Summarizer

> Do you think it can replace you basically one-shotting features/bugs in Zed? Nobody is one-shotting anything nontrivial in Zed's code base, with Opus 4.5 or any other model. What about a future model? Literally nobody knows. Forecasts about AI capabilities have had horrendously low accuracy in both directions - e.g. most people underestimated what LLMs would be capable of today, and almost everyone who thought AI would at least be where it is today...instead overestimated and predicted we'd have AGI or even superintelligence by now. I see zero signs of that forecasting accuracy improving. In aggregate, we are atrocious at it. The only safe bet is that hardware will be faster and cheaper (because the most reliable trend in the history of computing has been that hardware gets faster and cheaper), which will naturally affect the software running on it. > And also - doesn’t that make Zed (and other editors) pointless? It means there's now demand for supporting use cases that didn't exist until recently, which comes with the territory of building a product for technologists! :)

By tomorrow the app will be replaced with a new version from the other competitor, by that time the memory leak will not reveal itself

Hah! I actually initiated the project because I'm a long time XBMC/Kodi user. I started using it when it was called XBMC, on an actual Xbox 1. I am sick and tired of its crashing, poor playback performance, and increasingly bloated feature set. It's embarrassing when I have friends or family over for movie night, and I have to explain "Sorry folks, Kodi froze midway through the movie again" while I frantically try to re-launch/reboot my way back to watching the movie. VLC's playback engine is much better but the VLC app's TV UX is ass. This application actually uses the libVLC playback engine under the hood.

I think anecdotes like this may prove very relevant the next few years. AI might make bad code, but a project of bad code that's still way smaller than a bloated alternative, and has a UX tailored to your exact requirements could be compelling. A big part of the problem with existing software is that humans seem to be pretty much incapable of deciding a project is done and stop adding to it. We treat creating code like a job or hobby instead of a tool. Nothing wrong with that, unless you're advertising it as a tool.

Yea, after this little experiment, I feel like I can just go through every big, bloated, slow, tech-debt-ridden software I use and replace it with a tiny, bespoke version that does only what I need and no more. The old adage about how "users use 10% of your software's features, but they each use a different 10%" can now be solved by each user just building that 10% for themselves.

Isn't there more indirection as long as LLMs use "human" programming languages?

If you think of the training data, e.g. SO, github etc, then you have a human asking or describing a problem, then the code as the solution. So I suspect current-gen LLMs are still following this model, which means for the forseeable future a human like language prompt will still be the best. Until such time, of course, when LLMs are eating their own dogfood, in which case they - as has already happened - create their own language, evolve dramatically, and cue skynet.

More indirection in the sense that there's a layer between you and the code, sure. Less in that the code doesn't really matter as such and you're not having to think hard about the minutiae of programming in order to make something you want. It's very possible that "AI-oriented" programming languages will become the standard eventually (at least for new projects).

Why do you suppose that these tools will conveniently stop improving at some point that increases your productivity but are still too much for your clients to use for themselves?

And so the AI will develop the skills to interview the client and determine what they really need. There are textbooks written on how to do this, it's not going to be hard to incorporate into the training.

Not necessarily responding to you directly, but I find this take to be interesting, and I see it every time an article like this makes the rounds. Starting back in 2022/2023: - (~2022) It can auto-complete one line, but it can't write a full function. - (~2023) Ok, it can write a full function, but it can't write a full feature. - (~2024) Ok, it can write a full feature, but it can't write a simple application. - (~2025) Ok, it can write a simple application, but it can't create a full application that is actually a valuable product. - (~2025+) Ok, it can write a full application that is actually a valuable product, but it can't create a long-lived complex codebase for a product that is extensible and scalable over the long term. It's pretty clear to me where this is going. The only question is how long it takes to get there.

While I do agree with you. To play the counterpoint advocate though. What if we get to the point where all software is basically created 'on the fly' as greenfield projects as needed? And you never need to have complex large long lived codebase? It is probably incredibly wasteful, but ignoring that, could it work?

That sounds like an insane way to do anything that matters. Sure, create a one-off app to post things to your Facebook page. But a one-off app for the OS it's running on? Freshly generating the code for your bank transaction rules? Generating an authorization service that gates access to your email? The only reason it's quick to create green-field projects is because of all these complex, large, long-lived codebases that it's gluing together. There's ample training data out there for how to use the Firebase API, the Facebook API, OS calls, etc. Without those long-lived abstraction layers, you can't vibe out anything that matters.

