Programming

The author is supposedly fairly experienced. Which makes this take really baffling.

When someone needs an IDE with new language support, they won’t wait for JetBrains to release it next year, maybe. They will go to a software shop around the corner, pay a few hundred bucks, and get it next Monday. When someone needs a new feature in Photoshop, they won’t wait for Adobe. They will buy a new Photoshop from a friend, with the feature and maybe a few more. When a company needs their accounting system to support a new logistics optimization scheme, they won’t go to Oracle. They will re-write the entire Oracle Fusion, for a few thousand dollars.

No company in their right mind is going to want to constantly throw away and switch software like shoes. There's a reason companies employ tons of customer success people to help with migrating and onboarding. It is painful to migrate a tool over.

Also what happens with the shoe model when the customer forgot a few requirements, do you pay for the new disposable software again? Do you keep regenerating new software every time you forget a thing you need to support? And that's assuming a small company with an easy install process. What about a large company where you have to roll this out to multiple machines at any given time?

Okay cool you pay for a web app instead so its easier to distribute. Where are you housing your disposable app? You wanna manage an AWS account yourself and manage the scaling and infra?

People don't pay SaaS companies for functionality itself.

But all of that assumes that AI can perfectly replicate every aspect of different software. Which there's no context window in the world that will support that. It reeks of the same "Docusign is gonna be vibecoded away vibe". You don't pay docusign for an interface to type your name in. You pay them to stay on top of regulatory compliance with document signatures and support various different integrations with your other tools that you have.

Comparing software that can be copied for free, with physical items, is stupid.

"Just like books cost more ink with a big font, webpages cost more data with a big font"

Nope, that doesn't work, it's absurd. Which is not surprising from a stupid article trying to argue that slop software is the future.

I think the post (well, this translation anyway) is best read as a fantasy rather than associated with reality. It's predicated on a lot of assumptions, including the assumption that AI has the ability to develop large software almost entirely autonomously, that large brands have no means to lock users within an ecosystem, that people will be able to articulate exactly the software they need and how it should be designed, and so on.

The future being described by this post is the elimination of all roles of software and product development, spanning from developers to designers to even product managers.

As a thought experiment, it's interesting. It shouldn't be confused as reality, though.

I used to think this. When I was a teenager.

Now I'm pretty sure the fewer programmers you have, the better the program. Don't need to worry about stepping on toes or making sure your parts work with another person's parts if it's just 1 person doing the whole thing.

And if it's 1 person doing everything, not just programming, they also don't need to worry about some manager forcing them to a deadline or requesting ridiculous changes/additions.

Just like fast fashion replaced tailors with factory workers

I'm not sure this is right. If I wanted cheap clothes in the 1980s, I would go to a thrift store, not a tailor. If I wanted to hem up some pants I bought, I go to a tailor. In the 2020s, the former might have changed to online fast fashion behemoths, but there's no replacement for a tailor to do up some pants.

If I generously assume "tailors" is shorthand for a fashion designer that can also sew their own designs from fabric, then it's still wrong because fast fashion has never been about enabling designers that have no hand-sewing skills. Instead, it's about churning out mind-boggling amounts of product, irrespective of demand. Post-scarcity capitalism theory says that any product will sell at the right price, and the price for fast fashion is rock bottom.

fast software will replace programmers with AI operators

If "fast software" is going to mean shoddy software that's churned out just for the sake of it, then this is the only apt comparison to fast fashion. Even without AI, I don't think most modern software engineering or programming is comparable to tailoring or even fashion design.

When the opening comparison is so deeply flawed, I'm not exactly keen on reading the rest of the article.