The era of software mass production has begun. With many "devs" just being workers in a production line, pushing buttons, repeating the same task over and over.
The produced products however do not compare in quality to other industry's mass production lines. I wonder how long it takes until this comes all crashing down. Software mostly already is not a high quality product.. with Claude & co it just gets worse.
I think you'll be waiting a while for the "crashing down". I was a kid when manufacturing went off shore and mass production went into overdrive. I remember my parents complaining about how low quality a lot of mass produced things were. Yet for decades most of what we buy is mass produced, comparatively low quality goods. We got used to it, the benefits outweighed the negatives. What we thought mattered didn't in the face of a lot of previously unaffordable goods now broadly available and affordable.
You can still buy high goods made with care when it matters to you, but that's the exception. It will be the same with software. A lot of what we use will be mass produced with AI, and even produced in realtime on the fly (in 5 years maybe?). There will be some things where we'll pay a premium for software crafted with care, but for most it won't matter because of the benefits of rapidly produced software.
We've got a glimpse of this with things like Claude Artifacts. I now have a piece of software quite unique to my needs that simply wouldn't have existed otherwise. I don't care that it's one big js file. It works and it's what I need and I got it pretty much for free. The capability of things like Artifacts will continue to grow and we'll care less and less that it wasn't human produced with care.
While a general "crashing down" probably will not happen I could imagine some differences to other mass produced goods.
Most of our private data lives in clouds now and there are already regular security nightmares of stolen passwords, photos etc. I fear that these incidents will accumulate with more and more AI generated code that is most likely not reviewed or reviewed by another AI.
Also regardless of AI I am more and more skipping cheap products in general and instead buying higher quality things. This way I buy less but what I buy doesn't (hopefully) break after a few years (or months) of use.
I see the same for software. Already before AI we were flooded with trash. I bet we could all delete at least half of the apps on our phones and nothing would be worse than before.
I am not convinced by the rosy future of instant AI-generated software but future will reveal what is to come.
I think one major lesson of the history of the internet is that very few people actually care about privacy in a holistic, structural way. People do not want their nudes, browsing history and STD results to be seen by their boss, but that desire for privacy does not translate to guarding their information from Google, their boss, or the government. And frankly this is actually quite rational overall, because Google is in fact very unlikely to leak this information to your boss, and if they did it would more likely to result in a legal payday rather than any direct social cost.
Hacker news obviously suffers from severe selection bias in this regard, but for the general public I doubt even repeated security breaches of vibe coded apps will move the needle much on the perception of LLM coded apps, which means that they will still sell, which means that it doesn't matter. I doubt even most people will pick up the connection. And frankly, most security breaches have no major consequences anyway, in the grand scheme of things. Perhaps the public conscioussness will harden a bit when it comes to uploading nudes to "CheckYourBodyFat", but the truly disastrous stuff like bank access is mostly behind 2FA layers already.
There's a buge difference between possible and likely.
Maybe I'm pessimistic but I at least feel like there's a world of difference between a practice that encourages bugs and one that allows them through when there is negligence. The accountability problem needs to be addressed before we say it's like self driving cars outperforming humans. On a errors per line basis, I don't think LLMs are on par with humans yet
Knowing your system components’ various error rates and compensating for them has always been the job. This includes both the software itself and the engineers working on it.
The only difference is that there is now a new high-throughput, high-error (at least for now) component editing the software.
Yeah it’s interesting to see if blaming LLMs becomes as acceptable as “caused by a technical fault” to deflect responsibility from what is a programmer’s output.
Perhaps that’s what lead to a decline in accountability and quality.
The decline in accountability has been in progress for decades, so LLMs can obviously not have caused it.
They might of course accelerate it if used unwisely, but the solution to that is arguably to use them wisely, not to completely shun them because "think of the craft and the jobs".
And yes, in some contexts, using them wisely might well mean not using them at all. I'd just be surprised if that were a reasonable default position in many domains in 5-10 years.
Why didn't programmers think of stepping down from their ivory towers and start making small apps which solve small problems? That people and businesses are very happy to pay for?
But no! Programmers seem to only like working on giant scale projects, which only are of interest to huge enterprises, governments, or the open source quagmire of virtualization within virtualization within virtualization.
There's exactly one good invoicing app I've found which is good for freelancers and small businesses. While the amount of potential customers are in the tens of millions. Why aren't there at least 10 good competitors?
My impression is that programmers consider it to be below their dignity to work on simple software which solves real problems and are great for their niche. Instead it has to be big and complicated, enterprise-scale. And if they can't get a job doing that, they will pretend to have a job doing that by spending their time making open source software for enterprise-scale problems.
Instead of earning a very good living by making boutique software for paying users.
I don't think programmers are the issue here. What you describe sounds to me more like the typical product management in a company. Stuff features into the thing until it bursts of bugs and is barely maintainable.
I would love to do something like what you describe. Build a simple but solid and very specialized solution. However I am not sure there is demand or if I have the right ideas for what to do.
You mention invoicing and I think: there must be hundreds of apps for what you describe but maybe I am wrong. What is the one good app you mention? I am curious now :)
There's a whole bunch of apps for invoicing, but if you try them, you'll see that they are excessively complicated. Probably because they want to cover all bases of all use cases. Meaning they aren't great for any use case. Like you say.
The invoicing app in particular I was referring to is Cakedesk. Made by a solo developer who sells it for a fair price. Easy to use and has all the necessary functions. Probably the name and the icon is holding him back, though. As far as I understand, the app is mostly a database and an Electron/Chromium front-end, all local on your computer. Probably very simple and uninteresting for a programmer, but extremely interesting for customers who have a problem to solve.