In Japan buildings (apartments) aren't built to last forever. They are built with a specific age in mind. They acknowledge the fact that houses are depreciating assets which have a value lim->0. The only reason we don't do that with code (or didn't use to do it) was because rewriting from scratch NEVER worked[0]. And large scale refactors take massive amounts of time and resources, so much so that there are whole books written about how to do it. But today trivial to simple applications can be rewritten from spec or scratch in an afternoon with an LLM. And even pretty complex parsers can be ported provided that the tests are robust enough[1]. It's just a metter of time someone rewrites a small to medium size application from one language to another using the previous app as the "spec". [0] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-... [1] https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/15/porting-justhtml/

Sure, and the buildings are built to a slowly-evolving code, using standard construction techniques, operating as a predictable building in a larger ecosystem. The problem with "all software" being AI-generated is that, to use your analogy, the electrical standards, foundation, and building materials have all been recently vibe-coded into existence, and none of your construction workers are certified in any of it.

I know what you are talking about, but there is more to life than just product-market fit. Hardly any of us are working on Postgres, Photoshop, blender, etc. but it's not just cope to wish we were. It's good to think about the needs to business and the needs of society separately. Yes, the thing needs users, or no one is benefiting. But it also needs to do good for those users, and ultimately, at the highest caliber, craftsmanship starts to matter again. There are legitimate reasons for the startup ecosystem to focus firstly and primarily on getting the users/customers. I'm not arguing against that. What I am arguing is why does the industry need to be dominated by startups in terms of the bulk of the products (not bulk of the users). It begs the question of how much societally-meaningful programming waiting to be done. I'm hoping for a world where more end users code (vibe or otherwise) and the solve their own problems with their own software. I think that will make more a smaller, more elite software industry that is more focused on infrastructure than last-mile value capture. The question is how to fund the infrastructure. I don't know except for the most elite projects, which is not good enough for the industry (even this hypothetical smaller one) on the whole.

> I'm hoping for a world where more end users code (vibe or otherwise) and the solve their own problems with their own software. I think that will make more a smaller, more elite software industry that is more focused on infrastructure than last-mile value capture. Yes! This is what I'm excited about as well. Though I'm genuinely ambivalent about what I want my role to be. Sometimes I'm excited about figuring out how I can work on the infrastructure side. That would be more similar to what I've done in my career thus far. But a lot of the time, I think that what I'd prefer would be to become one of those end users with my own domain-specific problems in some niche that I'm building my own software to help myself with. That sounds pretty great! But it might be a pretty unnatural or even painful change for a lot of us who have been focused for so long on building software tools for other people to use.

I know the customer's couldn't care about the quality of the code they see. But the idea that they don't care about software being bad/laggy/bloated ever, because it "still solves problems", doesn't stand up to scrutiny as an immutable fact of the universe. Market conditions can change. I'm banking on a future that if users feel they can (perhaps vibe) code their own solutions, they are far less likely to open their wallets for our bloatware solutions. Why pay exorbitant rents for shitty SaaS if you can make your own thing ad-free, exactly to your own mental spec? I want the "computers are new, programmers are in short supply, customer is desperate" era we've had in my lifetime so far to come to a close.

> There are legitimate reasons for the startup ecosystem to focus firstly and primarily on getting the users/customers. I'm not arguing against that. What I am arguing is why does the industry need to be dominated by startups in terms of the bulk of the products (not bulk of the users). It begs the question of how much societally-meaningful programming waiting to be done. You slipped in "societally-meaningful" and I don't know what it means and don't want to debate merits/demerits of socialism/capitalism. However I think lots of software needs to be written because in my estimation with AI/LLM/ML it'll generate value. And then you have lots of software that needs to rewritten as firms/technologies die and new firms/technologies are born.

I didn't mean to do some snide anticaptialism. Making new Postgreses and blenders is really hard. I don't think the startup ecosystem does a very good job, but I don't assume central planning would do a much better job either. (The method I have the most confidence in is some sort of mixed system where there is non-profit, state-planned, and startup software development all at once.) Markets are a tool, a means to the end. I think they're very good, I'm a big fan! But they are not an excuse not to think about the outcome we want. I'm confident that the outcome I don't want is where most software developers are trying to find demand for their work, pivoting etc. it's very "pushing a string" or "cart before the horse". I want more "pull" where the users/benefiaries of software are better able to dictate or create themselves what they want, rather than being helpless until a pivoting engineer finds it for them. Basically start-up culture has combined theories of exogenous growth from technology change, and a baseline assumption that most people are and will remain hopelessly computer illiterate, into an ideology that assumes the best software is always "surprising", a paradigm shift, etc. Startups that make libraries/tools for other software developers are fortunately a good step in undermining these "the customer is an idiot and the product will be better than they expect" assumptions. That gives me hope we're reach a healthier mix of push and pull. Wild successes are always disruptive, but that shouldn't mean that the only success is wild, or trying to "act disruptive before wild success" ("manifest" paradigm shifts!) is always the best means to get there.

