[dumbfounder]

The future is that people stop buying software and just build it themselves. The spam filter in thunderbird was broken for me, I built my own in hours and it works way better. Oh that CRM doesn’t have the features you want? Build one that does. It will become very easy to built and deploy solutions to many of your own bespoke problems.

[mixdup]

Unlikely. The future will be some people will do this, but honestly I think it will largely be people who were already tinkering with building things, whether full on software development or not

My mom and dad, my brother who drives a dump truck in a limestone quarry, my sister-in-law, none of them work in tech or consider themselves technical in any way. They are never, ever going to write their own software and will continue to just download apps from the app store or sign up for websites that accomplish the tasks they want

[bmurphy1976]

Some of us will do this, and it will be great for us for a period of time. That is, until others build another giant ball of shit 10,000x bigger than the npm/nodejs/javascript/java/cobol/c++/whatever else garbage pile we have today.

We'll be right back here in no-time.

[DaanDL]

Correct, my ex couldn't even be bothered to update the notification settings on her iPhone, let alone she'd be generating and deploying an app using an LLM. Most people just don't want to have anything to do with tech, they just want it to work and get out of their way.

I did the same with my car, technically I could do maintenance myself and troubleshoot and what not, but I just couldn't be arsed, so I outsource it at a premium price.

[tclancy]

Yeah, I think (completely biased as a long-time developer who is happily playing with AI for building stuff) people using AI to build their own tooling will be like a hot rod scene from the '60s. Lots of buzz, definitely some cool stuff, but in reality probably physically smaller than the noise around it.

Off to bust my virtual knuckles on something.

[miki123211]

They won't think about it in terms of building software, just like many house buyers don't think in terms of building houses, even though somebody has effectively built a house just for them.

They'll just ask their bank to help them fill out a family income form based on last year's earnings. They'll get the numbers back, without thinking about the Python script that used Pandas and some web APIs to generate those numbers. They'll think about it in terms of "that thing that Chat GPT just gave me to compare truck from nearby local dealers", without realizing that it's actually a React app, partially powered by reverse-engineered APIs, partially by data that their agent scraped off Facebook and Craigslist.

[alwillis]

> Unlikely. The future will be some people will do this, but honestly I think it will largely be people who were already tinkering with building things, whether full on software development or not

Billions of dollars of stock market value disappeared because of the concern AI can create core SaaS functionality for corporations instead of them spending millions of dollars in licensing fees to SAP, Microsoft, etc.

This not about tinkering.

SaaS As We Know It Is Dead: How To Survive The SaaS-pocalypse! - https://www.forrester.com/blogs/saas-as-we-know-it-is-dead-h...

Why SaaS Stocks Have Dropped—and What It Signals for Software’s Next Chapter - https://www.bain.com/insights/why-saas-stocks-have-dropped-a...

Jim Cramer says AI fears have made the stock market fragile - https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/23/jim-cramer-says-ai-fears-hav...

[fragmede]

No judgement, but if my mom or dad had a problem I could solve with a couple hours a month, with an larger initial investment of time at the beginning, I'd be willing to make it for them.

To the matter of driving a truck though, if someone needs an app idea, blue collar workers are having to spend an hour after work logging what they did that day. If they could do it in their truck while driving home for the day, you could make a pile of cash selling an app that lets them do that.

[delfinom]

The future is either a regression of society from the resulting riots and massacres when 3/4 of the population is unemployed.

Or perpetual work camps for the masses.

[Gigachad]

This feels like when 3D printers hit the consumer market and everyone declared that buying things was over, everyone will just print them at home. There's tons of benefits to standardised software too. Companies rely on the fact they can hire people who already know photoshop/xero/webpack/etc rather than having to train them from scratch on in house tools.

[sarchertech]

Business software is also useful because it gives companies a process to follow that even if not optimal, is probably better than what they’d come up with on their own.

[riffraff]

> Companies rely on the fact they can hire people who already know photoshop/xero/webpack/etc rather than having to train them from scratch on in house tools.

Yeah, I've seen perfectly good flexible in house products abandoned because it was just easier to hire people who knew Salesforce or whatever.

But the true AI Believer would object you don't need to hire anymore, you can just get more agents to cold call or whatever :)

[vvpan]

What ever happened to that?

[jajuuka]

Definitely feels like that is the bigger take away. Not that it "solves all problems" or "isn't good enough to be merged". But that we are arriving to a place where solutions can be good enough to solve the problem you have. Reminds me of early Github when custom and unique software became much more accessible to everyone. Way less digging or going without.

[secbear]

Totally agree. I've found in many cases it's easier to roll your own software/patch existing software with AI than to open an issue, submit a PR, get it reviewed/merged, etc. Let alone buying software

[tclancy]

Yes, but this is the honeymoon period. A year from now when you want to make three of the tools talk to each other and they're in three different languages, two of which you don't know and there's no common interface or good place to put one, well, here's hoping you hung onto the design documents.

[hahn-kev]

What I want is to be able to use AI to modify the software we already have. Granted I've wanted to do that long before AI, but now maybe plugins will get more popular again now that AI could write them for us

[bonesss]

I’m imagining a world where everyone was using emacs/lisp or Smalltalk VMs, and what kind of world-improving insanity we could be sharing through LLMs.

[miki123211]

Funnily enough, this will make many "tragedy of the commons" / "Goodhart's law hacking" problems more tractable.

Right now, there's only one Google algorithm, one Amazon search and so on. The moment you let agents run wild, each with a different model, prompt and memory, effectively introducing randomness into the process, it becomes much harder to optimize for "metric go up."

[reactordev]

we've seen what "no barrier of entry" marketplaces look like...

Quality go down.

[mock-possum]

But people don’t actually want to just build it themselves - they never have, and I don’t see any reason to believe they ever will.

[petesergeant]

I think Greasemonkey scripts to fix the websites you use is an interesting area too. My bank now supports OFX exports because Claude vibecoded me an extractor for it in 10m.

[croes]

Lots of unaudited and battle tested software. Sounds like a nightmare.

[jmspring]

This is honestly one of the more naive takes I've seen in awhile. People includes more than people that frequent HN. My wife and I are discussing I'd like to keep finance and related things in a password manager. She is in the social sciences (has a couple of degrees) and isn't a fan.

The majority of computer users are not on HN.

You profile says "Trying to figure out what I want to do with my life. DM me if you have ideas." - I would recommend exploring connections and opinions outside tech.

[red-iron-pine]

why would F500 FAANG type orgs ever want the consumer to create their own software?

how will stock prices rise, outside of the one holder of the AI?

[goombacloud]

They won't build software, they'll let some AI-based software do the execution of their instructions (which is inefficient, opaque, vendor-locked, not reproducible etc.)