Pure speculation here, but this is a thought that occurs to me. I've often seen furniture used as an analogy for how quickly an automated process can displace craftpersons, but I think it might actually in one sense be an analogy for how craft can continue to survive and thrive even post-automation. Sure, Ikea sells a LOT more furniture than Ethan Allen; but Ethan Allen's handcrafted furniture is much higher quality and sells at a premium price.

Consumers benefit all round. Those who can afford to do so can buy the high quality handcrafted product; the majority who can't get cheap access to acceptable-quality furniture.

This is pure speculation but I wonder whether software will gradually evolve in this way with the availability of AI. For many basic tasks, consumers will be able to basically write their own software using some AI tool; it may not be high quality but at least it will be cheap and fast to produce and it will greatly reduce the barrier to access for the average computer user to do what they want to do on their machine. Meanwhile, a much smaller niche market for high-quality tools that have been at least partly handcrafted by experts to fill some special need where performance or a quality experience are crucial will continue to thrive. Either way, in this scenario, I would imagine the importance and prominence of SaaS will slowly decline.

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orthogonal_cube 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Someone made a comment the other day about how silly it would be for people to continue using hand tools when the electric motor was invented.

This felt very out of touch for the reason you brought forth: hand-crafted products very often become more valuable in an industry where production is done at-scale. (Provided the hand-crafted product is of high quality.)

We’ve discovered a way to take what someone asks for and generate a lot of relevant code at a significantly lower cost than what it would take to contract out. Maybe for small requests this could be fine for users in the future, but inevitably people will prefer carefully-crafted codebases that provide robust experiences or high reliability.

	▲	perlgeek 31 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Note that "hand-crafted" furniture is usually still built using power tools: electric planers, electric saws, routers etc. The real difference is that a carpenter actually talks to you when you order your furniture, and builds something custom to your specification. The quality of the finished cupboard wouldn't improve if your craftsman only used hand tools. I suspect something similar will happen for software: For some applications, vibe code is good enough. For others, a human will do software design (possibly with machine assistance), hand-writes some parts, delegates other parts to an AI but still reads it. Purely-human-written code will be akin to furniture built using only hand tools: a piece of art, or maybe product of a hobby or a religious ceremony rather than a practical necessity or a practical advantage.

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zeroonetwothree 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Average people aren't going to be writing their own software, even with AI tools. They will use AI tools to achieve goals directly and perhaps it will write software in the background (but that would be an implementation detail).

	▲	happy_dog1 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yes, thanks, that's what I meant / was trying to say. They want to do X on their computer and formerly they would have had to purchase software to do so; in the future perhaps they will instead ask the AI tool to do X and it will write whatever code is needed to do X. This will work well enough until it doesn't (which is where the "premium" market for handcrafted special-purpose tools might continue to thrive).