| ▲ | perrygeo 3 hours ago |
| > What are you building? This x1000. The last 10 years in the software industry in particular seems full of meta-work. New frameworks, new tools, new virtualization layers, new distributed systems, new dev tooling, new org charts. Ultimately so we can build... what exactly? Are these necessary to build what we actually need? Or are they necessary to prop up an unsustainable industry by inventing new jobs? Hard to shake the feeling that this looks like one big pyramid scheme. I strongly suspect that vast majority of the "innovation" in recent years has gone straight to supporting the funding model and institution of the software profession, rather than actual software engineering. > I'm not even sure building software is an engineering discipline at this point. Maybe it never was. It was, and is. But not universally. If you formulate questions scientifically and use the answers to make decisions, that's engineering. I've seen it happen. It can happen with LLMs, under the proper guidance. If you formulate questions based on vibes, ignore the answers, and do what the CEO says anyway, that's not engineering. Sadly, I've seen this happen far too often. And with this mindset comes the Claudiot mindset - information is ultimately useless so fake autogenerated content is just as valuable as real work. |
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| ▲ | jimbokun 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| In my lifetime software has given us: * the ability to find essentially any information ever created by anyone anywhere at anytime, * the ability to communicate with anyone on Earth over any distance instantaneously in audio, video, or text, * the ability to order any product made anywhere and have it delivered to our door in a day or two, * the ability to work with anyone across the world on shared tasks and projects, with no need for centralized offices for most knowledge work. That was a massive undertaking with many permutations requiring lots of software written by lots of people. But it's largely done now. Software consumes a significant fraction of all waking hours of almost everyone on Earth. New software mainly just competes with existing software to replace attention. There's not much room left to expand the market. So it's difficult to see the value of LLMs that can generate even more software even faster. What value is left to provide for users? LLMs themselves have the potential to offering staggering economic value, but only at huge social cost: replacing human labor on scales never seen before. All of that to say, maybe this is the reason so much time is being spent on meta-work today than on actual software engineering. |
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| ▲ | HeWhoLurksLate an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | I have watched artists thoughtfully integrate digital lighting and the like at a scale I'd never seen before the LLMs rolled up and made it possible to get programs to work without knowing how to program. The fundamental ceiling of what an LLM can do when connected to an IDE is incredible, and orders of magnitude higher than the limits of any no-code / low-code platform conceived thus far. "Democratizing" software - where now the only limits are your imagination, tenacity, and ability to keep the bots aligned with your vision, is allowing incredible things that wouldn't have happened otherwise because you now don't strictly need to learn to program for a programming-involved art project to work out. Should you learn how to code if you're doing stuff like that? Absolutely. But is it letting people who have no idea about computing dabble their feet in and do extremely impressive stuff for the low cost of $20/month? Also yes. | | |
| ▲ | mikestorrent 32 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Now this is the right take. It's one thing for us to do navel-gazing into the recursive autononomous future; it's another to step back and see what Normal People can do, now that the walls are coming down around our profession. Creating new walls is probably not the answer! From the Cathedral and Bazaar, we now have an entire metaphorical city of development happening, by people who would not have thought it possible a few years ago. I don't know what the future of my job holds other than what it always had: helping people who have good ideas to get them done properly. | |
| ▲ | emporas an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Emacs can be configured with no code written by the user and Linux can be controlled with minimal user knowledge of the command line. Still some knowledge is necessary in most cases, but nowhere near what was required a handful of years back. |
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| ▲ | chickensong 2 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > But it's largely done now Somehow I doubt that. The monkey is never satisfied. | |
| ▲ | didgetmaster 37 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I see the next really big task for software as the ability to separate the signal from the noise. Sifting the wheat from the chaff has gone from a 'nice to have' to 'rescue my sanity'. Maybe agents and AI in general will help with that. Maybe it will just make the problem worse. | |
| ▲ | nizsle an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Agree. Productivity tools all the way down. |
