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Comment by quietbritishjim | Hacker News Reader

The problem with this analogy (actually one of many) is that most people can make do with a cabinet that is literally identical to everyone else's. IKEA is great for that.

If you want software that is literally identical to what someone else is using then you don't need AI. You need a license to that software! That is just the traditional software model.

AI gives software that is bespoke with hundreds of decisions made, hidden from you, in the background. If it's a throwaway script, that's fine (and I don't mean to undersell this - this is a huge application). If you want a larger program that is going to form part of your business process then it will need at least some level of supervision from an actual expert.

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I think the issue with your rebuttal is that companies think they have a very specific problem that needs solving, so they need bespoke software. Just read on the various HN posts where people complain about PMs moving things around for no reason other than justifying their jobs.

Yep. And it's not just PMs.

Everyone with any responsibility for picking any software in a company will work very hard to make things harder and more expensive, rather than easier.

People will ask for a 100k-year app, or whatever is the Ferrari of their business. If they don't get it, they will ask for the complex features they saw in that 100k-year software package, even if they won't use it.

If it internal software, they will ask you to develop it. If it's another vendor, they will complain until they get what they want, increasing the cost. If it's vibe-coded, they will try to prompt that until it becomes a mess.

I had this with all sorts of people: HR, Sales, translators, artists, marketers, data analysts, testers. Even software engineers are obsessed with having the "most complete" in the shape of Amazon AWS and things like that.

The only situation where I didn't see this happening was in startups where people are actually busy.

> The only situation where I didn't see this happening was in startups where people are actually busy.

FWIW you still see this, it just tends to not survive for too long.

Yeah, that's true. Eventually you get the second batch of people who insist on doing things their way, and then that culture slowly dies.

I haven't seen any company recover from that, ever. Once they balloon to 250, 500, 1000, 2000 employees, any attempt to recover by injecting new blood is futile, you only burn out the new blood and enrages the people in the new culture. Then it dies.

This happened to a company I worked for, whose domain just expired this week, I will probably purchase them.

Depends on the business. I can easily see Generic Local Späti being fine to replace a mediocre hand-made spreadsheet of what products they've got in stock with a vibe-coded database that can OCR all the business copy of receipts from the till, while also vibe-coding a website and logo that's far less bad than the thing they got by asking their kid's schoolfriend to make both of them on the cheap in the 2015 summer holiday.

Most businesses are small. Most of the employment isn't in small businesses.

> OCR all the business copy of receipts from the till,

I would not do this at all. OCR is still very bad. If you want incorrect dollar figures be my guest.

Sure, but I'm not suggesting it's good-good, I'm drawing a comparison with "a mediocre hand-made spreadsheet".

We live in a world where some genes had to be renamed because Excel evaluated their original names as dates, and genetics researchers used Excel anyway. Isn't there at least a reasonable risk of this happening with a random SKU, too?

> it will need at least some level of supervision from an actual expert.

An expert? An expert or two? Maybe a few experts? Sure, even that is a lot less than how many we use today. Therein lies the issue.

Yeah, the analogy is more applicable to reusable software that used to be hand-crafted. For example many enterprise systems like ERPs, CRMs, CMSs, etc.

Even in that space there is still plenty of hand-crafted solutions or customization to the enterprise-system that might as well be hand-crafted solutions.

> If you want software that is literally identical to what someone else is using then you don't need AI. You need a license to that software! That is just the traditional software model.

isnt this the software model that AI is gonna kill over time? You dont need to pay a recurring license fee when you vibe code up a free tier alternative and never do maintenance on it

Depends on if code is the value. Which is rarely is to the consumer. Coding isn't the bottleneck for a better Twitter/Facebook, even if the backend behind it does demand proper code. Code isn't really the bottle neck for GTA6. Code isn't why your Netflix service gets worse by the years.

> If you want software that is literally identical ... If it's a throwaway script, that's fine (and I don't mean to undersell this - this is a huge application).

That is the application. AppleScript, VB script, IFTT - and how many drag and drop dev tools has the industry built that were supposed to be for average office workers?

Programers are like master carpenters, and the debates we keep having sum up to joinery and how a chair leg gets turned. Meanwhile there are lots of people slapping up 2x4 and plywood shelves in their garage and bootstrapping their businesses with that.

AI is changing the "is it worth your time" calculation (https://xkcd.com/1205/ ) it's delivering on the promise of all those scripting languages that were supposed to help office drones.

it's ~~delivering on~~ jumping on the bandwagon of the promise of all those scripting languages that were supposed to help office drones.

Not to overtax the original metaphor but /r/ikeahackers exists for a reason. Giving people fittings and hardware that all more or less work together and a bunch of reasonably high quality fiber boards is often enough to build quite a lot of bespoke stuff. Add a bit of paint and you can (and people have) build gorgeous interiors while saving a considerable amount of money.

I'm not a Luddite or a drooling evangelist; my take on AI coding is basically that it's a good accelerator if you already know the shape of what you want, and have the software engineering fundamentals to build it yourself. I find myself building a lot more stuff these days because I don't have to wrangle HTML and CSS; it's one of those things I know I can do myself but I absolutely hate, and translating designs from my brain to the browser is a horrible pain. But I know, for example, what flexbox is, so I can tell my coding agent that I want something in a certain shape, laid out with flexbox, and it handles the particulars.

I think we have to acknowledge that most software engineering is just putting mostly compatible fittings together to join mostly standard sized boards. That's okay, and unless you're doing something extremely specialized most of the time the standard solution is more than good enough. I've been loving Supabase recently as my backend for AI built things because it turns out that PostgREST is a great shape for >90% of the APIs I would normally build, and RLS handles auth modeling way more concisely than domain code, and it's very easily scriptable to do all the complicated business logic bits in a contained, testable way. It's not optimal, it's not elegant sometimes, but it's fine. Every other engineering discipline coalesced on standard operating procedures decades ago, maybe we software engineers have to swallow our pride a bit and start accepting them in our discipline too.

most people can make do with a cabinet that is literally identical to everyone else's

If you want software that is literally identical to what someone else is using then you don't need AI.

Hey GLM 4.6 – spot the load-bearing sleight of hand.

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