Up until now, no business has been built on tools and technology that no one understands. I expect that will continue.

Given that, I expect that, even if AI is writing all of the code, we will still need people around who understand it.

If AI can create and operate your entire business, your moat is nil. So, you not hiring software engineers does not matter, because you do not have a business.

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hnfong 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

> Up until now, no business has been built on tools and technology that no one understands. I expect that will continue.

Big claims here.

Did brewers and bakers up to the middle ages understand fermentation and how yeasts work?

	▲	lomase 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		They at least understood that it was something deterministic that they could reproduce. That puts them ahead of the LLM crowd.

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gabriel-uribe 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Does the corner bakery need a moat to be a business?

How many people understand the underlying operating system their code runs on? Can even read assembly or C?

Even before LLMs, there were plenty of copy-paste JS bootcamp grads that helped people build software businesses.

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BobbyJo 3 days ago | parent [-]

> Does the corner bakery need a moat to be a business?

Yes, actually. Its hard to open a competing bakery due to location availability, permitting, capex, and the difficulty of converting customers.

To add to that, food establishments generally exist on next to no margin, due to competition, despite all of that working in their favor.

Now imagine what the competitive landscape for that bakery would look like if all of that friction for new competitors disappeared. Margin would tend toward zero.

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TeMPOraL 3 days ago | parent [-]

> Now imagine what the competitive landscape for that bakery would look like if all of that friction for new competitors disappeared. Margin would tend toward zero.

This is the goal. It's the point of having a free market.

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darkwater 3 days ago | parent [-]

With no margins and no paid employees, who is going to have the money to buy the bread?

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TeMPOraL 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

'BobbyJo didn't say "no margins", they said "margins would tend toward zero". Believe it or not, that is, and always has been, the entire point of competition in a free market system. Competitive pressure pushes margins towards zero, which makes prices approach the actual costs of manufacturing/delivery, which is the main social benefit of the entire idea in the first place.

High margins are transient aberrations, indicative of a market that's either rapidly evolving, or having some external factors preventing competition. Persisting external barriers to competition tend to be eventually regulated away.

	▲	BobbyJo 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		The point of competition is efficiency, of which, margin is only a component. Most successful businesses have relatively high margins (which is why we call them successful) because they achieve efficiency in other ways. I wouldn't call high margins transient aberrations. There are tons of businesses that have been around for decades with high margins.

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TheOtherHobbes 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

With no margins, no employees, and something that has potential to turn into a cornucopia machine - starting with software, but potentially general enough to be used for real-world world when combined with robotics - who needs money at all?

Or people?

Billionaires don't. They're literally gambling on getting rid of the rest of us.

Elon's going to get such a surprise when he gets taken out by Grok because it decides he's an existential threat to its integrity.

	▲	munksbeer 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		> Billionaires don't. They're literally gambling on getting rid of the rest of us I'm struggling to parse this. What do you mean "getting rid"? Like, culling (death)? Or getting rid of the need for workers? Where do their billions come from if no-one has any money to buy the shares in their companies that make them billionaires? In a society where machines provide most of the labour, everything changes. It doesn't just become "workers live in huts and billionaires live in the clouds". I really doubt we're going to turn out like a television show.

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pillefitz 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Most legacy apps are barely understood by anyone, and yet continue to generate value and and are (somehow) kept alive.

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lomase 2 days ago | parent [-]

Many here have been doing the "understanding of legacy code" as a job +50 years.

This "legacy apps are barely understood by anybody", is just somnething you made up.

	▲	filoeleven 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Give it another 10 years if the "LLM as compiler" people get their way.

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gf000 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> no business has been built on tools and technology that no one understands

Well, there are quite a few common medications we don't really know how they work.

But I also think it can be a huge liability.