I've mostly seen this done for things where there is no prefect commercial tool because it's a small market.

For example a flight school that I work with has their own simple rental administration program. It's a small webapp with 3 screens. They use it next to a SaaS booking/planning tool, but that tool never replaced their administrative approach. Mainly because it wouldn't support local tax rules and some discount system that was in place there. So before the webapp they used paper receipts and an spreadsheet.

I think the challenge in the future with lots of these tools is going to be how they're maintained and how "ops" is done.

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conartist6 a day ago | parent [-]

It just doesn't seem that different to me. The difficulty of building and maintaining a 3 screen webapp hasn't changed significantly. Flight schools are a niche sure (and I've been around them; I'm a private pilot) but really all the innovation that lets a flight school own a webapp has nothing to do with AI, it happened in web browsers and in React and lots of investment in abstractions until we made it pretty trivial to build and own a simple webapp.

Somehow AI took over the narrative, but it's almost never the thing that actually created the value that it gets credit for creating.

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maddmann a day ago | parent [-]

Are you arguing that the difficulty of producing a fully functioning poc is no different today than 2-3 years ago?!

Personally, I’ve been writing software for 10 years professionally. It is much easier, especially for someone with little coding experience, to create a quite complex and fully featured web app.

It makes sense that ai models are leveraging frameworks like next js/react/supabase, they are trained/tuned on a very clear stack that is more compatible with how models function. Of course those tools have high value regardless of ai. But ai has rapidly lowered the barrier to entry, and allows be to go much much farther, much faster.

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conartist6 a day ago | parent | next [-]

No, I'm arguing that it's gotten steadily easier and easier to build high-level projects all the time over the last 20 years. React is obviously a huge part of that. There's a zillion React tutorials out there, so the value of making React accessible to beginners -- once again, that value was not created by AI, but rather by bloggers and youtubers and conversational evangelists.

I also just don't think "going fast" in that sense is such a big a deal. You're talking about frantic speed. I think about speed in terms of growth. The goal is to build sturdy foundations so that you keep growing on an exponential track. Being in a frantic hurry to finish building your foundations is not a good omen for the quality of what will be built on them.

	▲	maddmann a day ago \| parent [-]
		New software may end up being less about legacy foundations and more about bespoke software, fast iteration, throw away single purpose code, etc. AI is likely to change fundamental paradigms around software design by significantly decreasing the cost of a line of code/feature/bugfix/and or starting from scratch and enabling more stakeholders to help produce software.

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ponector a day ago | parent | prev [-]

3 years ago you throw hundreds of dollars to the Upwork and have an app in result. Nowadays it's much cheaper/faster with LLM, but the difficulty is pretty much the same.