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Comment by dumbfounder | Hacker News Reader

The future is that people stop buying software and just build it themselves. The spam filter in thunderbird was broken for me, I built my own in hours and it works way better. Oh that CRM doesn’t have the features you want? Build one that does. It will become very easy to built and deploy solutions to many of your own bespoke problems.

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Unlikely. The future will be some people will do this, but honestly I think it will largely be people who were already tinkering with building things, whether full on software development or not

My mom and dad, my brother who drives a dump truck in a limestone quarry, my sister-in-law, none of them work in tech or consider themselves technical in any way. They are never, ever going to write their own software and will continue to just download apps from the app store or sign up for websites that accomplish the tasks they want

Some of us will do this, and it will be great for us for a period of time. That is, until others build another giant ball of shit 10,000x bigger than the npm/nodejs/javascript/java/cobol/c++/whatever else garbage pile we have today.

We'll be right back here in no-time.

No we won't, that was our hope when software development experience started going downhill with cheap offshoring teams.

The best we could achieve were the projects that got so burned that near shore started to become an alternative, but never again in-house.

I really don't understand your reply. What exactly are you disagreeing with?

That businesses will eventually care about quality.

As proven by offshoring, it is a race to the bottom, as long as software kind of works.

Hmm. I think you misread my comment. I never said anything about businesses caring about quality. I meant strong engineers will care about quality but we'll eventually be drowned out by those (individuals and businesses) who don't. Actually think we agree on this.

Correct, my ex couldn't even be bothered to update the notification settings on her iPhone, let alone she'd be generating and deploying an app using an LLM. Most people just don't want to have anything to do with tech, they just want it to work and get out of their way.

I did the same with my car, technically I could do maintenance myself and troubleshoot and what not, but I just couldn't be arsed, so I outsource it at a premium price.

Yeah, I think (completely biased as a long-time developer who is happily playing with AI for building stuff) people using AI to build their own tooling will be like a hot rod scene from the '60s. Lots of buzz, definitely some cool stuff, but in reality probably physically smaller than the noise around it.

Off to bust my virtual knuckles on something.

They won't think about it in terms of building software, just like many house buyers don't think in terms of building houses, even though somebody has effectively built a house just for them.

They'll just ask their bank to help them fill out a family income form based on last year's earnings. They'll get the numbers back, without thinking about the Python script that used Pandas and some web APIs to generate those numbers. They'll think about it in terms of "that thing that Chat GPT just gave me to compare truck from nearby local dealers", without realizing that it's actually a React app, partially powered by reverse-engineered APIs, partially by data that their agent scraped off Facebook and Craigslist.

I think it's just much more likely that all of those things become features on the bank's website and Ford's website, I doubt that my non-technical family members will go to ChatGPT as the everything app and ask it to do everything, because they won't actually know how to ask it in a way that they'd trust, or that gets a good outcome vs. trusting a vendor in a specific vertical

> Unlikely. The future will be some people will do this, but honestly I think it will largely be people who were already tinkering with building things, whether full on software development or not

Billions of dollars of stock market value disappeared because of the concern AI can create core SaaS functionality for corporations instead of them spending millions of dollars in licensing fees to SAP, Microsoft, etc.

This not about tinkering.

SaaS As We Know It Is Dead: How To Survive The SaaS-pocalypse! - https://www.forrester.com/blogs/saas-as-we-know-it-is-dead-h...

Why SaaS Stocks Have Dropped—and What It Signals for Software’s Next Chapter - https://www.bain.com/insights/why-saas-stocks-have-dropped-a...

Jim Cramer says AI fears have made the stock market fragile - https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/23/jim-cramer-says-ai-fears-hav...

Did you see the network security stock sell-off after Anthropic announced a code security analysis feature? There's a sliver of nothing between mob mentality and wisdom of the crowd.

It's too soon to bother making predictions. Shits gonna be wild for the next few years, then some type of market correction will happen, and we'll start to get an idea of how things will actually look.

