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Comment by threatofrain | Hacker News Reader

Why ask such extreme stuff? Why not ask about the solo entrepreneur who creates a convincing iOS app without a programming background? Advantage the problem on the side of ML and look for winning scenarios today.

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because this comment is responding to: "I think the field is basically over as a long term career unless you are truly exceptional. It will become very easy to build most software"

photoshop, paypal, and many more companies etc. have software of vast complexity that cannot be reproduced or maintained today solely with llms, ipso facto you still need software developers or some similar role to build and maintain the complexity of _yesterday_

some guy shipping an iOS app to zero users doesn't change that. although i think it is good we can have more bespoke software.

You aren’t getting it. They can pay their engineers half what they used to, you don’t need the same level of skill to build photoshop. Yes, you need a bunch of engineers, but they will be driving coding agents, not writing code by hand. They can be hired and fired for cheap

Until the VC subsidies stop and the human devs are half the cost of the claude tokens lol

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law

Moore's Law covers transistors, not LLMs.

Moore's Law hasn't covered transistors in quite some time.

We get about 10% YoY now, which is actually impressive, but not even close to the past experiences. Computing power used to take 18 months to double, and was being attacked at a bunch of different angles.

Now we are literally out of tricks, to the point where we had to undo some of those tricks because they were fundamentally flawed, and it takes 100x the engineering investment to get that 10% YoY, or sometimes only every other year, and that isn't going to continue for much longer.

We can't increase clock speed much. We can't increase density much. We are out of clever tricks. It takes an entire earth's worth of human talent just to produce the machine that produces the chips. How the hell are people still insisting that computing power continues to follow Moore's Law?

Several of the limits we've hit are fundamental matters of physics.

Meanwhile, LLMs ask for orders of magnitude more compute than is cheap and cheerful right now. Do we even have a single order of magnitude left for compute?

It won't be photoshop then. It will be shitty, buggy clunky app that costed a (major) fraction to develop but it will also earn a fraction. Companies like MS can afford this ie with Office suite but patience of markets and customers can allow them to go only so far, if ie Excel becomes semi-useless thats the end of Office and big cash cow for M$ (I'd say about time, that monopoly is not good for consumers at all).

This is in a way the same argument that all companies will use just boxed (albeit customized) software. In reality many, ie banks run their own custom software and for good reasons. Wake me up (in retirement) when any major bank decides to run their finances, regulatory stuff and transactions on llm-generated stuff made by underpaid devs like you describe.

This is cope, ai coding agents will follow the path of self driving cars. They will be watched with extreme caution, but will slowly but surely expand outwards. Eventually manually writing code will be considered a dangerous/bug introducing act

If AI coding agents follow the same path then any software engineer over 25yo can peacefully continue working for 30 years until the tech is capable. The comparison is futile…

I've yet to see this apply with self-driving cars.

Eventually pigs will fly. Oh look anyone can just say ridiculous things will happen with no proof, and mentioning self driving cars does not help your case at all.

>They will be watched with extreme caution

We're doing a great job of that right now, aren't we?

I was told that private car ownership would be a thing of the past by 2025. Somehow it is 2026 now, and there is not a single (true) self driving car near where I live.

Self driving cars are deterministic models and are missing real world data to train on to increase their accuracy.

LLMs are non-deterministic so any interaction with them is a bug inducing act by definition because you don't know what you're gonna get.

And today the line for amateur capability is being drawn at eager entrepreneur making an app on the back of Supabase and Lovable. The fact that iOS apps have zero users owes far more to sales and marketing than to software, so maybe that's where we should be putting our focus?

What can a mid level person do? Instead of a consultancy loaning out a team of 3-4 people, it might just be one person now. That could mean a lot of downsizing.

One thing mid level people wouldn't be counted on to do was create Photoshop or Paypal. The original thread is about top level pros being the ones who stay in the industry, right? That sounds about right if we're moving the conversation over to Photoshop and Paypal.

this is a more reasonable argument IMO, but i would still disagree that that means only the top level pros stay for a few reasons (although it might happen / is already happening in the short term):

- if it is true that AI enhances our abilities it just means the goal posts move of what was expected for each level

- the complexity ceiling will rise for the level a superstar or a company is capable of maintaining, meaning there will still be stratified complexities for the mid levels of old to handle, it might just be higher than before

- counter intuitively but time and again increased software creation more often than not increases demand for more software rather than decreases

if the world decides it has no more problems to solve with software, then we are in trouble. i don't think that is happening anytime soon.

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