A lot of people aren’t realizing that it’s not about replacing software engineers, it’s about replacing software.

We’ve been trying to build well engineered, robust, scalable systems because software had to be written to serve other users.

But LLMs change that. I have a bunch of vibe coded command lines tools that exactly solve my problems, but very likely would make terrible software. The thing is, this program only needs to run on my machine the way I like to use it.

In a growing class of cases bespoke tools are superior to generalized software. This historically was not the case because it took too much time and energy to maintain these things. But today if my vibe coded solution breaks, I can rebuild it almost instantly (because I understand the architecture). It takes less time today to build a bespoke tool that solved your problem than it does to learn how to use existing software.

There’s still plenty of software that cannot be replaced with bespoke tools, but that list is shrinking.

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munk-a 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I absolutely believe in that value proposition - but I've heard a lot about how beneficial it will be for large organizationally backed software products. If it isn't valuable to that later scenario (which I have uncertainty about) then there is no way companies like OpenAI could ever justify their valuations.

	▲	crystal_revenge an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> there is no way companies like OpenAI could ever justify their valuations The value proposition isn't really "we'll help you write all the code for your company" it's a world where the average user's computer is a dumb terminal that opens up to a ChatGPT interface. I didn't initially understand the value prop but have increasingly come to see it. The gamble is that LLMs will be your interface to everything the same way HTTP was for the last 20 years. The mid-90s had a similar mix of deep skepticism and hype-driven madness (and if you read my comments you'll see I've historically been much closer to the skeptic side, despite a lot of experience in this space). But even in the 90s the hyped-up bubble riders didn't really see the idea that http would be how everything happens. We've literally hacked a document format and document serving protocol to build the entire global application infrastructure. We saw a similar transformation with mobile devices where most of your world lives on a phone and the phone maker gets a nice piece of that revenue. People thought Zuck was insane for his metaverse obsession, but what he was chasing was that next platform. He was wrong of course, but what his hope was was that VR would be the way people did everything. Now this is what the LLM providers are really after. Claude/ChatGPT/Grok will be your world. You won't have to buy SaaS subscriptions for most things because you can just build it yourself. Why use Hubspot when you can just have AI do all your marketting, then you just need Hubspot for their message sending infrastructure. Why pay for a budgeting app when you can just build a custom one that lives on OpenAIs server (today your computer, but tomorrow theirs). Companies like banks will maintain interfaces to LLMs but you won't be doing your banking in their web app. Even social media will ultimately be replaced by an endless stream of bespoke images video and content made just for you (and of course it will be much easier to inject advertising into this space you don't even recognize as advertising). The value prop is that these large, well funded, AI companies will just eat large chunks of industry.

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noelsusman an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

This is the thing a lot of skeptics aren't grappling with. Software engineering as a profession is mostly about building software that can operate at scale. If you remove scale from the equation then you can remove a massive chunk of the complexity required to build useful software.

There are a ton of recipe management apps out there, and all of them are more complex than I really need. They have to be, because other people looking for recipe management software have different needs and priorities. So I just vibe coded my own recipe management app in an afternoon that does exactly what I want and nothing more. I'm sure it would crash and burn if I ever tried to launch it at scale, but I don't have to care about that.

If I was in the SaaS business I would be extremely worried about the democratization of bespoke software.

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PaulHoule an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Tools for the non-professional developer to put their skills on wheels have always been part of the equation since we've had microcomputers if not minicomputer, see

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VisiCalc

	▲	selridge 18 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		But they’ve always basically required that you essentially become a programmer at the end of the day in order to get those benefits. The spreadsheet is probably the largest intruder in this ecosystem, but that’s only the case. If you don’t think that operating a spreadsheet is programming. It is. What people are describing is that Normies can now do the kinds of things that only wizards with PERL could do in the 90s. The sorts of things that were always technically possible with computers if you were a very specific kind of person are now possible with computers for everyone else.

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skydhash an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

A lot of people don’t care about software other than the fact that the ones they use work well. They don’t want to create it, to maintain it, or to upgrade it. That’s what the IT department is for.

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3vidence an hour ago | parent [-]

This seems like a big HN / VC bubble thing thinking that average people are interested in software at all... they really aren't.

People want to open Netflix / YT / TikTok, open instagram, scroll reddit, take pictures, order stuff online, etc. Then professionals in fields want to read / write emails, open drawings, CADs, do tax returns, etc.

If anything overall interest in software seems to be going down for the average person compared to 2010s. I feel like most of the above normal people are going to stop using in favor of LLMs. LLMs certainly do compete with Googling for regular people though and writing emails.

	▲	layer8 23 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		It just means that they want the software they use to work well, even if they aren’t particularly aware that what they use is software.