Hacker News Reader

Comment by jugg1es | Hacker News Reader

I've been worried for some time now that genAI will effectively kill the market for dev tools and so we will be stuck with our current dev tools for a long time. If everyone is using LLMs to write code, the only dev tools anyone will use will be the ones that the LLMs use. We will be stuck with NPM forever.

View on HN

I think the opposite may be true. If dev tools are broken and it annoys someone, they can more easily build a better architecture, find optimizations and release something that is in all ways better. People have been annoyed with pip forever, but it was the team behind uv that took on pip's flaws as a primary concern and made a better product.

I think having a pain point and a good concept (plus some eng chops) will result in many more dev tools - that may be cause different problems, but in general, I think more action is better than less.

this is exactly what I mean though. Instead of the community building a better tool that we collectively contribute to and work with, genAI is going to silo all the good stuff with individual developers and teams instead. Because its so cheap to create these tools, no one is going to bother publishing new ones for everyone, so we will essentially be stuck with what we have forever now.

What kind of tools do you have on your mind specifically? My experience is that LLM can create me a decent dev tool that I wouldn't ever bother making so nice myself.

IDEs, graphical debuggers, etc.

It's extremely weird that 40 years after TurboPascal, 30 years after Delphi and VBA, we've only regressed in terms of truly integrated development environments.

Heck, even programming languages have regressed. Python and Javascript are less type safe than Java circa 2005. Even though we have technology needed to make type safe languages much more ergonomic, since then.

On the other hand, LLM will force most languages to either become as masochistic as Rust with restricted clippy, or disappear.

Python is not going to survive once people start figuring out it's much easier to keep LLM agent in check if language actively fights back.

thats an interesting take on python. I think I might agree with you

Reply on news.ycombinator.com