Building quality software with LLMs is still very time-consuming. The vast majority of people are not going to bother, regardless of how low the bar to entry is, because time is not free. That and making software is not interesting to most people, for the same reason assembling electronics is not interesting to most people. It's a niche interest with limited mass appeal. For those two reasons, the software profession will survive AI.
> The vast majority of people are not going to bother, regardless of how low the bar to entry is, because time is not free.
You need a certain amount of thinking capacity at the user end to be able to understand, plan and envision a semi-complex functional software, regardless of who will produce it.
We (my company) have a corporate LoB ‘base’ which has, collected over the odd 40 years, any process you could imagine and using that we just look at large corps to their processes and offer to automate, on departmental level so they don’t need board approval nor IT dep approval to pay for it. SOTA AI can do this in a day or two with our base, almost on its own and we charge just below the departmental budgets for it. We have to send in nasty sarcastic ‘project managers/sales guys’ to the many meetings as of course these middle managers want to be seen as useful so these meetings are objectively useless to us but required misery anyway. They (meatspace meetings) are of course now far more expensive than the (just) tech part, even if you value the framework at some $ licensing and SLA cost.
These corps, and they are mostly multinationals, mostly owned by US, IN or CN owners and literally all their IT deps absolutely stink; stuck on Java or C# from 20 years ago with 0 incentive to improve or learn anything; they heard about AI but don’t use it for anything.
This is gravy train, worth billions in whatever region if you manage to get in at the right level. Not sure it will last as, in my experience, most of these people in those departments can be replaced by a LLM running on an iPhone today and LoB apps are pretty boring if you have one solid consultant who has a few decades knowledge; they must be training LLMs to do just that?
This problem is not new. The new thing is that anyone can understand the core problem they’re trying to solve without involving a dev team by quick ideation and rapid prototyping.
Just as always, it’s then up to the company to prioritize what to focus on - Just like how it’s always been.
* Don't hold onto an idea or prompt output just because you spent time on it.
* Writing code is easy. Maintaining it is hard.
* If it doesn’t save time or generate revenue, it’s just an expense.
It's also worth pointing out how many businesses have always had a dev team that can rapidly prototype regardless of AI usage.
They tend to be the largest businesses (outside of SV) that employ the majority of people in the USA. They are also the least likely to really use AI for much other than copilot in MS Teams.
I have spent the better part of the last decade of my career being approached by executives asking me how to optimize or automate away services that I felt had reached a local optimum. Each time this was the case I would gently express that our options were to commodify, by offering a kind of template, the service or optimize the process and way we gathered information from clients. Without fail, they hated the latter option. It was hard to do, and it implied that any number of people needed to do a lot better at their job in seemingly abstract ways. No, they’d always go for the template, then be dissatisfied by the fact that it’s, well, a template! Finally, they’d go back to begging me for alternatives.
This feels like them doubling down yet again. It’s like looking at your personal finances and trying to optimize it by canceling Netflix instead of acknowledging that you eat out 7 days a week.
I feel it's more nuanced than this, at least for now.
It's true to say anyone can build software, but that doesn't make the software good and it's not true to say that's specifically reliant on taste.
As an example I am working with an Entrepreneur right now who has no coding experience but have successfully made a product which they have also already sold to a mid sized company.
However without my involvement and knowing the right levers to craft the AI the software just wasn't performing how it needed to despite the latest frontier models trying their hardest to achieve what he was stating.
At least for now there's still a need for experienced devs.
"Years later the line of business asked for longitudinal reporting, cross-domain aggregation, and planning. The tool integrated with nothing, extended to nothing, had no underlying data platform, could not scale, and had to be rebuilt from scratch."
Any project that takes 2 weeks effort and lasts years (since it doesn't say how many, I read it as 3-5) delivering value is a win. That it needed to be thrown away? That's a couple of people out sick.
It seems like the author is pitching topological teams and responsible engineer concepts, sprinkled with decision governance.
None of that is really new, but it’s the chaos of silos, narrow decision frames and lack of detailed understanding by decision makers which probably accentuates the adoption of new concepts.
