Hacker News Reader

Comment by redorb | Hacker News Reader

I think chatGPT itself is an epic product, Cursor has insane growth and usage. I also think they are both over-hyped, have too much a valuation.

View on HN

Citing AI software as the only examples of how AI benefits developing software, has a bit of a touch of self-help books describing how to attain success and fulfillment by taking the example of writing self-help books.

I don’t disagree that these are useful tools, by the way. I just haven’t seen any discernible uptick in general software quality and utility either, nor any economic uptick that should presumably follow from being able to develop software more efficiently.

I made 1500 USD speculating on NVidia earnings, that's economic uptick for me !

I agree with everyone else, where is the Microsoft Office competitor created by 2 geeks in a garage with Claude Code? Where is the Exchange replacement created by a company of 20 people?

There are many really lucrative markets that need a fresh approach, and AI doesn't seem to have caused a huge explosion of new software created by upstarts.

Or am I missing something? Where are the consumer facing software apps developed primarily with AI by smaller companies? I'm excluding big companies because in their case it's impossible to prove the productivity, the could be throwing more bodies at the problem and we'd never know.

> Office…Exchange

The challenge in competing with these products is not code. The challenge competing in lucrative markets that need a fresh approach is also generally not code. So I’m not sure that is a good metric to evaluate LLMs for code generation.

I think the point remains, if someone armed with Claude Code could whip out a feature complete clone of Microsoft Office over the weekend (and by all accounts, even a novice programmer could do this, because of the magnificent greatness of Claude), then why don't they just go ahead and do it? Maybe do a bunch of them: release one under GPL, one under MIT, one under BSD, and a few more sold as proprietary software. Wow, I mean, this should be trivial.

It makes development faster, but not infinitely fast. Faithfully reproducing complex 42-year-old software in one weekend is a stretch no matter how you slice it. Also, AI is cheap, but not free.

I could see it being doable by forking LibreOffice or Calligra Suite as a starting point, although even with AI assistance I'd imagine that it might take anyone not intimately familiar with both LibreOffice (or Calligra) and MS Office longer than a weekend to determine the full scope of the delta between them, much less implement that delta.

But you'd still need someone with sufficient skill (not a novice), maybe several hundred or thousand dollars to burn, and nothing better to do for some amount of time that's probably longer than a weekend. And then that person would need some sort of motivation or incentive to go through with the project. It's plausible, but not a given that this will happen just because useful agentic coding tools exist.

Pick a smaller but impactful project and have 2-3 people working full-time on it for 1 year. Either this tech is truly revolutionary and these 2-3 people are getting at least 50% more done, or it's marginal and what are we even talking about?

There could be many such cases, or maybe only a few. I'm easily a multiple more productive as a result of integrating AI into my workflows; but whether that's broadly the case across the industry, or will become the case as we collectively adapt in coming years, is essentially unfalsifiable.

Cool. So we established that it's not code alone that's needed, it's something else. This means that the people who already had that something else can now bootstrap the coding part much faster than ever before, spend less time looking for capable people, and truly focus on that other part.

So where are they?

We're not asking to evaluate LLM's for code. We're asking to evaluate them as product generators or improvers.

Ok lets ignore competing with them. When will AI just spit out a "home cooked" version of Office for me so I can toss the real thing in the trash where it belongs? One without the stuff I don't want? When will it be able to give me Word 95 running on my M4 Chip by just asking? If im going to lose my career I might as well get something that can give me any software that I could possibly want by just asking.

I can go to Wendys or I can make my own version of Wendys at home pretty easily with just a bit more time expended.

The cliff is still too high for software. I could go and write office from scratch or customize the shivers FOSS software out there but its not worth the time effort.

It's not that they failed to compete on other metrics, it's that they don't even have a product to fail to sell.

We had upstarts in the 80s, the 90s, the 2000s and the 2010s. Some game, some website, some social network, some mobile app that blew up. We had many. Not funded by billions.

So, where is that in the 2020s?

Yes, code is a detail (ideas too). It's a platform. It positions itself as the new thing. Does that platform allow upstarts? Or does it consolidate power?

Pick other examples, then.

We have superhuman coding (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45977992), where are the superhuman coded major apps from small companies that would benefit most from these superhumans?

Heck, we have superhuman requirements gathering, superhuman marketing, superhuman almost all white collar work, so it should be even faster!

Fine, where's the slop then? I expected hundreds of scammy apps to show up imitating larger competitors to get a few bucks, but those aren't happening either. At least not any more than before AI.

It doesn’t matter what you think. Where’s all the data proving that AI is actually valuable? All we have are anecdotes and promises.

ChatGPT is... a chat with some "augmentation" feature aka outputting rich html responses, nothing new except the generative side. Cursor is a VSCode fork with a custom model and a very good autocomplete integration. Again where are the products? Where the heck is Windows without the bloat that works reliably before becoming totally agentic? And therefore idiotic since it doesn't work reliably

Reply on news.ycombinator.com