alt Hacker NewsIn my lifetime software has given us:
* the ability to find essentially any information ever created by anyone anywhere at anytime,
* the ability to communicate with anyone on Earth over any distance instantaneously in audio, video, or text,
* the ability to order any product made anywhere and have it delivered to our door in a day or two,
* the ability to work with anyone across the world on shared tasks and projects, with no need for centralized offices for most knowledge work.
That was a massive undertaking with many permutations requiring lots of software written by lots of people.
But it's largely done now. Software consumes a significant fraction of all waking hours of almost everyone on Earth. New software mainly just competes with existing software to replace attention. There's not much room left to expand the market.
So it's difficult to see the value of LLMs that can generate even more software even faster. What value is left to provide for users?
LLMs themselves have the potential to offering staggering economic value, but only at huge social cost: replacing human labor on scales never seen before.
All of that to say, maybe this is the reason so much time is being spent on meta-work today than on actual software engineering.
Replies
> the ability to find essentially any information ever created by anyone anywhere at anytime,
Except from. You know, books. And all the websites die pretty fast. At an insane rate.
> the ability to communicate with anyone on Earth over any distance instantaneously in audio, video, or text,
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jimbokun
No contact info, intentionally.
>* the ability to order any product made anywhere and have it delivered to our door in a day or two,
You can buy the same things from a thousand stores with 99% asking many times what it costs.
>* the ability to work with anyone across the world on shared tasks and projects, with no need for centralized offices for most knowledge work.
Again, in theory yes. I wish it was all true, and it should be. But it isn't, sadly.
> But it's largely done now
Somehow I doubt that. The monkey is never satisfied.
I see the next really big task for software as the ability to separate the signal from the noise. Sifting the wheat from the chaff has gone from a 'nice to have' to 'rescue my sanity'.
Maybe agents and AI in general will help with that. Maybe it will just make the problem worse.
> So it's difficult to see the value of LLMs that can generate even more software even faster. What value is left to provide for users?
I know a half dozen people who've created working software in the past month to solve a problem nothing else solved as well as what they made themselves. Software developers have finally automated themselves out of a job.
(I still think it's interesting that this requires pre-existing languages, libraries, etc, so this might not work in the future. But at least for now, we now have "Visual Basic" without the need for the visual part)
> What value is left to provide for users?
Everything and anything people actually want or need, whether it’s every day or just for five minutes, that nobody else could be bothered to make.
Today most won’t know what to do with it, just like they didn’t know what to do with a web browser.
But that won’t last.
I’m not sophisticated enough to enjoy abstract art. Maybe AI will bring abstract software projects to the world next.
I can imagine all the people staring at these software projects amazed at the genius it must have taken to create them. :)
"Everything That Can Be Invented Has Been Invented"
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2023/06/23/invented/
The actual quote from 1884 seems to have been: "The advancement of the arts, from year to year, taxes our credulity, and seems to presage the arrival of that period when human improvement must end." - Henry L. Ellsworth
Either way we have a lot of things but it's not quite STTNG yet. There's no limit to how much more we can do.
Not all software is competing for attention. The big win of automation is it frees your attention to do other things!
Agree. Productivity tools all the way down.
> So it's difficult to see the value of LLMs that can generate even more software even faster. What value is left to provide for users?
In the past two or three days I generated an interactive disk usage crawler tailored to my operating system and my needs. I have audited essentially none of the code, merely providing vision and detailed explanations of the user experience and algorithms that I want, and yet got back an interactive TUI application that does what I want with tons of tests and room to easily expand. I plan to audit the code more deeply soon to get it into a shape I'd be more comfortable open-sourcing. One thing agents suck at is meaningful DRY.
> What value is left to provide for users?
A spreadsheet editor with at most a couple of hundred MBs in size that can compete against Excel, for example. While also not eating from RAM resources. The same goes for a new browser and a new browser engine, it's time for Chrome to have a real competitor, it has become a mess. I can of other such examples, but these are the 2 biggest ones.
I have watched artists thoughtfully integrate digital lighting and the like at a scale I'd never seen before the LLMs rolled up and made it possible to get programs to work without knowing how to program.
The fundamental ceiling of what an LLM can do when connected to an IDE is incredible, and orders of magnitude higher than the limits of any no-code / low-code platform conceived thus far. "Democratizing" software - where now the only limits are your imagination, tenacity, and ability to keep the bots aligned with your vision, is allowing incredible things that wouldn't have happened otherwise because you now don't strictly need to learn to program for a programming-involved art project to work out.
Should you learn how to code if you're doing stuff like that? Absolutely. But is it letting people who have no idea about computing dabble their feet in and do extremely impressive stuff for the low cost of $20/month? Also yes.