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Comment by neom | Hacker News Reader

I stopped building web early 2000s to build web businesses instead, but I was pretty creative with the ol' LAMP back in the day, this whole thing is honestly just... it makes me giddy. I can build super fun stuff now without asking people, for example this took me... I dunno, from telling what I want to deploy... 15 minutes? And to ME, it's awesome: https://funds.ascent.ca/ - I doubt it's well coded or w/e, but the fact that I could get a "cool" marketing property online in < 20 minutes basically exactly as I want... giddy is the right word.

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A friend of mine said to me a few months ago, “all existing software is technical debt”. Meaning that owning software now is, in many cases, a burden not an asset since you can spin up new greenfield software using the latest tech so quickly.

That's a super interesting way to look at it. Got my wheels spinning, I guess you can in a way then say... the person who makes super easy click in persistence is very winning. For example, lets say I want to make an app that hosts all the docs the founders in my "funds" accelerator thing above. I probably want to spend a week once a year upgrading that front end with the AI tools, new coat of paint if you will, but I want it to "just work" on top of however the data it's pulling is persisted on. At that point, I really could do anything I think... at that point, people are gonna build some cool stuff I'd imagine.

Software is definitely an asset. "Becoming less valuable over time" is called depreciation, or in the case of IP, amortization. Poorly written software amortizes at a higher rate.

Software is more than just the code to make a computer do something. It is the auditor's log of rules that were painstakingly researched and decided on over months, years, etc. A lot of time goes into deciding what the program needs to do and only after some decision is made is it written down as code. "Do we ship the customer order after payment is authorized or after the funds settle? Depends what we're selling maybe? What does the finance department think? Oh we have regulatory rules to follow, better make sure those are there too. Oh we need to be able to back-wipe PII on-demand as well. But maybe we need to retain certain attributes, let's schedule a meeting." Etc. This is where a lot of the value lies.

Cool design. It’s well done for it being a 20 minute effort. And that’s where these things currently shine.

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