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Comment by deadbabe | Hacker News Reader

What's there to advance to?

Without a revolutionary new platform to build apps on that no one has ever developed for before, there is basically no reason to believe there is any software left that has some business or economic value that hasn't already been written.

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This gives "let's close the patent office"

> This gives "let's close the patent office"

This is a really good idea for completely different reasons. :-)

This is probably true in the consumer facing software space. But in business, industry, and academia, often there are novel data generated by some new or refined process. And this needs new software that correctly handles both the nature of these new data and meet the goals the data is collected to advance. This sort of software is also usually poorly represented in training sets, if represented at all.

If you think we're "done", you have no imagination.

What are you gonna make? Yet another CRUD app? An API subscription? A game? A mobile app?

We’ve created software for virtually every place we can put software. There’s nothing new.

It’s like bridges. We’ve seen all the ways bridges can be built by now. There’s nothing new left to discover.

Why did we even need bridges in the first place

When Gutenberg invented the printing press, he could not have predicted the teleprompter. Now that code is easy to generate, it’s plausible that we will use much, much more of it than before.

It’s also a bit ironic to imagine that we’re at the end of new software ideas on a site owned(?) by YC.

it's also plausible that with an ability to generate as much code as we want with little effort, we will quickly discover how much code we actually need, and then plateau at that point.

Personally, I think we've already reached that point.

Even at YC, I have not really seen any startup doing anything interesting where their main value prop is enabled by new proprietary code that does stuff no one else can already do.

We have more code than we need. Proof for me is every "smart" device that worked better before we put a computer in it.

Exactly, this is the true problem with the world today: too much code.

Are teleprompters a net positive achievement? They were needed for live television, they will be superseded I guess by AI generated news avatars. And 24-hour news coverage is in the business of generating content non-stop, to sell advertisements, regardless if there are newsworthy events or not, the machine never stops producing.

> There’s nothing new left to discover.

It's the end of history. What could we possibly discover about a series of technologies that are already nearly 100 years old now?

I've heard people say that various things are "solved" now because of LLMs too -- programming included. This implies we've "solved" thinking. I'm worried about these sentiments.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End_of_history

Mature tech evolves more slowly. Think about cars, there's nothing new about them any more. But wait, what about electic cars? Aren't they a new thing? And driverless cars. And soon flying taxis. Automobiles are an old invention but they are still evolving.

The reason the evolution of cars has slowed down so much is mostly regulatory compliance.

With the current ongoing revolution in home manufacturing (starting with 3D printing; currently there is a lot of work done in home CNC machining), it would be easily possible to get a huge leap towards "print your own car".

The reason why you see nothing of this is basically red tape.

Well, a short time ago somebody made the first LLM. Was that the end of it?

this implies that the only thing that can change what needs doing are technology platforms, which about 6000 years of human civilization would indicate is not the case.

that you don't see this as inevitable worries me dearly

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