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> I think, is that everyone who needs small software to manage a todo list or synchronize files, or whatever "normal" people do, will end up with bespoke personalized software written by their own AI

People can't be bothered to cook for themselves, and often order crappy, unhealthy food that costs 10 times as much just so they don't have to cook.

Now they're going to build their own software every time they think they need an app..?

If they can do it from their couch by talking to their phone, they might.

While eating the junk food I was talking about :-D

They can be bothered to order food. The machine will figure out the rest with the help of other machines and the network

So, machines will allow ordering an app.

i assume the food will be made by machines too

Yeah, I think this will really be a thing. I have been using `exe.dev` lately, and I was at an AirBnB with my family where we wanted to play a game, but it needed pencil and paper for each person, but we didn't have those. I thought it would be nice to have a little web app where you could write your input and then vote on other people's responses directly from your phone. I just spun up a VM on exe.dev, asked the AI to write the app, and then made the VM public-facing. It was a little buggy, but it worked well enough and we had a fun time.

Do you think just anyone (now or soon) would be able to do what you needed to do to get that app specified and running?

Not yet. I did specify some specific things about the tech stack and the way I wanted pages outlined that I think helped it get on the right track. But I honestly didn't look at any of the code at all, even when there were a couple bugs that needed fixed. In the future, I'll bet they could.

Gemini at least will produce small functional inline sample apps without being explicitly told to, particularly if you're trying to learn about something, it'll produce an interactive diagram or similar. I can see a future where these kinds of end users aren't necessarily saying "I can build an app for this", but their AI can just produce one when appropriate.

I think this is an interesting analogy. If AI is really progressing as rapidly as some describe, should we expect a robotics renaissance with automated-chef appliances etc?

In other words, when will we really see a transition from "yet another token generator" to something that appears to coherently observe, perceive, form intent, plan, and act in a way that is compatible with an existing, long-running human context?

(And, also, do this with enough determinism to be a viable product and not some gaping liability...)

If these things happen, they will be privacy nightmares, just as our cars are becoming.

I agree, in practice.

In theory, they could be made to strictly compartmentalize their "memories" and exercise some kind of robot-client privilege. There could even be built-in, task-appropriate data-retention limits and anonymization algorithms to reduce the risk of leaks.

But instead, we should assume they will be made to remember too much and to send abusive levels of reconnaissance and other telemetry back to their parent companies. Because anything less is "leaving money on the table" and that has become the greatest sin of all... :-(

> Now they're going to build their own software every time they think they need an app..?

As others have said, this will be more like ordering food than "building". It's not there yet, but soon-ish it might be.

the thing is they won't need to "cook" anymore to get it done. they can just... describe what they want to eat.

"Tea, Earl Grey, Hot"

I feel the same way about bespoke software as I do about 3D printing. For a small subset of people who like to tinker it is amazing, but there is a pretty big market for paying other people to please to 3D print for you.

For technical people who are developers or in other technical roles, sure. For everyone else, no way.

The hard part isn't the code, for most problems it never was. The hard part is being able to think logically about what problem you are trying to solve, making sure the guardrails are in place so you don't accidentally wipe your whole photo library, and staying on top of the specs for multiple walled gardens that you want to interface with. In short, maintenance.

Building is fun, maintaining is a slog. This is also why saas isn't going anywhere. There is a benefit from not reinventing the wheel, having a shared language and shared ecosystem.

On the other hand, I do think that the software that is going to succeed is the software that is the easiest to build on top of.

3D printing is similar but also a vastly smaller market than information systems. 100% of businesses need information systems, but only a small percentage need custom plastic components.

(Actually I would argue every business past a tiny size should have access to a 3D printer, it can save a lot of money in subtle ways, though its rarely business-critical)

> The end state, I think, is that everyone who needs small software to manage a todo list or synchronize files, or whatever "normal" people do, will end up with bespoke personalized software written by their own AI.

I think you're right here. Even for myself, AI has enabled me to actually finish a plethora of personal projects that I've always wanted to built but just never bothered.

These aren't things to share, nor would they be particularly useful to others necessarily, but now I actually have the time to make a little custom utility for very specific problems.

I still think it remains to be seen if "normal" people will do this though. Like, yeah I managed to replace a ton of little paid macOS utilities with my own software now, but AI still only got me about ~90% or so of the way there. I still had to rely on my own knowledge and experience to finish them.

Very impressive, but still a far cry from, say, the average user at my employer who struggles to even operate a non-mobile OS, being able to do this. Maybe we'll get there eventually, but for that to happen, the agent needs to be able to make these utilities 100% on its own with a very vague prompt, and be able to infer what the user actually wants when they don't (and they won't) explicitly state every use case they have in mind.

Slightly off topic, but it feels cyberpunk to me in a way. In those stories, everybody always has their own bespoke technology stack:

NullVoid added the traffic cam feed to his HUD so he could make his deliveries faster"

That sort of thing. In the stories, it makes you think that everyone is just some sort of genius, but we're kind of heading there where anybody can, theoretically, create a personalized tech stack with the help of a programming agent.