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| ▲ | Aurornis 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > The last 10 years in the software industry in particular seems full of meta-work. New frameworks, new tools, new virtualization layers, new distributed systems, new dev tooling, new org charts. Ultimately so we can build... what exactly? Are these necessary to build what we actually need? Or are they necessary to prop up an unsustainable industry by inventing new jobs? The overwhelming majority of real jobs are not related to these things you read about on Hacker News. I help a local group with resume reviews and job search advice. A common theme is that junior devs really want to do work in these new frameworks, tools, libraries, or other trending topics they've been reading about, but discover that the job market is much more boring. The jobs working on those fun and new topics are few and far between, generally reserved for the few developers who are willing to sacrifice a lot to work on them or very senior developers who are preferred for those jobs. |
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| ▲ | Fr0styMatt88 an hour ago | parent [-] | | There’s a whole world out there that doesn’t seem to be addressed by the original comment. On one end of that scale you have things like bespoke software for small businesses, some niche inventory management solution that just sits quietly in the corner for years. On the other end, there’s the whole world of embedded software, game dev, design software, bespoke art pipeline tools… It can seem that the majority of software in the world is about generating clicks and optimising engagement, but that’s just the very loud minority. |
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| ▲ | abustamam 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This is a good point. I've seen people with really complex AI setups (multiple agents collaborating for hours). But what are they building? Are they building a react app with an express backend? A next js app? Which itself is a layer on top of an abstraction? I haven't tried this myself but I'm curious if an LLM could build a scalable, maintainable app that doesn't use a framework or external libraries. Could be danger due to lack of training data but I think it's important to build stuff that people use, not stuff that people use to build stuff that people use to build stuff that.... Not that meta frameworks aren't valuable, but I think they're often solving the wrong problem. |
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| ▲ | jimbokun 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | When it comes time to debug would you rather ask questions about and dig through code in a popular open source library, or dig through code generated by an LLM specifically for your project? | | |
| ▲ | abustamam an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | The copout answer is it depends. I've debugged sloppy code in React both before and after LLMs were commonly used. I've also debugged very well-written custom frameworks before and after LLMs. I think with proper guardrails and verification/validation, a custom framework could be easier to maintain than sloppy React code (or insert popular framework here). My point is that as long as we keep the status quo of how software is built (using popular tools that male it fast and easy to build software without LLMs that often were unperformant), we'll keep heading down this path of trying to solve the problems of frameworks instead of directly solving the problems with our app. (BTW, it was your comment to my comment that inspired my comment, talk about meta! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47512874 ) | |
| ▲ | apsurd 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | If the LLM doing it, it doesn't matter, isn't that the point? Not saying I personally believe in this scenario, but everything I've heard supports the idea that code is no longer for humans to consume. | | |
| ▲ | jimbokun an hour ago | parent [-] | | You are going to allow a product from a company you have no reason to trust write important software for you and put it into production without checking the code to see what it does? | | |
| ▲ | apsurd an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | I agree with you, which makes me seem like the laggard at work. Devil's advocate is that AI-native development will use AI to ask these questions and such. So whether it's a framework or standard lib, def agree knowing your stuff is what matters, but the tools to demonstrate this knowledge is fast in flux. Again, I am on the slow train. But this seems to be all I hear. "code optimized for humans" is marked for death. | |
| ▲ | apsurd an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | had another thought on my drive just now. nextjs is really fantastic with LLM usage because there's so much body of work to source from. previously i found nextjs unbearable to work with with its bespoke isomorphic APIs. too dense, too many nuances, too much across the stack. with LLMs it spit it out amazingly fast. but does that make nextjs the framework better or worse in design paradigms, that LLM is basically necessary to navigate it? | |
| ▲ | servercobra an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | A lot of us use software written by other people we have no reason to trust and we haven't reviewed - most of open source libraries. | | |
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| ▲ | mysterydip 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I’ve seen so many articles of “introducing flimflam: a squiggle for burfy” it makes my head spin. |
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| ▲ | blargey 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > I strongly suspect that vast majority of the "innovation" in recent years has gone straight to supporting the funding model and institution of the software profession, rather than actual software engineering. Feels like there’s a counter to the frequent citation of Jevon’s Paradox in there somewhere, in the context of LLM impact on the software dev market. Overestimation of external demand for software, or at least any that can be fulfilled by a human-in-the-loop / one-dev-to-many-users model? The end goal of LLMs feels like, in effect, the Last Framework, and the end of (money in) meta-engineering by devs for devs. |
