If you’re working on an app or software that has few users, no revenue or minimal revenue, tolerance to bugs is higher and just another Claude prompt away, Software factories are a perfect fit. Most personal software or hobby software or 0-1 yet-to-find-PMF startups belong in this category.

You can even take a stand that you’ll never look at the code and just ship. This is a perfect equilibrium for a Software factory, where the only input or feedback is a one-liner/specced requirement and the only output is outcome of whether the one-liner requirement worked or not.

For almost any other software that does not fit this criteria, software factories are yet to solve the Intent and Subjective Quality problem.

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bandrami 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> few users, no revenue or minimal revenue

The 900 pound gorilla has for a while been "where is all the output of these LLMs?", and this seems to be the answer; the number of apps on the various app stores has skyrocketed over the past two quarters but installs overall are actually down a little bit. So it seems like we've had an explosion of software that one or two people use. Which is a cool situation to think about but is pretty bearish for the "AI as a profitable business" idea.

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tmikaeld 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Marketing was a problem with apps even before AI, which, with today’s slopforests makes it even harder for consumers to see any of your trees even if they wanted to.

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bandrami 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Right but if we're going to a small-batch bespoke development model then "marketing" more or less disappears because why would I pay someone to talk to an LLM when I can also talk to an LLM? The money goes from the end user to the lab in this model.

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jambalaya8 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

What happens then, though? Is it good to have tens or hundreds of thousands of potentially angry marketing managers roaming around that were developed out of careers?

	▲	bandrami 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		IDK, get Springsteen to record an aid concert for them?

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bandrami 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I should expand that: the money goes from the end user to the lab and only in the cases where the marginal utility of the small app exceeds the cost.

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davidgl 20 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

100 points for the term Slopforest :-)

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aleph_minus_one 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> If you’re working on an app or software that has few users, no revenue or minimal revenue, tolerance to bugs is higher and just another Claude prompt away, Software factories are a perfect fit. Most personal software or hobby software or 0-1 yet-to-find-PMF startups belong in this category.

I would rather claim that for my personal/hobby software, I apply a much higher quality standard than for the software that I write at work.

Believe me: I would love to apply the same high (or even higher) standard at work, too.

The problem rather is that it is a very common situation that bosses actively prohibit me from rocking the boat too much. If I make (I think typically good) suggestions, I often get very stern reactions.

At work, elegance is not celebrated - just implement the tasks of users who don't care about quality or elegance.

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andrewljohnson 5 hours ago | parent [-]

You either need to quit or keep your head down, I can’t tell which.

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taneq 4 hours ago | parent [-]

If you need to actively keep your head down, you need to quit.

Doesn’t matter whether ‘the problem’ is the employer, the employee, both, or neither. They’re a bad fit for each other.

	▲	swiftcoder 9 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> If you need to actively keep your head down, you need to quit. This really depends on whether they are paying you decently. The number of people I've met who found a nice corner in FAANG, and decided to keep their head down and collect a steady paycheque... One may find one can swallow a lot of engineering pride for a recurring six figures
	▲	podocarp 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		I don't think so? It's very common in both large companies and small startups where pragmatism has a higher priority than so called elegance or whatever you call it the "artisan" feel. It's varying shades of "perfect is the enemy of good", where different cultures and business environments dictate how much a manager is going to tolerate your proposed refactoring. At least that's what I got from the parent lost.
	▲	eru 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Keep your head down, while you look for alternatives. No need to pre-emptively quit, if you can coast and collect a paycheck.

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preg_match 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The perfect poster boy is system scripts. They’re not even published usually, but being able to just generate < 500 line scripts for everything is a huge boon.

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dhorthy 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I agree this rocks I do this almost daily

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preg_match 3 hours ago | parent [-]

It goes hand in hand with Linux desktops too, because everything is just so much more scriptable. That used to be intimating, user unfriendly, and maybe it still is. But with AI it enables so many new avenues.

	▲	black_knight 5 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Now that LLMs can do the actual configuration, I started using NixOS and now all my config lives in one repo, and every quality of life improvement fans out to every machine without issue. Since Claude (code) knows all about my system, it will also tailor solutions to it when I ask how to do something. Using it I can often find really neat solutions to whatever sys admin task I can imagine.