Can we please have some calm, stable, boring years please, before I'm dead? The last 5 years have already been "wild" enough. The world is unrecognizable. I'm unprepared for further wildness.

Excluding the batshit insane political side, I don't actually think it's been as nuts as people think, or at least not uniformly so.

I have a lot of friends in the tech sector, but outside the FANNG/silicone valley/startup bubbles. It's been largely business as normal across the board. Twitter and social media warps our perspective I think.

there was a whole pandemic

And there’s still biggest war in Europe since ww2. Israel and Gaza. Iran standoff. Tariffs.

Not really whole. COVID was at best like a quarter pandemic.

It depends where you lived. In my city (harshest/longest restrictions in the world), we were not allowed to leave the house for more than 30 minutes a day for 2.5 years unless we were out buying groceries. No large gatherings allowed at our homes. Mask usage enforced everywhere in public.

In the city in my country reknowned for having a much higher level of hypochrondria before the pandemic, imagine the mental health issues my city is going through now.

Ok, sure, but that's a political/social problem, rather than the pandemic.

Stow the propaganda. 1) it's not over, the pandemic continues and will likely continue for a long time 2) it's already the fifth deadliest pandemic in known history. "Quarter pandemic" is an insane thing to think let alone say out loud.

1. It is pretty much over. Covid has become (for me at least) indistinguishable from a common cold.

2. Gemini says covid-19 killed 0.086% of world population (over several years). That's about as mild as it gets. More than sharks, but less than anything that usually kills people, like air polution (estimated about 0.095% yearly), cancer (est 0.12% every damn year) or cardiovascular disease (est 0.25% a year). Peak covid was still killing less than business-as-usual cancer or cardiovascular disease.

As far as pandemics go, the deadliest ones kill double digit percentage of people who contract them. That's two orders of magnitude more than covid. Even the single-digit percentage pandemics must be extremely rough. We were lucky[0].

[0]: Not the ones who died or have lasting consequences, but "we" as humanity, were rather lucky with covid. It could've been something much worse.

How many dead bodies you need to see to even flinch? Millions not enough?

One is enough to make me flinch. But the 7 millions are just a statistic, and a drop in the bucket compared to cancer or cardiovascular disease.

Cancer and heart disease together kill the same number of people as the whole covid pandemic every 10-12 days.

The market is losing its shit over this because people are operating on the thesis that "AI will be able to ..." rather than "AI can demonstrably do ...". At some point they're all gonna get margin called on their futurisms. It would be a lot better if, before getting excited, we ask to see experimental results. So you say you have a world-beating security tool? Show me something it can do that all the other ones can't. That would be worth getting excited about, not a vague blog post about vibes and dreams.

But then the sellers wouldn’t find the useful idiots to sell their snake oil to.

There are other businesses models than pump-and-dump, they could try it!

>Billions of dollars of stock market value disappeared because of the concern

That's really the key, right there. The value disappeared because of concern, not of anything real.

When ungodly amounts of money is governed entirely by vibes, it's hardly surprising they lose ungodly amounts of money to vibe-coding.

The downside is the effects of all that money shifting is very real :(

> That's really the key, right there. The value disappeared because of concern, not of anything real.

The value also only existed in the first place because of belief, in future work, operations, profits, etc.

Like it or not, confidence in institutions is society. Concern that affects that confidence is as real as any other societal effect.

That's because of P/E and how future earnings work.

If the P/E = 1 then there would be no sell-off. Looks at utility stocks with divs, they don't sell off [as sharply] when there is AI news.

Oh no Bain and Jim Cramer think software is dead. All that is is a signal to buy software stocks

No judgement, but if my mom or dad had a problem I could solve with a couple hours a month, with an larger initial investment of time at the beginning, I'd be willing to make it for them.

To the matter of driving a truck though, if someone needs an app idea, blue collar workers are having to spend an hour after work logging what they did that day. If they could do it in their truck while driving home for the day, you could make a pile of cash selling an app that lets them do that.

The future is either a regression of society from the resulting riots and massacres when 3/4 of the population is unemployed.

Or perpetual work camps for the masses.

