alt Hacker News"Why isn't there better software available?" is the 900 pound gorilla in the LLM room, but I do think there are enough anecdotes now to hypothesize that what agents seem to be good at is writing software that
1. wasn't economical to write in the first place previously, and
2. doesn't need to be sold to anyone else or maintained over time
So, Brad in logistics previously had to collate scanned manifests with purchase requests once a month, but now he can tell Claw to do it for him.
Which is interesting given the talk of The End of Software Development or whatever because "software that nobody was willing to pay for previously" kind of by definition isn't going to displace a lof of people who make software.
I do agree with this fully. I think LLMs have utility in making the creation of bad software extremely accessible. Bad software that happens to perfectly match some person's super specific need is by no means a bad thing to have in the world. A gap has been filled in creating niche software that previously was not worth paying anyone to create. But every single day we have multiple articles here proclaiming the end of software engineering, and I just don't get how the people hyping this up reconcile their hype with the lack of software being produced by agents that is good enough to replace any of the software people actually pay for.