I'm curious: why don't YOU create this app? 95% of a software business isn't the programming, it's the requirements gathering and marketing and all that other stuff.
Is it beneath YOUR dignity to create this? What an untapped market! You could be king!
Also it's absurd to an incredible degree to believe that any significant portion of programmers, left to their own devices, are eager to make "big, complicated, enterprise-scale" software.
What makes you think that I know how to program? It's not beyond my dignity, it's beyond my skills. The only thing I can do is support boutique programmers with my money as a consumer, and I'm very happy to do that.
But yes, sometimes I have to AI code small things, because there's no other solution.
Where is the win? Life is a mixture of pain, joy, success, failure and so on. Ups and down. How would you know the value of something if you never experienced (some of) the opposite?
And yes we are over connected and over sharing but everyone can change his own fate here.. just get rid of all the social networks and meet people in real life. It is possible.
I truly think that social media is one of the worst things that happened to mankind and we still have not fully grasped all the damage it does. (And here I do not refer to occasional posting in web forums or HN or such.. but the mindless, addictive participation in Facebook, Tiktok etc. where the only gain is a dopamine hit.)
Even if you have experience with DWARF, I think you will learn something new from the book.
I work on CNCF Pixie, which uses DWARF for eBPF uprobes and dynamic instrumentation. While I understood how our project uses DWARF, the book made many details much clearer for me.
The SPD started moving to the right shortly after Schröder was elected chancellor. Their policies curbed the welfare system in a "only Nixon could go to China manner".
The issue is you need to explicitly recover each goroutine just so a nil dereference or a panic from a library you have no control over doesn’t bring down the whole application. Maybe this is the way it has to be, but it is a little known fact that might bite you.
The only time a library should be panicking is if they’ve reached a state they cannot continue from.
I’d be interested to know which libraries you’re working with where this has been a problem because I’ve only ever experienced one occasion where a 3rd party library panicked unnecessarily.
Hmm.. I was referring to rich Germans not to innovative Germans.
That aside the Schwarz Group is building their own Cloud business.. and they were one of the very few large companies that dared to NOT use SAP but build their own stuff. Not sure this counts as innovation but it's worth mentioning.
edit: I just re-read the GP comment and I get it now.. it was only doubting that there are people who recently accumulated riches.. then of course Schwarz would be a bad example :)
> I wonder if there is some major propaganda push on HN to discourage actual software engineers from ever running their servers. Judging from the comments in this and similar posts, sounds like it is common belief that it's super expensive and a full time job to run bare metal services. AWS and GCP free credits have created a generation of developers that think running a webserver, a webapp and a database is rocket science, and when stuff breaks the whole company might go bankrupt because no one could ever save a corrupted database.
Related to this observation you really should watch DHHs keynote talk at Rails World 2024 from about minute 20 to 30: https://youtu.be/-cEn_83zRFw?t=1296
He addresses exactly this phenomenon.
EDIT: changed URL to include timestamp to the start of the relevant content.
The problem is that what is legal should not be decided by social media platforms or their users but by the law & the courts. But most often this is not the case.. maybe the OP is addressing this issue.
This is basically X's position – they will enforce countries speech laws, no more, no less.
But OP says:
> Other places such as x/twitter, has some liberty but not very much. Real subjects are not getting through.
So I'm not sure if they're saying that isn't what X is doing, or that they're criticising X for not going beyond the law (illegally), or that perhaps they feel that some legal speech is not treated equally?
> So I'm not sure if they're saying that isn't what X is doing, or that they're criticising X for not going beyond the law (illegally), or that perhaps they feel that some legal speech is not treated equally?
I'm saying that posts get removed if they contain certain subjects. Nothing offensive is in them but only facts.
The law is clear in the US: with a few carved out exemptions, the government cannot penalize you for what you say.
Private platforms and citizens can do what they want.
I am sure a forum where any and all speech is tolerated quickly turns to 4chan but with all kinds of extreme porn. I am sure those places exist on ToR. I do not know why you would want to go there.
Ironically, a lot of the forums which value free speech will kick you out for even sounding like you have the wrong opinions.
The platforms don't decide what is legal, but they do have the right, and in many cases the obligation, to moderate their platforms. They can be held liable for allowing CSAM for example. And these platforms have business goals that can be in conflict with, say, allowing anti-LGBTQ or Nazi content.
Sounds like the problem (for a platform like this) is that they have "business goals" in the first place. Freedom of speech shouldn't be up for sale, especially when it comes to discussing sensitive topics and creating a for-profit business around that would do just that.
so people shouldn't create apps/tools/sites where others can communicate with each other unless they're willing to forgo any moderation? how does that work?
Not every service with user-generated content need to try to cater to maximum freedom of expression, so it first of all doesn't apply to any service with user-generated content.
Secondly, my point is that if you do have a service that is trying to optimize for freedom of expression, mixing in needing to earn money on top of that, is bound to leave you almost penny-less, as advertisers don't like an environment like that and people needing to be anonymous aren't as happy to donate.
Social media companies are private companies. You can set up your own servers and no government will interfere with you as long as you aren’t doing something illegal
If I start spewing political speech on HN, you will soon be banned and dang and company have every right to do so.
> You can set up your own servers and no government will interfere with you as long as you aren’t doing something illegal
Might have been true in the past but no longer. Once your platform gets a large enough audience, governments will try to artificially sway public opinion on the platform. This has been true for every single large social platform so far.
Government always tries to sway opinion. They are made of politicians. I’m not in love with Musk by any means. But do you think the Biden administration could have convinced Musk to change his moderation policy!
The produced products however do not compare in quality to other industry's mass production lines. I wonder how long it takes until this comes all crashing down. Software mostly already is not a high quality product.. with Claude & co it just gets worse.
edit: sentence fixed.