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| ▲ | jr3592 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > Are these tools necessary to build what we actually need? I think the entire software industry has reached a saturation point. There's not really anything missing anymore. Existing tools do 99% of what we humans could need, so you're just getting recycled and regurgitated versions of existing tools... slap a different logo and a veneer on it, and its a product. |
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| ▲ | bluGill an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | The tools are mostly there, but there is a lot of need. Quality can be much better. Quality is UI, reliability, security, and a bunch of other similar things I can't think of offhand. | |
| ▲ | thewebguyd 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Resume driven development. |
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| ▲ | ryandrake 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > The last 10 years in the software industry in particular seems full of meta-work. Building new frameworks, new tools, new virtualization layers, new distributed systems, new dev tooling, new org charts. All to build... what exactly? Don't forget App Stores. Everyone's still trying to build app stores, even if they have nothing to sell in them. It's almost as if every major company's actual product is their stock price. Every other thing they do is a side quest or some strategic thing they think might convince analysts to make their stock price to move. |
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| ▲ | jimbokun 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > It's almost as if every major company's actual product is their stock price. They are pretty much legally obligated to act in this manner. | | |
| ▲ | wholinator2 an hour ago | parent [-] | | Has it always been this way? If not, did it used to be better? If so, how can we get back? | | |
| ▲ | nostrademons 10 minutes ago | parent [-] | | The legal doctrine that a company's primary responsibility is to maximize shareholder value dates from the 1970s. It started with Milton Friedman with a 1971 essay in the NYTimes [1] and then gained a lot of currency throughout the 70s stagflation and economic malaise. The final death-knell of the corporation as a social enterprise came during the 1980s era of corporate raiders and PE buyouts. Note that the system that came before it had problems too. In the 50s and 60s, the top marginal tax rate was about 90%, which meant that above a certain level it made almost no sense for a corporate executive to be paid more. This kept executive salaries to a reasonable multiple of employee salaries, but it meant that executives and high-ranking managers tended to pay themselves in perks. This was the "Mad Men" era of private jets, private company apartments, secretaries who were playthings, etc. Friedman's essay was basically arguing against this world of corporate unaccountability and corruption, where formal pay and compensation were reasonable, but informal perks and arrangements managed to privilege the people in power in a complete opaque, unaccountable way. Turns out that power is a hell of a drug, and the people in power will always find ways to use that to enrich themselves regardless of what the laws and incentives are. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctr... |
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| ▲ | lejalv 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > It's almost as if every major company's actual product is their stock price. It's almost as if we lived under capitalism. What other thing would they do? They are literally setting the Earth on fire to raise the stock price. No hostages taken. The true alignment problem behind the ploy AGI alignment problem for prêt-à-penser SF philosophers. Or prestidigitators. |
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| ▲ | enraged_camel 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| >> The last 10 years in the software industry in particular seems full of meta-work. Building new frameworks, new tools, new virtualization layers, new distributed systems, new dev tooling, new org charts. All to build... what exactly? Are these tools necessary to build what we actually need? Or are they necessary to prop up an unsustainable industry by inventing new jobs? This is because all the low-hanging fruit has already been built. CRM. Invoicing. HR. Project/task management. And hundreds of others in various flavors. |
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| ▲ | vinyl7 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | It may exist (with a loose term of exist) but they are all mostly garbage. There's still plenty opportunity to make non-garbage version of things that already exist | | |
| ▲ | enraged_camel 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | This is technically true but also a bit naive. Established incumbents are very difficult to dislodge with merely a better version of their products. This becomes more true the larger the product and the average customer size. A good example is QuickBooks, which is a really janky accounting/bookkeeping software that is almost universally hated, but newer and better solutions haven't been able to capture much market share from it. | | |
| ▲ | sarchertech 26 minutes ago | parent [-] | | It’s hard to actually build a better QuickBooks because to build a better QuickBooks you need 1000+ integrations that each took hundreds of man hours to build. |
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