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 3 hours 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.

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mikestorrent 2 hours 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.

	▲	Forgeties79 31 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		The thing is though it all still feels so…rudderless/pointless sometimes? When digital cameras came out, it democratized filmmaking immensely. But it wasn’t just people screwing around - amazing new works of art, received positively by audiences and critics alike, exploded in number. They wound up winning film fests, garnering millions of views (and fans) online, and even on big screens world wide, almost immediately Where are the vibe coded apps that are actually good? Where are the new, innovative creations built by “normal” people? Because by now you’d think we’d see them. It’s all been parlor tricks, proofs of concept, and post mortems on how a bot ruined half a year’s work or whatever. The “good stuff” is still happening behind closed doors, led by experienced engineers on existing projects. It’s a productivity multiplier more than anything it seems, but it doesn’t seem useful as a tool for new people to make new things in any given space.

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emporas 3 hours 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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code4life an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I’m not sophisticated enough to enjoy abstract art. Maybe AI will bring abstract software projects to the world next.

I can imagine all the people staring at these software projects amazed at the genius it must have taken to create them. :)

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didgetmaster 2 hours 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.

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paganel 20 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> What value is left to provide for users?

A spreadsheet editor with at most a couple of hundred MBs in size that can compete against Excel, for example. While also not eating from RAM resources. The same goes for a new browser and a new browser engine, it's time for Chrome to have a real competitor, it has become a mess. I can of other such examples, but these are the 2 biggest ones.

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chickensong 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> But it's largely done now

Somehow I doubt that. The monkey is never satisfied.

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nizsle 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Agree. Productivity tools all the way down.