alt Hacker News>Where's the next Dotcom Boom or Cloud SaaS Explosion?
i see it isn't your first rodeo :) So, in Dotcom the companies needed huge financing for hardware and those money were the main limiter, in Cloud SaaS era small teams with relatively small financing mostly for salaries were able to deliver large - AirBnb, Uber, WhasApp, ... - and the employees, their brain abilities and their ability to work together were the main limiter. Now with AI we don't have these limiters. I'd say the slopped up Claude Code and OpenClaw are the examples of the new wave which is just starting.
>large companies falling over each other to enshittify their products.
Oh, yes, each wave the software is even more sh.tty than before, and this time i think we're really in for a shock to our imagination of how sh.tty it can get. All these datacenters here and later in space would need some slop to churn through :)
My bet is that we'd not have a software as a static set of bits existing for more than one execution. I think we'll have Just-In-Time software. An ephemeral one. It will be generated on the fly for specific task and discarded after. That will keep those datacenters busy at least for some time.
Another storyline i, with some horror, expect is merging of the coming boom of actual physical robots with the boom of AI-slopped software - that should be fascinating :)
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> I think we'll have Just-In-Time software. An ephemeral one. It will be generated on the fly for specific task and discarded after.
For years I've been telling people that every office worker should be able to do at least some programming, just to avoid ever having them spend several days manually repeating the same handful of steps on a large set of data.
I can 100% see AI taking over this market. Teaching office workers to write half-decent prompts is probably easier than teaching office workers Python. But you don't need a $1000/month subscription to write barely-good-enough-to-run-once one-off scripts, and you can't build a business solely on ad-hoc scripts.
> the employees, their brain abilities and their ability to work together were the main limiter. Now with AI we don't have these limiters
Was it? Don't we?
There has never been a shortage of college kids willing to throw together MVPs. Sure, hacking together the bare minimum of business logic with auto-generated Rails code and a $20 Bootstrap template during a hackathon is being replaced by an afternoon talking an AI into generating a Tailwind-styled SPA in whatever Javascript framework is fashionable this week, but what does it really change? Writing MVP-level code was never the hard part.
The hard part is the engineering behind making it scalable, extendable, and durable. That's still staying the same: you're now just giving the prompt to an AI rather than a junior dev. If anything, having to deal with inept managers now sending full-blown AI slop proposals rather than blabbering a handful of buzzwords and leaving the professionals to fill in the rest is going to slow down our ability to work together.
I feel like "just in time" software is something we already had-- things like VBA and AppleScript showed there has always been an audience for scratch-your-own-itch tooling for work scenarios that aren't programming-centric.
It would be irresponsible to treat it as completely ephemeral though; clever tooling would make it easy when you remember "I already solved this issue 3 months ago, let me pull that back and reuse it."
What terrifies me is doing it with the current slopbox user experience. From a UI perspective, it's clumsy system that discourages developing mastery in favour of guesswork and gacha. (When you said the wrong thing in a classic command line, it at least told you so rather than trying to stagger along with it) And as an executing tool, it's simply sluggish-- once you've expressed what you want, Claude takes minutes to do what a regex does in milliseconds.
I wonder if the latter is fixable-- pre-configure the bot to generate answers as reusable code instead of slowly pumping the changes themselves.