alt Hacker NewsRegarding the argument about LLMs having difficulties auditing their work:
I wonder whether we are entering the era of throwaway software. Just like cheap plastics and improved processes has enabled us to rapidly manufacture anything we want for a very low price, maybe LLMs give us the same for software. Produce it cheaply and if it breaks throws it away and reproduce it.
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I'm sure this will become the standard. And plastic is an excellent analogy. Maybe we can take it a step further and compare it to on-demand 3D printing.
Why would anyone still use off-the-shelf software when they can have a system that has access to all data, can transform it into any form, and can export it in any format?
After years of thinking that I needed to develop a decent movie management system for my own films or a columnar browser for large CSV files, Claude and Qwen each delivered exactly what I needed in just a day.
Yes. It's fantastic for one-off tasks.
Does this make sense with economics of software though? Throwaway products compete with more durable versions of the same product because there is a cost per unit produced that can be minimized by using cheaper materials or production processes that cut corners. With software there is no cost per unit. There might be a market for one-off software that serves a very specific purpose where throwaway software can compete with adapting more carefully engineered software to that purpose, but I am not convinced there is a lot value in this market.
> Just like cheap plastics and improved processes has enabled us to rapidly manufacture anything we want for a very low price
Have they? Most of the world production is tied down to expensive factories and machines. Yes, we have more products, but that the result of the global trade, which is a very complex system.
> Produce it cheaply and if it breaks throws it away and reproduce it.
I don't know why everyone would ever wants this. It's been parroted since forever, but the true usefulness of software is to be able to build it once and runs it indefinitely. If some edge case occurs, I fix it. Which is way cheaper than rebuilding the whole thing. The goal is to have something like OpenBSD's ed[0] or dmesg[1], which you only touch every few years or so
[0] https://github.com/openbsd/src/commits/master/bin/ed
[1] https://github.com/openbsd/src/commits/master/sbin/dmesg/dme...
To a certain extent to what end though,
On the one hand yes, almost every task I work at now is one off one of scripts I throw away.
The question is - where does the software the spec or the “code”.
A really complex game will probably always be token heavy. At least for the next few years code is still not free.
But certain software is just iterative by design. If we mean we regenerate all the for loops of a game from scratch, sure but I think “code” Is really more spec then implementation, and we’ll want to continue building things through iteration.
And even on the for loop point - Do you really want to spend millions of tokens rewriting a game every time you need to make balance changes?