In the very long term, software will become a commodity, as you mentioned. Process and workflow may move into JIT delivery for the need at hand, in theory the data layer will be comprehensive and clean and the days of clicking around a bunch of stuff to fulfill process needs will move into a lower latency activity like...talking to your agent.
I saw a quote today by Brian Eno(1995) that said: "So the question becomes not whether you can do it or not, because any drudge can do it if they're prepared to sit in front of the computer for a few days; the question then is: of all the things you can now do, which do you choose to do?" and it resonated with me a lot.
This is true when you had to work hard for those ideas. Now you have LLMs. It means more people can sling a lot more crap at walls with fewer barriers to entry.
- nearly every enterprise IT project is a failure anyway
- "can i do this for free?" savvy people write "thing i don't want to pay for github".
- ??? "stupid smelly nerds!" (https://www.reddit.com/r/github/comments/1at9br4)
okay, what was the actual obstacle? it's really simple: in order to use something FREE, you had to touch GITHUB, which meant GIT. and people hate git.
today, with LLMs:
- "can i do this for free?"
- LLM dutifully does the needful, using projects it finds and code it learned from github, and doing the prosaic tasks of launching them for you, whatever that means.
people are getting way up into their heads about what matters, psychosocial and management and whatever bs. chatgpt is FREE. it will fix your problems for FREE. people will put up with ANYTHING for FREE.
the real innovation is laundering all that inaccessible, pre-existing solution space into a format that doesn't require transiting git and giving it away for free.
don't believe me? all of the most profitable SaaS businesses in technology are the packaging, deployment and customization of pre-existing open source free software, whether it is linux, kvm, postgres, etc. they are factories to turn stuff that is inaccessible because it is in GIT, which SUCKS - that is the hard part for people to wrap their minds around, that GIT sucks - into websites you can pay for. now LLMs do that.
A CTOs job isn't to save money but to spend money effectively. Saving money by increasing risk is not neccesarily a prudent move.
In some sense having customer able to prototype what they want is a good thing. I did it myself as i was at the time on that side, and having a quick-whip-it tool was a good thing to quickly get some feature that was missing in the major software before that major software would add it (if at all). (And if one remembers for example Crystal Reports - while for "reports", it and the likes were in many senses such quick-whip-it tools for a lot of such customization that was doable by the customer.)
So, after initial aftershock - "Ahhhh, we don't need software companies anymore!" - we'll get to the state with software companies still doing their thing just with a lot of AI as specialization is one of the main thing in modern economy and AI becomes most powerful tools of the trade. (and various AI components themselves will be part of software delivery, like say a very fine-tuned model (hosted or on-premise) specific to the customer and software - Clippy on steroids)
(Of course some companies wouldn't survive the transition just like some companies didn't survive the transitions to client/server, cloud, etc. while some new companies will emerge like Anthropic has today or Borland had at the time)
LLM coding is going to create a cambrian explosion of these tools. It’s going to be very interesting to see the remnants of this wave 30 years down the line.
American capitalism hides the depressing fact that rarely does the best succees.
AAI momentum is parallel to just buying lottery tickets and doing so with the belief that you know the real odds, so one can overwhelm with quantity of tickets.