alt Hacker NewsI think it's even more pervasive than that. Why bother forking software at all? At the point in which code generation is meaningfully trivialized, software becomes entirely disposable. Anything you want, have a model spin it up. You don't even need libraries, the model can just make everything in-situ, who cares? Why on earth would I ever want to use SQLite if I have access to a sufficiently advanced code generator which can generate me a similarly high quality database system, with the added benefit of conforming to whatever my problem domain is, conforming to whatever branch of database theory I want?
Even SaaS isn't safe. I don't even have to describe your product to my system, I just have to give it a harness with access to the interface and have it replicate it locally. Frankly you can probably already prompt for that.
The only thing holding this future back right now are pricing problems and code generation quality. Both of those barriers are constantly being knocked down. We might never arrive at that future, but it's definitely a higher probability than solving AGI's scaling issues, and would arrive much sooner for technical users.
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>Why on earth would I ever want to use SQLite if I have access to a sufficiently advanced code generator which can generate me a similarly high quality database system
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_qzqY1bb7I your sufficiently advanced code generator may generate you a high quality database system for some measure of quality, but it will not have SQLite's reliability over the extremely long tail of edge cases proven through its testing and use in real life
You still spend all your time troubleshooting the reinvented wheels even if AI writes it because you won’t know the edge cases til you hit them. Then you modify the lib, re-release, and update all your apps, but now look where all your time is spent.
The assumption you make is the classic LLM mistake of thinking writing code === building software.
To cite your example SQL has had its tires kicked a lot it’s seen things you can’t even imagine thanks to being used millions of times by millions of people. It’s hard to just replicate all that iteration, learning, mastery, and process. If you reinvent it, users will encounter the dumbest bugs over and over and over. Sure you’ll fix them, but you’re now embarking on this big thing that SQL and others already did.
If you love the problem space definitely do it - go full steam ahead - especially if you’re actually innovating and doing things better, but don’t be fooled into thinking anyone can, or should with every side project.
The new struggle is focus, what not to build, I almost have the purely opposite view of instead of using LLMs for grandiosity, only using the LLM for tedium and making sure it doesn’t do anything too much that I haven’t planned for or want to do. I drive the thing, so every new project is still my time and energy and focus.
> Why on earth would I ever want to use SQLite if I have access to a sufficiently advanced code generator which can generate me a similarly high quality database system
Because SQLite has 10k requirements that wouldn't even cross your mind to write down, but 80% of which are useful to you.