Can you name me another time when humanity has run out of useful work to do?

Was it when we tamed fire, invented the wheel, writing, or double entry bookkeeping? All of which appear more consequential than current AI.

We’ll always have something to do. And humans like doing things.

The claim of the AI true-believers is that this time it will be different because of the "general" nature of it.

Fire can't build a house.

The wheel can't grow crops.

Writing can't set a broken bone.

Double entry bookkeeping can't write a novel.

If you believe that this AI+robotics wave will be able to do anything a human can do with fewer complaints, what would the humans move on to?

Fighting the clankers, of course.

Perhaps you meant writing bad futuristic science fiction on HN rather than building something.

I think it's a foregone conclusion that the clankers are the only ones building something in OP's scenario, leaving nothing left for us meatbags to do but fight the battery bloods and write bad science fiction.

A lot of people are being more or less coerced into doing abjectly useless stuff with their time.

David Graeber did a thing on the topic where he called the subset he was interested in "bullshit jobs".

> Can you name me another time when humanity has run out of useful work to do? > > Was it when we tamed fire, invented the wheel, writing, or double entry bookkeeping? All of which appear more consequential than current AI. > > We’ll always have something to do. And humans like doing things.

History doesn't predict the future. I can't tell you about another time when humans ran out of usefull things to do. What I can tell you is that we humans are biological beings we limited cognitive and physical abiloties.

I can also tell you about another biological being whose cognitive and phyisical abilities were surpassed by technology. Horses. What happened to them then wasn't pretty. The hight of their population in US was in 1915.

And sure, humans like doing things and so do horses, but you can't live by doing things that aren't useful to others, at least not in the current system. If technology surpases our abilities, the only useful things left to do for vast majority of humans is the same thing that was left for horses to do. Entertainment in various forms and there won't be enough of those jobs for all of us.

In the USA, the great depression, that is what "the grapes of wrath" is about. Or in all the dock towns when we shifted to containerized shipping.

(I don't think technological innovation leads to permanent job loss, but some people will lose)

> Can you name me another time when humanity has run out of useful work to do?

Can you name me another time when big swaths of highly paid population were laid off due to redundancy and how did it go for the population?

Also, another hint: I couldn’t care less what is going to happen to “humanity”. “Humanity” isn’t the one who pays my bills and puts food on my table.

> I couldn’t care less what is going to happen to “humanity”.

I would be profoundly ashamed to write such words on any public forum, myself.

However, I fear that probably, most people don't think like me, but feel the way you claim to. :-(

This feels like when 3D printers hit the consumer market and everyone declared that buying things was over, everyone will just print them at home. There's tons of benefits to standardised software too. Companies rely on the fact they can hire people who already know photoshop/xero/webpack/etc rather than having to train them from scratch on in house tools.

Business software is also useful because it gives companies a process to follow that even if not optimal, is probably better than what they’d come up with on their own.

The flexibility of big source of truth systems like ERP and CRM is sometimes (often) a downside. Many times these companies need to be told how to do something instead of platform vendors bending over backwards to enable horrible processes

> Companies rely on the fact they can hire people who already know photoshop/xero/webpack/etc rather than having to train them from scratch on in house tools.

Yeah, I've seen perfectly good flexible in house products abandoned because it was just easier to hire people who knew Salesforce or whatever.

But the true AI Believer would object you don't need to hire anymore, you can just get more agents to cold call or whatever :)

What ever happened to that?

They became much like woodworking or power tools. Accessible to anyone who wants them, but still requires an investment to learn and use. While the majority still buys their stuff from retail.

Or rents a printer for one-off designs. Unless you 3d print on the regular it's easier to pay someone to print one-off designs. You get a printer that gets regularly used and services and a knowledgeable operator. Not at all dissimilar to fancy commercial sign printers. In a past life working at $large-uni we really did try to make those damn things self-service but it was so much easier for the staff to be the print queue.

It turns out they're really great at building toys, cosplay gear and little plastic parts for things, but in general not that useful in most people's daily lives. Kind of like Ai.

