alt Hacker NewsSoftware products are about unique competitive value that grows over time. Products have it or not. AI produced software is like open source in a sense, you get something for free. But whose gonna get rich if everybody can just duplicate your product by asking AI to do it, again?
Think of investing in the stock market by asking AI to do all the trading, for you. Great maybe you make some money. But when everybody catches on that it is better to let the AI do the trading, then others's AI is gonna buy the same stocks as yours, and their price goes up. Less value for you.
Spot on. That's why so far all of the supposed solutions to 'the programmer problem' have failed.
Whether this time it will be different I don't know. But originally compilers were supposed to kill off the programmers. Then it was 3G and 4G languages (70's, 80's). Then it was 'no code' which eventually became 'low code' because those pesky edge cases kept cropping up. Now it is AI, the 'dark factory' and other fearmongering. I'll believe it when I see it.
Another HN'er has pointed me into an interesting direction that I think is more realistic: AI will become a tool in the toolbox that will allow experts to do what they did before but faster and hopefully better. It will also be the tool that will generate a ton of really, really bad code that people will indeed not look at because they can not afford to look at it: you can generate more work for a person in a few seconds of compute time than you can cover in a lifetime. So you end up with half baked buggy and insecure solutions that do sort of work on the happy path but that also include a ton of stuff that wasn't supposed to be there in the first place but that wasn't explicitly spelled out in the test set (which is a pretty good reflection of my typical interaction with AI).
The whole thing hinges on whether or not that can be fixed. But I'm looking forward to reading someone's vibe coded solution that is in production at some presumably secure installation.
I'm going to bet that 'I blame the AI' is a pattern what we will be seeing a lot of.