The article provides a few good signals: (1) an increase in the rate at which apps are added to the app store, and (2) reports of companies forgoing large SaaS dependencies and just building them themselves. If software is truly a commodity, why aren't people making their own Jiras and Figmas and Salesforces? If we can really vibe something production-ready in no time, why aren't industry-standard tools being replaced by custom vibe clones?

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thunky a day ago | parent [-]

> If we can really vibe something production-ready in no time, why aren't industry-standard tools being replaced by custom vibe clones?

That's a silly argument. Someone could have made all of those clones before, but didn't. Why didn't they? Hint: it's not because it would have taken them longer without AI.

I feel like these anti-AI arguments are intentially being unrealistic. Just because I can use Nano Banana to create art does not mean I'm going to be the next Monet.

	▲	bccdee a day ago \| parent [-]
		> Why didn't they? Hint: it's not because it would have taken them longer without AI. Yes it is. "How much will this cost us to build" is a key component of the build-vs-buy decision. If you build it yourself, you get something tailored to your needs; however, it also costs money to make & maintain. If the cost of making & maintaining software went down, we'd see people choosing more frequently to build rather than buy. Are we seeing this? If not, then the price of producing reliable, production-ready software likely has not significantly diminished. I see a lot of posts saying, "I vibe-coded this toy prototype in one week! Software is a commodity now," but I don't see any engineers saying, "here's how we vibe-coded this piece of production-quality software in one month, when it would have taken us a year to build it before." It seems to me like the only software whose production has been significantly accelerated is toy prototypes. I assume it's a consequence of Amdahl's law: > the overall performance improvement gained by optimizing a single part of a system is limited by the fraction of time that the improved part is actually used. Toy prototypes proportionally contains a much higher amount of the type of rote greenfield scaffolding that agents are good at writing. The sticker problems of brownfield growth and robustification are absent.