is to software what muscle cars were to air emissions quality? A whole lot of useless, unabated toxic garbage?

▲ spicyusername 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

    Where is the software that wouldn't exist without LLMs?

Where are the books that wouldn't exist without Microsoft Word?

▲ kragen 4 days ago | parent [-]

I've definitely read a lot of books that wouldn't exist without WYSIWYG word processors, although MacWrite would have done just as well. Heck, NaNoWriMo probably wouldn't.

I've been reading Darwen & Date lately, and they seem to have done the typesetting for the whole damn book in Word—which suggests they couldn't get anyone else to do it for them and didn't know how to do a good job of it. But they almost certainly couldn't have gotten a major publisher to publish it as a mimeographed typewriter manuscript.

Your turn.

▲ spicyusername 4 days ago | parent [-]

My point is that these are accelerating technologies.

    maybe they don't actually work for that yet.

So you're not going to see code that wouldn't exist without LLMs (or books that wouldn't exist without Word), you're going to see more code (or more books).

There is no direct way to track "written code" or "people who learned more about their hobbies" or "teachers who saved time lesson planning", etc.

▲ kragen 4 days ago | parent [-]

You must have failed to notice that you were replying to a comment of mine where I gave a specific example of a book that I think wouldn't exist without Word (or similar WYSIWYG word processors), because you're asserting that I'm never going to see what I am telling you I am currently seeing.

Generally, when there's a new tool that actually opens up explosive changes and development of new products, at least some of the people doing the exploding will tell you about it, even if there's no direct way to track it, such as Darwen & Date's substandard typography. It's easy to find musicians who enthuse about the new possibilities opened up by digital audio workstations, and who are eager to show you the things they created with them. Similarly for video editors who enthused about the Video Toaster, for programmers who enthused about the 80386, and electrical engineers who enthused about FPGAs. There was an entire demo scene around the Amiga and another entire demo scene around the 80386.

Do people writing code with AI today have anything comparable? Something they can point to and say, "Look! I wrote this software because AI made it possible!"?

It's easy to answer that question for, for example, visual art made with AI.

I'm not sure what you mean about "accelerating technologies". WYSIWYG word processors today are about the same as Bravo in 01979. HTML is similar but both better and worse. AI may have a hard takeoff any day that leaves us without a planet, who knows, but I don't think that's something it has in common with Microsoft Word.

▲ spicyusername 3 days ago | parent [-]

I noticed.

Books written with WYSIWYG could have been written by hand just fine, it would have just been more painful and taken longer. What WYSIWYG unlocks is more books, not new kinds of books. And sure, you might argue that more books is new books, which is fair.

So it is with LLMs. We're going to get more code, more lesson plans, etc. Accelerating.

    Do people writing code with AI today have anything comparable?

Like every fourth post on here is someone talking about their workflow with LLMs, so... I think they do?

▲ kragen 2 days ago | parent [-]

People talking a lot about their workflow with LLMs are evidence of the cost. What I'm asking for is evidence of the benefit, the "explosive changes and development of new products".

Remember that old Wendy's commercial, "Where's the beef?"

Where's the meat? I want to see your meat, and you're showing me pastures.

▲ spicyusername 2 days ago | parent [-]

    explosive changes and development of new products

That's because that's not happening. Like I've been saying! The benefit is just that it makes coding (or brainstorming a vacation, or planning a diy project, or writing a dnd campaign, etc) a little faster... It's an accelerating technology.

I don't disagree that the hype around LLMs is overblown, but that doesn't mean the utility isn't tangible.

If you listen to the salesman, everything is always going to sound like it solves every problem, but that doesn't mean the products they are hawking solve no problems.

	▲	kragen 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		I see! Now I understand what you mean by "accelerating technology", and I understand that you're not in agreement with mmargenot's thesis. Thank you for having the patience to explain until I stopped misinterpreting you!