Hacker News Reader

Comment by qnleigh | Hacker News Reader

So much of the conversation is around these models replacing software engineers. But the use cases described in the article sound like pretty compelling business opportunities; if the custom apps he built for his wife's business have been useful, probably there are lots of businesses that would pay for the service he just provided his wife. Small, custom apps can be made way more cheaply now, so Jeven's paradox says that demand should go up. I think it will.

I would love to hear from some freelance programmers how LLMs have changed their work in the last two years.

View on HN

One problem with the idea of making businesses out of this kind of application is actually mentioned in passing in the article

"I decided to make up for my dereliction of duties by building her another app for her sign business that would make her life just a bit more delightful - and eliminate two other apps she is currently paying for"

OP used Opus to re-write existing applications that his wife was paying for. So now any time you make a commercial app and try to sell it, you're up against everyone with access to Opus or similar tooling who can replicate your application, exactly to their own specifications.

so everybody is making their own apps for their specific problem? Sounds as it will get a mess in the end. So maybe it will be more about ideas and concepts and not so much about know how to code.

Yep vast numbers of personalized apps seems like it would end up being pretty messy. I think the challenge of betting on ideas and concepts is that once you've published something, someone else can take the idea and replicate it easily and cheaply, so it'll be harder to monetize unless you can come up with something that's hard to replicate.

I think you're misunderstanding my point. If you can crank out a custom app this quickly, you don't make a commercial app and then try to sell it on an app store. Customers pay you to make apps for their specific usecase. One app, one customer. And if a week later they want some new features, they pay you (or another freelancer) to add it.

Put another way, we programmers have the luxury of being able to write custom scripts and apps for ourselves. Now that these things are getting way cheaper to build, there should be a growing market that makes them available to more people.

Why do they pay you though, why not just do it themselves? With improving models and surrounding tooling the barrier to creating apps is lowered, and it's easier for a user just to create their own app, no 3rd party person needed.

A coworker who’s never coded has made 25 small work automation/helper apps using ai vibe coding.

She doesn’t need to hire anyone

Reply on news.ycombinator.com