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nielsbottoday at 8:48 AM3 repliesview on HN

While there is still a market for artisanal furniture, dishes and clothes most people buy mass-produced dishes, clothes and furniture.

I wonder if software creation will be in a similar place. There still might be a small market for handmade software but the majority of it will be mass produced. (That is, by LLM or even software itself will mostly go away and people will get their work done via LLM instead of "apps")


Replies

Cthulhu_today at 8:59 AM

As with furniture, it's supply vs demand, and it's a discussion that goes back decades at this point.

Very few people (even before LLM coding tools) actually did low level "artisanal" coding; I'd argue the vast majority of software development goes into implementing features in b2b / b2c software, building screens, logins, overviews, detail pages, etc. That requires (required?) software engineers too, and skill / experience / etc, but it was more assembling existing parts and connecting them.

Years ago there was already a feeling that a lot of software development boiled down to taping libraries together.

Or from another perspective, replace "LLM" with "outsourcing".

pinkgolemtoday at 8:56 AM

I would argue the opposite..

What you get right now is mass replicated software, just another copy of sap/office/Spotify/whatever

That software is not made individually for you, you get a copy like millions of other people and there is nearly no market anymore for individual software.

Llms might change that, we have a bunch of internal apps now for small annoying things..

They all have there quirks, but are only accessible internally and make life a little bit easier for people working for us.

Most of them are one shot llms things, throw away if you do not need it anymore or just one shoot again

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intendedtoday at 9:24 AM

Acceptance of mass production is only post establishment of quality control.

Skipping over that step results in a world of knock offs and product failures.

People buy Zara or H&M because they can offload the work of verifying quality to the brand.

This was a major hurdle that mass manufacturing had to overcome to achieve dominance.

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