I've worked in various roles, and I'm one of those people who is not computer illiterate and likes to build solutions that meet local needs. It's got a lot easier technically to do that in recent year, and MUCH easier with AI. But institutionally and in terms of governance it's got a lot harder. Nobody wants home-brew software anymore. Doing data management and governance is complex enough and involves enough different people that it's really hard to generate the momentum to get projects off the ground. I still think it's often the right solution and that successful orgs will go this route and retain people with the skills to make it happen. But the majority probably can't afford the time/complexity, and AI is only part of the balance that determines whether it's feasible.

This is the thing that will be changing the open source and small/medium SaaS world a lot. Why use a 3rd party dependency that might have features you don't need when you can write a hyper-specific solution in a day with an LLM and then you control the full codebase. Or why pay €€€ for a SaaS every month when you can replicate the relevant bits yourself?

"And likely just creating more debt down the road" In the most inflationary era of capabilities we've seen yet, it could be the right move. What's debt when in a matter of months you'll be able to clear it in one shot?

Have you ever tried to find software for a specific need? I usually spend hours investigating anything I can find only to discover that all options are bad in one way or another and cover my use case partially at best. It's dreadful, unrewarding work that I always fear. Being able to spent those hours to develop custom solution that has exactly what I need, no more, no less, that I can evolve further as my requirements evolve, all that while enjoying myself, is a godsend.

Up until now, no business has been built on tools and technology that no one understands. I expect that will continue. Given that, I expect that, even if AI is writing all of the code, we will still need people around who understand it. If AI can create and operate your entire business, your moat is nil. So, you not hiring software engineers does not matter, because you do not have a business.

> Up until now, no business has been built on tools and technology that no one understands. I expect that will continue. Big claims here. Did brewers and bakers up to the middle ages understand fermentation and how yeasts work?

Does the corner bakery need a moat to be a business? How many people understand the underlying operating system their code runs on? Can even read assembly or C? Even before LLMs, there were plenty of copy-paste JS bootcamp grads that helped people build software businesses.

> Does the corner bakery need a moat to be a business? Yes, actually. Its hard to open a competing bakery due to location availability, permitting, capex, and the difficulty of converting customers. To add to that, food establishments generally exist on next to no margin, due to competition, despite all of that working in their favor. Now imagine what the competitive landscape for that bakery would look like if all of that friction for new competitors disappeared. Margin would tend toward zero.

Refactoring does always cost something and I doubt LLMs will ever change that. The more interesting question is whether the cost to refactor or "rewrite" the software will ever become negligible. Until it isn't, it's short-sighted to write code in the manner you're describing. If software does become that cheap, then you can't meaningfully maintain a business on selling software anyway.

This is the question! Your narrative is definitely plausible, and I won't be shocked if it turns out this way. But it still isn't my expectation. It wasn't when people were saying this in 2023 or in 2024, and I haven't been wrong yet. It does seem more likely to me now than it did a couple years ago, but still not the likeliest outcome in the next few years. But nobody knows for sure!

as depressing as it is to say, i think it's a bit like the year is 1906 and we're complaining that these new tyres for cars they're making are bad because they're no longer backwards compatible with the horse drawn wagons we might want to attach them to in the future.

Yes, exactly. This is a completely new thing which will have transformative consequences. It's not just a way to do what you've always done a bit more quickly.

Now that entirely depends on app. A lot of software industry is popping out and maintaining relatively simple apps with small differences and customizations per client.

It matters for all the things you’d be able to justify paying a programmer for. What’s about to change is that there will be tons of these little one-off projects that previously nobody could justify paying $150/hr for. A mass democratization of software development. We’ve yet to see what that really looks like.

We already know what that looks like, because PHP happened.

php was still fundamentally a programming language you had to learn. This is “I wanted to make a program for my wife to do something she doesn’t have time to do manually” but made quickly with a machine. It’s probably going to do for programming what the Jacquard Loom did for cloth. Make it cheap enough that everyone can have lots of different shirts of their own style.

But the wife didn't do it herself. He still had to do it for her, the author says. I don't think (yet) we're at the point where every person who has an idea for a really good app can make it happen. They'll still need a wozniak, it's just that wozniaks will be a dime a dozen. The php analogy works.

And low-code/no-code (pre-LLMs). Our company spent probably the same amount of dev-time and money on rewriting low-code back to "code" (Python in our case) as it did writing low-code in the first place. LLMs are not quite comparable in damage, but some future maintenance for LLM-code will be needed for sure.

