The end state, I think, is that everyone who needs small software to manage a todo list or synchronize files, or whatever "normal" people do, will end up with bespoke personalized software written by their own AI. SWEs will be reduced to working on only the big corporate projects.
The overwhelming trend in commercial software these past few decades has been hyper-aggressive anti-customization, anti-personalization, anti-user. Commercial software has been reduced to one single happy path and if that doesn't suit your needs, then fuck off. No one is making commercial software for everyday people. Even open source is trending away from everyday users.
Soon, regular everyday people who simply need some software to solve a problem the way they want it solved will have the ability to do so. In the bast majority of those cases, the quality and correctness of said software really doesn't matter. What matters is that it's personalized, free, and isn't an invasive surveillance/advertisement platform.
People can't be bothered to cook for themselves, and often order crappy, unhealthy food that costs 10 times as much just so they don't have to cook.
Now they're going to build their own software every time they think they need an app..?
In other words, when will we really see a transition from "yet another token generator" to something that appears to coherently observe, perceive, form intent, plan, and act in a way that is compatible with an existing, long-running human context?
(And, also, do this with enough determinism to be a viable product and not some gaping liability...)
As others have said, this will be more like ordering food than "building". It's not there yet, but soon-ish it might be.
I think you're right here. Even for myself, AI has enabled me to actually finish a plethora of personal projects that I've always wanted to built but just never bothered.
These aren't things to share, nor would they be particularly useful to others necessarily, but now I actually have the time to make a little custom utility for very specific problems.
I still think it remains to be seen if "normal" people will do this though. Like, yeah I managed to replace a ton of little paid macOS utilities with my own software now, but AI still only got me about ~90% or so of the way there. I still had to rely on my own knowledge and experience to finish them.
Very impressive, but still a far cry from, say, the average user at my employer who struggles to even operate a non-mobile OS, being able to do this. Maybe we'll get there eventually, but for that to happen, the agent needs to be able to make these utilities 100% on its own with a very vague prompt, and be able to infer what the user actually wants when they don't (and they won't) explicitly state every use case they have in mind.
NullVoid added the traffic cam feed to his HUD so he could make his deliveries faster"
That sort of thing. In the stories, it makes you think that everyone is just some sort of genius, but we're kind of heading there where anybody can, theoretically, create a personalized tech stack with the help of a programming agent.
I haven't put a lot of energy into it, but your first paragraph triggered that thought.
For technical people who are developers or in other technical roles, sure. For everyone else, no way.
The hard part isn't the code, for most problems it never was. The hard part is being able to think logically about what problem you are trying to solve, making sure the guardrails are in place so you don't accidentally wipe your whole photo library, and staying on top of the specs for multiple walled gardens that you want to interface with. In short, maintenance.
Building is fun, maintaining is a slog. This is also why saas isn't going anywhere. There is a benefit from not reinventing the wheel, having a shared language and shared ecosystem.
On the other hand, I do think that the software that is going to succeed is the software that is the easiest to build on top of.
(Actually I would argue every business past a tiny size should have access to a 3D printer, it can save a lot of money in subtle ways, though its rarely business-critical)
For these reasons, I think people are overestimating the end-state impact of AI. Right now the hype cycle is fierce, and it definitely changes the economics of producing software (with a lot of negative effects forcing adjustments in open source ways of working), but I don't think in the end state the core landscape of software changes all that much. Well worn and hardened infrastructure like the Linux kernel is infinitely more valuable than CRUD apps used with small user populations on the edge. User space libraries and frameworks fall somewhere in between. AI increases the volume of new software, yes, but I see it as mostly fractal bits filling in the margins.
The effort to start is way down and drives new demand for software (at least in my own portfolio of side projects) but the effort to keep going is still above this threshold.
I have to say I find it pretty funny.
You'll need to qualify that statement...
I think you're right in the second part of the quote, but the first doesn't follow.
The software space has moved from value propositions to grifts like crypto, but that has more to do with what investors are willing to fund than with user needs. Modest, sustainable businesses don't have the absurd levels of growth that's currently on demand.
Consumer perception is that everything's reducing in quality and increasing in price, digital or otherwise. It will have to give at some point.
This sounds like an utopian dream. The surveillance is baked into this AI built to create the software. It will be built into the platform used to host and run the software. Why wouldn't AWS want that sweet sweet data to train their models. How many people can really self host? You seem to be overestimating average people's ability to learn how to self host.
Its like saying "we have vaccine related information at our finger tips so there are no longer going to be vaccine skeptics". Existence of information doesn't necessarily lead to application of such information.
The other thing which I feel these kinds of utopian dreams miss is that if something is commoditized and you can't really tell the difference between software A and B - because of AI, there is more incentive for companies to form cliques and raise prices while still delivering commoditized terrible software.
This sounds good. But technically it seems highly implausible, just as a thriving human civilization on Mars sounds highly implausible. Nice plot for a sci-fi novel though.
Yes.
