alt Hacker NewsI wrote this same concern in February: what happens when it's easier to build custom software than spend one search looking for mature libraries?
https://gavinray97.github.io/blog/llm-build-cheaper-than-sea...
Replies
A few years ago, after ChatGPT but before agentic, I was asking AI for help with some projects. It kept recommending really good, well designed APIs, and gave me code snippets for them.
One small issue: they didn't exist! It had just hallucinated them!
Which was a real shame, since they were much nicer than the actual stuff I ended up finding.
I just realized, thinking about this now, that these days (and perhaps even back then), I could just say "ok now take this code and build the missing library so it actually works!"
When worldwideweb.app was first being developed an the RFCs and so forth for web servers and protocols were being discussed, one of the sticking point was what to call a URL --- the initial suggestion was "Universal Resource Locator", but the argument was made that users and writers were not librarians and that the distributed nature would preclude a given web page having a universally agreed-upon location and name, so instead the present "Uniform Resource Locator" was adopted.
What if there was a code sharing site where it was unambiguous what a given snippet of code would be named and where it would be stored, so that a user could just browse it and find a list of implementations for a given problem?
This of course runs up against one what John Ousterhout notes is one of the most difficult problems in computer science --- naming things --- in his book:
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/39996759-a-philosophy...
I've tried to do it on a small-scale with my own work, storing bits of (la).tex code in a single file, but on reviewing it, I'll often find that I have written a given solution a second time and given the macro a slightly different name....
Even before LLMs I found building custom software to be easier than using mature libraries for almost every task. I don't think this is a new problem.
Less external dependencies. I noticed Claude was vendoring (copy-pasting) Lucide icon svgs into my codebase (with proper attribution) because I was only using a small handful of them. That's awesome.
We've all been there. What happens is that you end up hiring someone to fix the unmaintainable mess a few years later when the pile of shit collapses.
(LLMs accelerate this and "a few years" can easily turn into "a few months".)
One positive result is that you get a lot more variation in vulnerabilities. That probably sounds negative, but it isn't.
As an example, a black hat doesn't get 70% of web sites from one shared bug in PHP. They need to target specific sites, and the exploit isn't likely to work in very many other places.