Comment by sosodev | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sosodev | Hacker News Reader

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While that is part of the equation it's not at all that simple. If the average business owner wants a custom piece of software for their workflow how are they getting it now? For decades the answer would have been new hires, agencies, consultants, and freelancers. It didn't matter that most software boiled down to a simple CRUD backend and a flashy frontend. There was still a need for developers to create every piece of software.

Now AI makes it unbelievably easy to make those simple but bespoke software packages. The business owner can boot up Lovable and get something that is good enough. The non-software folk generally aren't scrutinizing the software they use. It doesn't matter if the backend is spaghetti code or if there are bugs here and there. If it works well enough then they're happy.

In my opinion that's the unfortunate truth of AI software development. It's dirt cheap, fast, and good enough for most people. Computer's couldn't write software before and now they can. Obviously that is real devaluation, right?

That might happen, but it hasn't yet.

So far, the tools help many programmers write simple code more quickly.

For technically adept professionals who are not programmers, though, we still haven't seen anything really break through the ceiling consistently encountered by previous low-code/no-code tools like FoxPro, Access, Excel, VBA, IFTTT, Zapier, Salesforce etc.

The LLM-based tools for this market work differently than the comparable tools that preceded them over the last 40 years, in that they have a much richer vocabulary of output, but the ceiling that all of these tools encountered in the last has been a human one: most non-programmers don't know how to describe what they need with sufficient detail for anything much beyond a fragile, narrow toy.

Maybe GPT-8 or Gemini 6 or whatever will somehow finally be able to shatter this ceiling, and somebody will make finally make a no-code software builder that devours the market for custom/domain software. But that hasn't happened yet and it's at least as easy to be skeptical as it is to be convinced.

I'm fairly certain that it's happening right now. There is no threshold that LLMs need to "break through" to see adoption. The number of non-technical using them to write software is growing every day.

I was working freelance through late 2023 - mid 2025 and the shift seemed quite obvious to me. Other freelancers, agency managers, etc that I talked to could see it too. The volume of clients, and their expectations, is changing very rapidly in that space.

When I first earned money for coding (circa 20 years ago) it was small e-commerce shop. Today nobody does them, because there's woocomerce, shopify, FB marketplace. All dirt cheap and fast.

It isn't devaluation. It's good - it freed a lot of people to work on more ambitious things.

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