alt Hacker News> Its also worth noting that if you can create a business with an LLM, so can everyone else. And sadly everyone has the same ideas
Yeah, this is quite thought provoking. If computer code written by LLMs is a commodity, what new businesses does that enable? What can we do cheaply we couldn't do before?
One obvious answer is we can make a lot more custom stuff. Like, why buy Windows and Office when I can just ask claude to write me my own versions instead? Why run a commodity operating system on kiosks? We can make so many more one-off pieces of software.
The fact software has been so expensive to write over the last few decades has forced software developers to think a lot about how to collaborate. We reuse code as much as we can - in shared libraries, common operating systems & APIs, cloud services (eg AWS) and so on. And these solutions all come with downsides - like supply chain attacks, subscription fees and service outages. LLMs can let every project invent its own tree of dependencies. Which is equal parts great and terrifying.
There's that old line that businesses should "commoditise their compliment". If you're amazon, you want package delivery services to be cheap and competitive. If software is the commodity, what is the bespoke value-added service that can sit on top of all that?
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We said the same thing when 3D printing came out. Any sort of cool tech, we think everybody’s going to do it. Most people are not capable of doing it. in college everybody was going to be an engineer and then they drop out after the first intro to physics or calculus class. A bunch of my non tech friends were vibe coding some tools with replit and lovable and I looked at their stuff and yeah it was neat but it wasn't gonna go anywhere and if it did go somewhere, they would need to find somebody who actually knows what they're doing. To actually execute on these things takes a different kind of thinking. Unless we get to the stage where it's just like magic genie, lol. Maybe then everybody’s going to vibe their own software.
Even if code gets cheaper, running your own versions of things comes with significant downsides.
Software exists as part of an ecosystem of related software, human communities, companies etc. Software benefits from network effects both at development time and at runtime.
With full custom software, you users / customers won't be experienced with it. AI won't automatically know all about it, or be able to diagnose errors without detailed inspection. You can't name drop it. You don't benefit from shared effort by the community / vendors. Support is more difficult.
We are also likely to see "the bar" for what constitutes good software raise over time.
All the big software companies are in a position to direct enormous token flows into their flagship products, and they have every incentive to get really good at scaling that.
> If software is the commodity, what is the bespoke value-added service that can sit on top of all that?
Troubleshooting and fixing the big mess that nobody fully understands when it eventually falls over?
> If software is the commodity, what is the bespoke value-added service that can sit on top of all that?
It would be cool if I can brew hardware at home by getting AI to design and 3D print circuit boards with bespoke software. Alas, we are constrained by physics. At the moment.
> Yeah, this is quite thought provoking. If computer code written by LLMs is a commodity, what new businesses does that enable? What can we do cheaply we couldn't do before?
The model owner can just withhold access and build all the businesses themselves.
Financial capital used to need labor capital. It doesn't anymore.
We're entering into scary territory. I would feel much better if this were all open source, but of course it isn't.
This reminds me of the old idea of the Lisp curse. The claim was that Lisp, with the power of homoiconic macros, would magnify the effectiveness of one strong engineer so much that they could build everything custom, ignoring prior art.
They would get amazing amounts done, but no one else could understand the internals because they were so uniquely shaped by the inner nuances of one mind.