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Comment by mikkupikku | Hacker News Reader

I predict that the commercial market for a lot of software will evaporate as people find that getting AI to whip up a custom solution that fits their unique problem space like a glove is actually cheaper and simpler than trying to make COTS software do the job. We're not quite here yet, but maybe in a few years.

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> I predict that the commercial market for a lot of software will evaporate

Counterpoint: Windows, Oracle DB, etc. have had free/cheaper alternatives for decades and still thrived.

Yes/no. Regardless of the code complexity reduction there is still architecture, planning and implementation. Could someone come by and clone my work afterwards? Absolutely. Will they retain customers with only a little understanding of the product or model? Questionable.

You aren't just buying software, you're offloading liability of continued support and functionality.

Sure, but there's a whole lot of businesses already using custom solutions made with excel/access/etc that are held together with duct tape and chicken wire, so I think the adventurous spirit necessary is there.

There have always been hundreds or thousands of companies that want software engineers but simply don't have the revenue to support them. My first dev job was a small private company in exactly this spot. They basically paid me my salary for six months to figure out WordPress and PHP on the job having only ever done very basic programming stuff on my own in high school ~6 years prior.

The median dev salary across the entire US is something like $130k/yr. There are huge numbers of new or self-taught software devs in low cost of living areas of the country making $50-60k/yr.

In the same pattern there are a lot of businesses where these solutions are not efficient and they MOVED from them to expensive commercial software. It's actually an antipattern to build a bunch of in-house, Excel-based solutions - with AI or not - for these companies.

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