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Comment by falloutx | Hacker News Reader

This article makes no sense. Wouldn't software companies make more money if Claude Code is good, as they have to pay less to the SDEs?

Genuinely confused here.

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A common belief is that an experienced software developer steers AI (whether via Claude Code, Gemini CLI, Opencode, browser et al) much more effectively than a "layperson". I concur.

How much is “much more”. It is still a number.

I doubt any single engineer of any level can steer AI into building something complex like lets say Photoshop.

Most of the recent completely vibe coded projects dont do anything as complex as that, they are usually just tiny websites or some slop tui

I disagree, particularly if the engineer is skilled in and directly controls the architectural compartmentalization of the project. I do not see that limit here.

There's also no technical limit preventing a single engineer without AI from implementing Photoshop all by themselves. The question is can they compete with Adobe.

A single person company wouldn't have to compete with Adobe, for example Photopea is profitable and sustainable project made by just one person. My point was that even Photopea is yet to be copied by any of the engineers using coding agents, let alone the full version of Photoshop.

If its that easy why haven't we seen a single attempt being anywhere close?

The theory (which I don't really think stands up) is that software companies will lose value because everyone just gets an LLM to generate them the software they need instead.

There are variants of the theory that are actually pretty sound, but it's more about the critical mass open source will achieve and the reduced friction that agents will bring to self hosting.

What closed source software company can compete on features against the entire world's collective agents? What sales pitch do hosted saas vendors have when you can spin up a container for your open source saas of choice pre-configured, and the agent can tweak stuff and offload ops efficiently? We're ~2 years away from this reality.

This theory falls apart because I dont think a regular internet user can just generate something complex like Photoshop/Figma/Final Cut Pro via LLMs.

Even hardcore top level engineer wont be able to do it just via LLMs

Also, all the biggest software companies run network services. You could download your own search engine forever, but it doesn't mean anything without the Google data centers and crawlers. Likewise there's a million open source twitter clones, but without the users they have no real utility to the average person. The era of shrink wrap software has been over for a long time.

why would you pay for software you can generate for free?

Try generating Figma through Claude Code before you can say that. Classic software is full of human ingenuity and replicating each feature looks easy on the surface, but when you get into it, it slowly becomes impossible.

Note: Figma was just an example of a complex software.

Figma is old-world technology. The future is on-demand LLM image generation.

> The future is on-demand LLM image generation.

Why even generate an image then. Why don I just use dribbble / behance and pick the best design

So you're going to generate Quickbooks on the fly every time you need to make an accounting journal entry?

Why would you pay for a meal you could make at home?

Because I have neither the time nor inclination to make it at home right now. I have other stuff I need to do.

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