| ▲ | ThePhysicist 3 hours ago | |
Not sure if good, but I get it, the velocity is so fast that even perfectly fine AI pull requests will add a ton of new features to the software as people mostly go "I have problem X can you write a feature for me that solves it?" and in the end you end up producing a "The Homer" [1] which has every conceivable feature under the sun but doesn't have any cohesion or logic between them, so user experience is subpar. Then again maybe that's where all software is heading, if AI can produce features on demand at infinite space there might no longer be specialized software, or at least not nearly as much, as people will just code their own solutions tailored perfectly to their use case. On the weekend I wrote a full-fledged 3D planner where I modeled my whole house based on plans and written descriptions I handed to Claude, it runs in the browser, produces high quality renderings, has path tracing for realistic lighting and materials and builds real objects like windows based on specifications and blueprints, so you can actually see how stuff looks like (unlike with AI images where proportions are always off). For me it's way better than SketchUp and it works completely dialogue based and allows me to experiment with furniture, window styles, doors, colors etc. in a super intuitive way. There is software I could use for this but why bother at this point? This whole thing took me a few hours and maybe 10-20 € in AI credits to build. Why try to use open-source software where I need to wait weeks for a reply from a maintainer? So I think these projects fundamentally misunderstand where software engineering is heading, they are trying to hold back the flood but that will only lead to them being left in the dust once people realize they no longer have to wait for maintainers to update their sanctioned software timeline for you. That said, I think it's also ok and maybe even beneficial to be very protective of your feature set. There will (at least for now) still be room for complex core software that can serve as a basis for AI modification, so from that perspective it might be good to keep the core really tight and fully audited. My little software project only exists because three.js and other libraries provide most of what I need as LLMs will not write everything from scratch in such a short amount of time. | ||