I love how every one of these "how do we cope now" essays makes the assumption that the progress has now stopped, and what we currently have is what needs to be adapted to.
Humanity really does not want to look at what is happening.
HA! I'm of the belief that it is impossible to predict other than it's going to keep improving.
If you read this essay, you see quickly that his implicit assumption is that this is now the way things will remain. It is literally insane, given what we are seeing.
> What should we be doing instead?
I have no idea. No one does. This is a runaway train.
I guess being out of control is so intolerable to some people that their minds will not accept it.
When anyone can buy legal forms from an office supply store or make photocopies from books, why pay for a lawyer and who decides what needs a contract anyway?
That was likely a real question that got some debate in the 20th century only further compounded by the internet by the end of that century. Guess what? We still have lawyers.
I think creative analysts may have a brighter future than programmers. When almost anyone can build software, the real skill shifts from knowing how to build something to understanding what is worth building in the first place. Creativity, judgement, curiosity and the ability to see consequences may become far more valuable than simply being able to write code.
Product design also becomes more important. You can build a new UX every day but your userbase can only handle a new UX or two every year, so creating and validating good ideas and strategies becomes more valuable.
Or just entrepreneurs - people willing to take a risk to build something, and effort to promote / sell / hustle. They have always done well as a group, and now they are likely to shine even more.
(I am empathically not one of those so times are getting even more interesting for me :)
You need a certain amount of thinking capacity at the user end to be able to understand, plan and envision a semi-complex functional software, regardless of who will produce it.
These corps, and they are mostly multinationals, mostly owned by US, IN or CN owners and literally all their IT deps absolutely stink; stuck on Java or C# from 20 years ago with 0 incentive to improve or learn anything; they heard about AI but don’t use it for anything.
This is gravy train, worth billions in whatever region if you manage to get in at the right level. Not sure it will last as, in my experience, most of these people in those departments can be replaced by a LLM running on an iPhone today and LoB apps are pretty boring if you have one solid consultant who has a few decades knowledge; they must be training LLMs to do just that?
Just as always, it’s then up to the company to prioritize what to focus on - Just like how it’s always been.
* Don't hold onto an idea or prompt output just because you spent time on it.
* Writing code is easy. Maintaining it is hard.
* If it doesn’t save time or generate revenue, it’s just an expense.
* Output does not equal value.
They tend to be the largest businesses (outside of SV) that employ the majority of people in the USA. They are also the least likely to really use AI for much other than copilot in MS Teams.
This feels like them doubling down yet again. It’s like looking at your personal finances and trying to optimize it by canceling Netflix instead of acknowledging that you eat out 7 days a week.
It's true to say anyone can build software, but that doesn't make the software good and it's not true to say that's specifically reliant on taste.
As an example I am working with an Entrepreneur right now who has no coding experience but have successfully made a product which they have also already sold to a mid sized company.
However without my involvement and knowing the right levers to craft the AI the software just wasn't performing how it needed to despite the latest frontier models trying their hardest to achieve what he was stating.
At least for now there's still a need for experienced devs.
Any project that takes 2 weeks effort and lasts years (since it doesn't say how many, I read it as 3-5) delivering value is a win. That it needed to be thrown away? That's a couple of people out sick.
None of that is really new, but it’s the chaos of silos, narrow decision frames and lack of detailed understanding by decision makers which probably accentuates the adoption of new concepts.
Humanity really does not want to look at what is happening.
If you read this essay, you see quickly that his implicit assumption is that this is now the way things will remain. It is literally insane, given what we are seeing.
> What should we be doing instead?
I have no idea. No one does. This is a runaway train.
I guess being out of control is so intolerable to some people that their minds will not accept it.
— Lao Tzu
>When almost anyone can build software, the organizations that win will not be the ones that build the most
It's not possible to A/B test a huge amount of software. The sample size of the real world is not that big.
Let me illustrate with a similarly dumb question:
When anyone can buy legal forms from an office supply store or make photocopies from books, why pay for a lawyer and who decides what needs a contract anyway?
That was likely a real question that got some debate in the 20th century only further compounded by the internet by the end of that century. Guess what? We still have lawyers.
(I am empathically not one of those so times are getting even more interesting for me :)