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Comment by EagnaIonat | Hacker News Reader

I read a book called "Blood in the machine". It's the history of the Luddites.

It really put everything into perspective to where we are now.

Pre-industrial revolution whole towns and families built clothing and had techniques to make quality clothes.

When the machines came out it wasn't overnight but it wiped out nearly all cottage industries.

The clothing it made wasn't to the same level of quality, but you could churn it out faster and cheaper. There was also the novelty of having clothes from a machine which later normalised it.

We are at the beginning of the end of the cottage industry for developers.

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Does the analogy hold though?

We had "free clothes" for years, decades now. I don't mean cheap I mean literally free, as in $0.0 software. Cheaper software isn't new.

Also there are still clothe designers, fashion runways, and expensive Patagonia vests today. The clothing industry is radically different from back then but it's definitely not gone.

It didn't kill everything. Some survived but not to the extent that it was.

> The clothing industry is radically different from back then but it's definitely not gone.

Small towns had generations of people who had learned skills in making clothing / yarn. To do the work you needed years of experience and that's all you knew.

Once the industrial revolution hit they hired low skilled workers that could be dumped at a moments notice. It made whole villages destitute. Some survived, but the far majority became poor.

That was one industry. We now have AI at a point to wipe out multiple industries to a similar scale.

I posted elsewhere, but you are looking at the wrong part of the chain.

We have cheap (or free) software for large markets, and certain small markets where software developers with hobbies have made something. If every niche that will never be able to afford a large 6-figure custom software could get slop software for an affordable price, then that establishes a foot-hold for working its way up the quality ladder.

Luddism arose in response to weaving machines, not garment-making machines. The machines could weave a piece of cloth that still had to be cut and sewn by hand into a garment. Weaving the cloth was by far the most time consuming part of making the clothing.

Writing code is not at all the most time consuming part of software development.

> Luddism arose in response to weaving machines, not garment-making machines.

It started there, yes.

> Writing code is not at all the most time consuming part of software development.

The current Vibe coding systems can do the full pipeline.

> The current Vibe coding systems can do the full pipeline.

For small and relatively simple projects, sure. In codebases that are either large, complex, or fairly novel, I've been consistently disappointed by the hands-off approach.

There are plenty of small, relatively simple projects out there. Lots of websites and cookie cutter apps to make. But that's never been the stuff I wanted to work on anyway.

I use Claude code constantly, but it's not nearly as reliable as any of the colleagues I've worked with.

If you used the car as an analogy instead, it would make more sense to me. There were car craftsmen in Europe that Toyota displaced almost completely. And software is more similar to cars in that it needs maintenance and if it breaks down, large consequences like death and destruction and/or financial loss follows.

If llms can churn out software like Toyota churns out cars, AND do maintenance on it, then the craftsmen (developers of today) are going to be displaced.

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