Definitely feels like that is the bigger take away. Not that it "solves all problems" or "isn't good enough to be merged". But that we are arriving to a place where solutions can be good enough to solve the problem you have. Reminds me of early Github when custom and unique software became much more accessible to everyone. Way less digging or going without.

Totally agree. I've found in many cases it's easier to roll your own software/patch existing software with AI than to open an issue, submit a PR, get it reviewed/merged, etc. Let alone buying software

Yes, but this is the honeymoon period. A year from now when you want to make three of the tools talk to each other and they're in three different languages, two of which you don't know and there's no common interface or good place to put one, well, here's hoping you hung onto the design documents.

Maybe I'm just naive, but I've been making lots of my 'vibe-coded' tools interoperable already.

My assumption is that eventually the VC-backed gravy train of low-cost good-quality LLM compute is going to dry-up, and I'm going to have to make do with what I got out of them.

What I want is to be able to use AI to modify the software we already have. Granted I've wanted to do that long before AI, but now maybe plugins will get more popular again now that AI could write them for us

I’m imagining a world where everyone was using emacs/lisp or Smalltalk VMs, and what kind of world-improving insanity we could be sharing through LLMs.

Funnily enough, this will make many "tragedy of the commons" / "Goodhart's law hacking" problems more tractable.

Right now, there's only one Google algorithm, one Amazon search and so on. The moment you let agents run wild, each with a different model, prompt and memory, effectively introducing randomness into the process, it becomes much harder to optimize for "metric go up."

we've seen what "no barrier of entry" marketplaces look like...

Quality go down.

That is only true at the start.

The quality will always be lower for a new product/ production line, because 1) it hasn't had the time to iterate that got the established, big-name producers to where they are, and 2) it democratizes the market to allow for lower-quality version that weren't fiscally feasible under a more complex (and thus expensive) manufacturing/ production base.

But after the market normalizes, it will start to naturally weed out the price-divorced low-quality products, as people will figure out which ones are shitty even for their price, and the good-for-their-price ones will remain.

Eventually you'll end up with a wider range of quality products than you started with, at a wider range (especially at the low end, making products more accessible) than when it started.

High barrier of entry marketplaces only benefit big companies who don't want to actually compete to stay on top.

Tying it back to the discussion here...

Sure, AI will produce a million shitty Google clones, but no one is using them but their makers. Eventually the good ones will start to inch up in users as word gets around, and eventually one might actually make an inroad that Google has to take note of.

Thus creating a concentration on which is the best personal Google clone and thus, creating another Google. Walled paywall and all. It’s a cycle.

Free and open marketplace, crapware. Crapware for long enough, goodware. Goodware so good, it needs hardware, it needs integrations, it solves world hunger, but no one uses anything else anymore.

No, the best are marketplaces that are open but moderated for quality.

Moderated by who? A company who owns the 'marketplace'/ app store? A government whose politicians get election money or favor companies that employ their constituents?

There is no such thing 'moderated for quality' when authority is at play, only 'moderated for control'.

Quality-first requires free association, which requires a free market.

But people don’t actually want to just build it themselves - they never have, and I don’t see any reason to believe they ever will.

I think Greasemonkey scripts to fix the websites you use is an interesting area too. My bank now supports OFX exports because Claude vibecoded me an extractor for it in 10m.

Lots of unaudited and battle tested software. Sounds like a nightmare.

This is honestly one of the more naive takes I've seen in awhile. People includes more than people that frequent HN. My wife and I are discussing I'd like to keep finance and related things in a password manager. She is in the social sciences (has a couple of degrees) and isn't a fan.

The majority of computer users are not on HN.

You profile says "Trying to figure out what I want to do with my life. DM me if you have ideas." - I would recommend exploring connections and opinions outside tech.

why would F500 FAANG type orgs ever want the consumer to create their own software?

how will stock prices rise, outside of the one holder of the AI?

They won't build software, they'll let some AI-based software do the execution of their instructions (which is inefficient, opaque, vendor-locked, not reproducible etc.)

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