I am mostly in agreement. And I suspect there are many folks that’re trying to ship something AI-assisted that’s sufficient to get to income security first, and who would use success there as a stepping stone to greater things.

▲

bemtevi 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The problem is, why even produce something greater now when someone is just going to clone it with AI? And moreover, what differentiates software now will no longer be the care put into it but marketing and trends. The highly commercialized nature of software means that there's not much point now in doing anything except getting there first and exiting with a decent nest egg.

▲

majormajor 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> And moreover, what differentiates software now will no longer be the care put into it but marketing and trends. The highly commercialized nature of software means that there's not much point now in doing anything except getting there first and exiting with a decent nest egg.

That happened at least 20 years ago. How many recent "this product did so great because of the care of software engineering, and now the creator is comfortable for the rest of their life without risk of it being copied" success stories are there compared to "this product chased some trends VCs were nuts about with a slapdash MVP and the founders took out 8 figures from their later fundraising rounds, but then the business sputtered out"?

I think there's an angle with AI tools where business-minded people will have a better chance of doing interesting things now than in the recent past, because you could potentially tailor much more deeply to individual customers with reasonable economics than in the past. There are fields where there's room for a garden of solutions from different small-team vendors appropriate for different use cases instead of a one-size-fits-all SaaS winner-take-all type market in the past. We could kill the old line about SAP around needing to change your business to accommodate SAP instead of customize SAP to accommodate your existing workflow.

But if you aren't business-minded at all there are likely less places that will need to hire as many careful maintainers or novel-software-writers, which obviously is a huge kick in the teeth to a lot of people.

	▲	jltsiren 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It seems to me that you are comparing two kinds of business-minded people. Some want to sell tailored products to individual customers, while others want to sell one-size-fits-all products to many customers. You could also focus on problems. What are the actual problems you want to solve? Can you use software to solve them? Do you still need to buy that software from other companies, or is it now feasible to have sufficient in-house expertise to develop it yourself?

▲

8note 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

because its fun?

why are you here if you dont enjoy the solving of problems first and foremost?

	▲	bemtevi 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I love solving problems. But I don't enjoy sharing my solutions with the way the world is today. My comment was directed towards the "sharing" aspect, not the making aspect. I still solve problems on my own and learn on my own but I'm not a fan of the way the world has become.

▲

bluefirebrand 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yup

If you can make it solo with an LLM then someone else with an LLM can copy it immediately

	▲	mindcandy an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Good for them?

▲

fuzzythrowaway 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

UBI or a living wage for part-time workers in-line with what was expected would be possible from productivity gains over the past half-century would do that. You just have to get the "hard workers" who are happy to race to the bottom on their way to the top, and undercut/throw under the bus everyone else in the process.

Can we please, for once, stop trying to figure out how to "get ahead" of each other, and instead figure out how to build a decent and dignified floor for as many people as possible? Because I imagine that, "Ultimate power in the hands of anyone with enough VRAM to run GTAVI," works better when people are in a culture of looking out for each other, versus a culture of clawing their way to one of the limited lifeboat spots (under the mistaken impression that there ARE lifeboats, when, again, everyone potentially has the power to blow up the lifeboats).