Right. Basically cambrian explosion of internet that spawned things like Facebook and WordPress.

When an LLM can rewrite it in 24 hours and fill the missing parts in minutes that argument is hard to defend. I can vibe code what a dev shop would charge 500k to build and I can solo it in 1-2 weeks. This is the reality today. The code will pass quality checks, the code doesn’t need to be perfect, it doesn’t need to be cleaver it needs to be. It’s not difficult to see this right? If an LLM can write English it can write Chinese or python. Then it can run itself, review itself and fix itself. The cat is out of bag, what it will do to the economy… I don’t see anything positive for regular people. Write some code has turned into prompt some LLM. My phone can outplay the best chess player in the world, are you telling me you think that whatever unbound model anthropic has sitting in their data center can’t out code you?

Well, where is your competitor to mainstream software products?

What mainstream software product do I use on a day to day basis besides Claude? The ones that continue to survive all build around a platform of services, MSO, Adobe, etc. Most enterprise product offerings, platform solutions, proprietary data access, proprietary / well accepted implementation. But lets not confuse it with the ability to clone it, it doesnt seem far fetched to get 10 people together and vibe out a full slack replacement in a few weeks.

> let LLMs do whatever behind the scenes to hit the specs assuming for the sake of argument that's completely true, then what happens to "competitive advantage" in this scenario? it gets me thinking: if anyone can vibe from spec, whats stopping company a (or even user a) from telling an llm agent "duplicate every aspect of this service in python and deploy it to my aws account xyz"... in that scenario, why even have companies?

It’s all fun and games vibecoding until you A) have customers who depend on your product B) it breaks or the one person prompting and has access to the servers and api keys gets incapacited (or just bored). Sure we can vibecode oneoff projects that does something useful (my fav is browser extensions) but as soon as we ask others to use our code on a regular basis the technical debt clock starts running. And we all know how fast dependencies in a project breaks.

You can do this for many things now. Walmart, McDonalds, Nike - none really have any secrets about what they do. There is nothing stopping someone from copying them - except that businesses are big, unwieldy things. When software becomes cheap companies compete on their support. We see this for Open Source software now.

These are businesses with extra-large capital requirements. You ain't replicating them, because you don't have the money, and they can easily strangle you with their money as you start out. Software is different, you need very very little to start, historically just your own skills and time. Thes latter two may see some changes with LLMs.

How conveniently you forgot about the most impotant things for a product to make money - marketing and the network effect....

I don't see the relevance to the discussion. Marketing is not significantly different for a shop and a online-only business. Having to buy a large property, fulfilling every law, etc is materially different than buying a laptop and renting a cloud instance. Almost everyone has the material capacity to do the latter, but almost no one has the privilege for the former.

Okay, we will copy that version of the product too. There is more to it than the code and software provided in most cases I feel.

I think `andrekandre is right in this hypothetical. Who'd pay for brand new Photoshop with a couple new features and improvements if LLM-cloned Photoshop-from-three-months-ago is free? The first few iterations of this cloud be massively consumer friendly for anything without serious cloud infra costs. Cheap clones all around. Like generic drugs but without the cartel-like control of manufacturing. Business after that would be dramatically different, though. Differentiating yourself from the willing-to-do-it-for-near-zero-margin competitors to produce something new to bring in money starts to get very hard. Can you provide better customer support? That could be hard, everyone's gonna have a pretty high baseline LLM-support-agent already... and hiring real people instead could dramatically increase the price difference you're trying to justify... Similarly for marketing or outreach etc; how are you going to cut through the AI-agent-generated copycat spam that's gonna be pounding everyone when everyone and their dog has a clone of popular software and services? Photoshop type things are probably a really good candidate for disruption like that because to a large extent every feature is independent. The noise reduction tool doesn't need API or SDK deps on the layer-opacity tool, for instance. If all your features are LLM balls of shit that doesn't necessarily reduce your ability to add new ones next to them, unlike in a more relational-database-based web app with cross-table/model dependencies, etc. And in this "try out any new idea cheaply and throw crap against the wall and see what sticks" world "product managers" and "idea people" etc are all pretty fucked. Some of the infinite monkeys are going to periodically hit to gain temporary advantage, but good luck finding someone to pay you to be a "product visionary" in a world where any feature can be rolled out and tested in the market by a random dev in hours or days.

OK, so what do people do? What do people need? People still need to eat, people get married and die, and all of the things surrounding that, all sorts of health related stuff. Nightlife events. Insurance. actuaries. Raising babies. What do you spend your fun money on? People pay for things they use. If bespoke software is a thing you pick up at the mall at a kiosk next to Target we gotta figure something out.

I totally agree. And welcome to disposable software age.