| ▲ | dumbfounder 8 hours ago |
| The future is that people stop buying software and just build it themselves. The spam filter in thunderbird was broken for me, I built my own in hours and it works way better. Oh that CRM doesn’t have the features you want? Build one that does. It will become very easy to built and deploy solutions to many of your own bespoke problems. |
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| ▲ | mixdup 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Unlikely. The future will be some people will do this, but honestly I think it will largely be people who were already tinkering with building things, whether full on software development or not My mom and dad, my brother who drives a dump truck in a limestone quarry, my sister-in-law, none of them work in tech or consider themselves technical in any way. They are never, ever going to write their own software and will continue to just download apps from the app store or sign up for websites that accomplish the tasks they want |
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| ▲ | bmurphy1976 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Some of us will do this, and it will be great for us for a period of time. That is, until others build another giant ball of shit 10,000x bigger than the npm/nodejs/javascript/java/cobol/c++/whatever else garbage pile we have today. We'll be right back here in no-time. | |
| ▲ | tclancy 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Yeah, I think (completely biased as a long-time developer who is happily playing with AI for building stuff) people using AI to build their own tooling will be like a hot rod scene from the '60s. Lots of buzz, definitely some cool stuff, but in reality probably physically smaller than the noise around it. Off to bust my virtual knuckles on something. | |
| ▲ | delfinom 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The future is either a regression of society from the resulting riots and massacres when 3/4 of the population is unemployed. Or perpetual work camps for the masses. | | |
| ▲ | shermantanktop 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Can you name me another time when humanity has run out of useful work to do? Was it when we tamed fire, invented the wheel, writing, or double entry bookkeeping? All of which appear more consequential than current AI. We’ll always have something to do. And humans like doing things. | | |
| ▲ | majormajor 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | The claim of the AI true-believers is that this time it will be different because of the "general" nature of it. Fire can't build a house. The wheel can't grow crops. Writing can't set a broken bone. Double entry bookkeeping can't write a novel. If you believe that this AI+robotics wave will be able to do anything a human can do with fewer complaints, what would the humans move on to? | | |
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| ▲ | alwillis 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Unlikely. The future will be some people will do this, but honestly I think it will largely be people who were already tinkering with building things, whether full on software development or not Billions of dollars of stock market value disappeared because of the concern AI can create core SaaS functionality for corporations instead of them spending millions of dollars in licensing fees to SAP, Microsoft, etc. This not about tinkering. SaaS As We Know It Is Dead: How To Survive The SaaS-pocalypse! - https://www.forrester.com/blogs/saas-as-we-know-it-is-dead-h... Why SaaS Stocks Have Dropped—and What It Signals for Software’s Next Chapter - https://www.bain.com/insights/why-saas-stocks-have-dropped-a... Jim Cramer says AI fears have made the stock market fragile - https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/23/jim-cramer-says-ai-fears-hav... | | |
| ▲ | samplatt 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | >Billions of dollars of stock market value disappeared because of the concern That's really the key, right there. The value disappeared because of concern, not of anything real. When ungodly amounts of money is governed entirely by vibes, it's hardly surprising they lose ungodly amounts of money to vibe-coding. The downside is the effects of all that money shifting is very real :( | |
| ▲ | jdub 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Did you see the network security stock sell-off after Anthropic announced a code security analysis feature? There's a sliver of nothing between mob mentality and wisdom of the crowd. | | |
| ▲ | scuff3d 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It's too soon to bother making predictions. Shits gonna be wild for the next few years, then some type of market correction will happen, and we'll start to get an idea of how things will actually look. | | |
| ▲ | luckman212 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Can we please have some calm, stable, boring years please, before I'm dead? The last 5 years have already been "wild" enough. The world is unrecognizable. I'm unprepared for further wildness. | | |
| ▲ | scuff3d 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Excluding the batshit insane political side, I don't actually think it's been as nuts as people think, or at least not uniformly so. I have a lot of friends in the tech sector, but outside the FANNG/silicone valley/startup bubbles. It's been largely business as normal across the board. Twitter and social media warps our perspective I think. | | |
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| ▲ | jcgrillo 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The market is losing its shit over this because people are operating on the thesis that "AI will be able to ..." rather than "AI can demonstrably do ...". At some point they're all gonna get margin called on their futurisms. It would be a lot better if, before getting excited, we ask to see experimental results. So you say you have a world-beating security tool? Show me something it can do that all the other ones can't. That would be worth getting excited about, not a vague blog post about vibes and dreams. |
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| ▲ | mixdup 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Oh no Bain and Jim Cramer think software is dead. All that is is a signal to buy software stocks |
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| ▲ | Gigachad 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This feels like when 3D printers hit the consumer market and everyone declared that buying things was over, everyone will just print them at home. There's tons of benefits to standardised software too. Companies rely on the fact they can hire people who already know photoshop/xero/webpack/etc rather than having to train them from scratch on in house tools. |
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| ▲ | sarchertech 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Business software is also useful because it gives companies a process to follow that even if not optimal, is probably better than what they’d come up with on their own. | | |
| ▲ | mixdup 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | The flexibility of big source of truth systems like ERP and CRM is sometimes (often) a downside. Many times these companies need to be told how to do something instead of platform vendors bending over backwards to enable horrible processes |
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| ▲ | vvpan 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | What ever happened to that? | | |
| ▲ | Gigachad 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | They became much like woodworking or power tools. Accessible to anyone who wants them, but still requires an investment to learn and use. While the majority still buys their stuff from retail. | | |
| ▲ | Spivak 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Or rents a printer for one-off designs. Unless you 3d print on the regular it's easier to pay someone to print one-off designs. You get a printer that gets regularly used and services and a knowledgeable operator. Not at all dissimilar to fancy commercial sign printers. In a past life working at $large-uni we really did try to make those damn things self-service but it was so much easier for the staff to be the print queue. |
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| ▲ | falkensmaize 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | It turns out they're really great at building toys, cosplay gear and little plastic parts for things, but in general not that useful in most people's daily lives. Kind of like Ai. |
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| ▲ | jmspring 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This is honestly one of the more naive takes I've seen in awhile. People includes more than people that frequent HN. My wife and I are discussing I'd like to keep finance and related things in a password manager. She is in the social sciences (has a couple of degrees) and isn't a fan. The majority of computer users are not on HN. You profile says "Trying to figure out what I want to do with my life. DM me if you have ideas." - I would recommend exploring connections and opinions outside tech. |
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| ▲ | secbear 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Totally agree. I've found in many cases it's easier to roll your own software/patch existing software with AI than to open an issue, submit a PR, get it reviewed/merged, etc. Let alone buying software |
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| ▲ | tclancy 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yes, but this is the honeymoon period. A year from now when you want to make three of the tools talk to each other and they're in three different languages, two of which you don't know and there's no common interface or good place to put one, well, here's hoping you hung onto the design documents. |
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| ▲ | hahn-kev 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| What I want is to be able to use AI to modify the software we already have. Granted I've wanted to do that long before AI, but now maybe plugins will get more popular again now that AI could write them for us |
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| ▲ | mock-possum 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| But people don’t actually want to just build it themselves - they never have, and I don’t see any reason to believe they ever will. |
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| ▲ | jajuuka 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Definitely feels like that is the bigger take away. Not that it "solves all problems" or "isn't good enough to be merged". But that we are arriving to a place where solutions can be good enough to solve the problem you have. Reminds me of early Github when custom and unique software became much more accessible to everyone. Way less digging or going without. |
