[mrmincent]

To misuse a woodworking metaphor, I think we’re experiencing a shift from hand tools to power tools.

You still need someone who understands the basics to get the good results out of the tools, but they’re not chiseling fine furniture by hand anymore, they’re throwing heaps of wood through the tablesaw instead. More productive, but more likely to lose a finger if you’re not careful.

[forgotoldacc]

And we may get an ugly transitory period where a lot of programs go from being clearly hand made with some degree of care and some fine details that show the developer's craftsmanship, to awful prefab and brutalist software that feels inhuman, mass-produced, and nothing is really fit for the job but still shipped because it kind of works well enough.

People go to museums to admire old hand-carved furniture and travel to cities to admire the architecture of centuries past made with hand-chiseled blocks. While power tools do let people make things of equal quality faster, they're instead generally used to make things of worse quality much, much faster and the field has gone from being a craft to simply being an assembly line job. As bad as software is today, we're likely to hit even deeper lows and people will miss the days where Electron apps are good compared to what's yet to come.

There's already been one step in this direction with the Cambrian extinction of 90s/early 2000s software. People still talk about how soulful Winamp/old Windows Media Player/ZSNES/etc were.

[konart]

>nothing is really fit for the job but still shipped because it kind of works well enough.

This is true for most of the software these days (except for professional software like Photoshop and the like) without LLMs.

[rolisz]

I think it's going to go the opposite way: we'll get a lot more custom made software, that fits exactly what a small customer needs. The code might be utter crap, the design might not be award winning, but it will be custom made to a degree that you can't customize your average Savas.

[torginus]

I kinda feel differently - it's more like how nowadays you have access to high-quality power tools at cheap prices, and tons of tutorials on Youtube that teach you how to do woodworking, and even if you can't afford the masterwork furniture made by craftsmen, you don't have to buy the shitty mass produced stuff - sure yours won't be as good, but it will be made to your spec.

Moving on into a concrete software example, thanks to AI productivity, we replaced a lot of expensive and crappy subscription SaaS software with our homegrown stuff. Our stuff is probably 100x simpler (everyone knows the pain of making box software for a diverse set of customer needs, everything needs to be configurable, which leads to crazy convoluted code, and a lot of it). It's also much better and cheaper to run, to say nothing of the money we save by not paying the exorbitant subscription fee.

I suspect the biggest losers of the AI revolution will be the SaaS companies whose value proposition was: Yes you can use open source for this, but the extra cost of an engineer who maintains this is more than we charge.

As for bespoke software, 'slop' software using Electron, or Unity in video games exists because people believe in the convenience of using these huge lumbering monoliths that come with a ton of baggage, while they were taught the creed that coding to the metal is too hard.

LLMs can help with that, and show people that they can do bespoke from scratch (and more importantly teach people how to do that). Claude/o3/whatever can probably help you build a game in WebGL you thought you needed a game engine for.

[conception]

Feels more like photography. Everyone will “soon” have a tool that lets you take pretty great photos - surpassing professional of thirty years ago.

If you want professional work done you’ll still hire someone but that person will also use a lot of professional grade computer tooling with it.

But there definitely won’t be as many jobs as before - especially on the low skill end.

[steve_adams_86]

I like this metaphor because power tools didn’t lead to more sophisticated craftspeople despite the increase in efficiency and potential. I think it will be the same with code. More outputs, not necessarily more refined or better in any way, but not innately bad either.

[SkepticalWhale]

Great analogy.

Although I still wonder how long we're in this phase and how ubiquitous it will be, because didn't power tools coincide with improved automation in factories eliminating manufacturing jobs?

[otterley]

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like your thumb.

[floriferous]

Great metaphor, exactly how it feels to me too!