I haven't put a lot of energy into it, but your first paragraph triggered that thought.

I agree we have more software than most people want, but I don't think bespoke software is the answer. Sure, that is an interesting new area that AI makes possible, but I don't think it's more than a niche because people don't fundamentally want software, they want certain problems to be solved, and if AI creates a custom solution and it doesn't work, they won't be able to get help from anyone. More fundamentally, there is value in standardization and polish on well-worn paths. Even if you're right and people do end up with personal AI driving everything, I still think the lower layers need to be standardized because of the nature of distributed data. For example, you still need to talk to your bank to get your financial state and automate any payments, and that stuff has to be rigorous, with strong consistency and accounting guarantees.

For these reasons, I think people are overestimating the end-state impact of AI. Right now the hype cycle is fierce, and it definitely changes the economics of producing software (with a lot of negative effects forcing adjustments in open source ways of working), but I don't think in the end state the core landscape of software changes all that much. Well worn and hardened infrastructure like the Linux kernel is infinitely more valuable than CRUD apps used with small user populations on the edge. User space libraries and frameworks fall somewhere in between. AI increases the volume of new software, yes, but I see it as mostly fractal bits filling in the margins.

> The end state, I think, is that everyone who needs small software to manage a todo list or synchronize files, or whatever "normal" people do, will end up with bespoke personalized software written by their own AI. SWEs will be reduced to working on only the big corporate projects.

I think you vastly overestimate the amount of B2C software and underestimate the amount of B2B and “internal” software. Consider also how much more complex “business” processes are than “personal” processes.

This has "why pay for Dropbox" vibes.

I am tired of reading this comment

Its a HN truism, now, though.

I think it now has a slightly different lens. The DropBox argument was that anyone can build this in five minutes, so why use this? Now, with LLMs, the argument is that anyone can build its own.

I have to say I find it pretty funny.

I don't. Do you?

This is like saying we only need 100 websites when the internet came out. We have no idea what second third fourth order effects of frictionless and abundance are. What you think is software itself will change.

I thought we were very close until recently but I’ve just seen a long string of very promising openings from myself and others turn into “yeh dunno, it doesn’t work, I gave up”.

The effort to start is way down and drives new demand for software (at least in my own portfolio of side projects) but the effort to keep going is still above this threshold.

> We already collectively produce more software than anyone really wants

You'll need to qualify that statement...

I agree with this more than the parent, but think about apps is probably too last generation. The rich don't use apps. They have assistants to do things and tell them what they need to know when they need to know it. AI is more likely to be like that type of assistant.

>We already collectively produce more software than anyone really wants, and the bulk of it is anywhere between garbage and outright fraud, if not actively malicious.

I think you're right in the second part of the quote, but the first doesn't follow.

The software space has moved from value propositions to grifts like crypto, but that has more to do with what investors are willing to fund than with user needs. Modest, sustainable businesses don't have the absurd levels of growth that's currently on demand.

Consumer perception is that everything's reducing in quality and increasing in price, digital or otherwise. It will have to give at some point.

I do this already scraping web sites for descriptions of what they provide and then tell the agent to build the part I want and nothing more. There's a lot broken about the web and software today that can be addressed by these agents. Just getting a newsfeed of news I want to read free of the mandatory click and enrage bait would be progress for me IMO. But I'd never ship a product that did that because of how Google treated ad-blockers on chrome.

Really? People will just have their AI build OCR apps for converting handwritten notes (with equations) into LaTex, transcription apps for spoken language-to-text for understanding foreign language speakers, custom audio apps for recording and playing music files, etc.?

This sounds good. But technically it seems highly implausible, just as a thriving human civilization on Mars sounds highly implausible. Nice plot for a sci-fi novel though.

>Really? People will just have their AI build OCR apps for converting handwritten notes (with equations) into LaTex, transcription apps for spoken language-to-text for understanding foreign language speakers, custom audio apps for recording and playing music files, etc.?

Yes.

With a tiny subset of people building core modules and libs to be used for the above (eg. an OCR module, plenty of which already exist, and an AI can trivially hook them with other functionality into an app form).

Most of what you write can be built already quite easily. An example "Custom audio apps for recording and playing music files"*:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qW4rIXft0Bg

> What matters is that it's personalized, free, and isn't an invasive surveillance/advertisement platform

This sounds like an utopian dream. The surveillance is baked into this AI built to create the software. It will be built into the platform used to host and run the software. Why wouldn't AWS want that sweet sweet data to train their models. How many people can really self host? You seem to be overestimating average people's ability to learn how to self host.

Its like saying "we have vaccine related information at our finger tips so there are no longer going to be vaccine skeptics". Existence of information doesn't necessarily lead to application of such information.

The other thing which I feel these kinds of utopian dreams miss is that if something is commoditized and you can't really tell the difference between software A and B - because of AI, there is more incentive for companies to form cliques and raise prices while still delivering commoditized terrible software.