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Comment by lloydatkinson | Hacker News Reader

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On the other hand, this is an example of a new category of tools: things made by individuals scratching an itch, that wouldn't have been made otherwise because the barrier to entry was too high.

There will always be a need for high quality human-reviewed software, but I think we should celebrate this too.

Scratching an itch with a rusty nail risks tetanus.

You'd be surprised. I have to run RHEL at work, with Gnome. No Albert, no Wofi, no Rofi. Fuck all in the repositories. For months I missed typing Alt + Space, typing filename, hitting enter and having it open.

One evening with Claude. Done. Obviously it's not perfect, but man what an amazing thing to be able to do. I'm not even a software developer. LLMs are the new Excel.

This category of projects reminds me of how the aliens in Niven's "Mote in God's Eye" used to work, making instant bespoke things as they went along.

> There was a time people took pride in writing high quality software.

And other people have always churned out low-quality software that solves a problem they have in a specific way. This is just sort of accelerating

From my viewpoint you are conflating software quality with ambition. All software develops iteratively. Tools now celebrated for quality and consistency (commercial and OSS alike) shipped from states where they were neither. Jerm-CAD existing gives it a shot at improvement. The alternative is it doesn’t exist.

Was there? Software has always been a "speed of delivery over correctness" discipline. LLMs will just crank that up to 11.

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