With a tiny subset of people building core modules and libs to be used for the above (eg. an OCR module, plenty of which already exist, and an AI can trivially hook them with other functionality into an app form).
Most of what you write can be built already quite easily. An example "Custom audio apps for recording and playing music files"*:
It's kind of funny that you say this, because I am a frontend developer and I tend to see the state of the art as being very good at doing the boring behind-the-scenes plumbing that I don't care about, and not great at doing the kind of bespoke design work that my day job's clients want.
I'm not saying that either of us are definitively right or wrong, and I agree that having a more generalist skillset is probably the best way to succeed in this new era; I'm just pointing out that LLMs don't really own any part of the stack so thoroughly that specialists in that segment will just go away.
It's taste can be atrocious, so we're not replacing engineers entirely yet, but it's clear that it's almost hands off for any task I would have done as a consultant in 2012, for example. And, contrary to my opinion a couple months ago, I think taste is a pretty shallow moat, ultimately. Many of my clients when I was operating a consultancy had plenty of taste, if that's all they required, and I think it'd be foolish to assume frontier models won't acquire taste eventually.
I do think that, ultimately, the tippy top of the pinnacle for things like truly original design work, truly original work of any kind, will take a long time to replace. But most software engineering isn't moving the boundaries of the possibilities of humanity, it's making sure that we can turn $0.10 of infra spend into $2 of revenue reliably.
[0] https://research.google/pubs/the-role-of-visual-complexity-a...
As far as frontend vs backend, there’s a greater scope for fuckups when dealing with the backend. Frontend problems tend to be more transient. So the stakes are lower, which means that the accountability of humans has less value.
Idk, I like AI when it works, but it drives me insane when it keeps making errors. I've had a few errors which I figured out from documentation fairly quickly, provided said docs but the AI would still mess it up somehow.
The AI is not intelligent. Its really hard to grasp cleanly. But it can't do anything logically like we do. Its pattern matching. It has to be a pattern its seen; then it can assemble them. If there are competing patterns - it'll trip up being consistent. Long established libraries and languages that change the least, it'll be best at. Anything newer it'll be bad at - even with documentation. The only way out is to give it tests, then it can loop over several simpler problems, where the errors (failed tests) match well onto the more basic primitives that don't really change (wrong string, wrong type, wrong structure, etc)
I think I finally have a way to describe how AI works: infinite experience, none of the smarts.
1) A designer that uses Figma correctly (using well defined components / design systems) 2) A front-end framework as close to HTML / CSS as possible for the visuals (I have success with Web Components / Lit) with Figma MCP
The front-end is usually one-shot using frontier models. However in my experience, designers are all over the place with using Figma correctly.
Every engineer can now produce things in the front end that doesn't look like complete and utter garbage, sure, but everyone is also producing the new-era of Twitter Bootstrap pages. It all has the same touched-by-AI look and it might as well be customer kryptonite from everything I've experienced at my workplace with customer surveys and collaboration. It has raised the floor substantially for internal tools and admin pages though.
It does seem to be happening - at least in mobile app stores.
There's some recent analysis that demonstrates how, despite a huge updraft in the quantity of apps released, the aggregate count of reviews and downloads remains static.
In other words, there are now many more apps. But not many (or really any?) more users
Take a look at p40 / figure 12 of "WRITING CODE VS. SHIPPING CODE: PRODUCTIVITY EFFECTS ACROSS GENERATIONS OF AI CODING TOOLS" (https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w35275/w352...)
Their analysis is on pg42-43
> they should be clear about why this time is different to the entire history of the computer industry so far
I can't prove the pie is fixed, but nor can you prove the pie is infinite.
Maybe this comes close to sounding patronising, but I think the key thing people miss, when talking about economic growth of software is, money has to come from somewhere. Someone has to give it to you. So it you want to keep growing, you need someone who isn't paying for software, to start. Who are these people, how much money do they have, and what other costs are you competing against?
Right now, people pay all sorts of money for real interactions with real people, most notably friendship and dating.
Tiktok has done a good job at starting to disrupt this, but with AI and better VR technology, maybe we can finish the job and disrupt all human relationships, all romantic relationships, all friendships. It's a huge addressable market (all humans), and if even just 5% of all humans buy a $5 virtual coffee (free to produce, pure profit) for their AI partner each day, that would be a massive increase in software spend.
Once we hit "The Matrix", that'll mean software has nowhere left to go.
Do you want to live in this world? Why? Because you envision yourself receiving said money?
You should be ashamed of yourself for writing such a thing.
Isn't the likely explanation for this that the updraft is a huge number of sloppy AI-generated apps that nobody wants to use because they're just bad?
There is a lot of software that are constrained by human eyeballs (entertainment or ads monetized)
I’m not talking about growth here. I’m merely saying that it won’t recede. My argument is that we won’t use the increased productivity to spend less money producing the same amount of software – we’ll use the increased productivity to spend the same amount of money to produce a larger amount of software.
In aggregate software comes out of R&D, operations, and labor spend. Good software increases revenue and decreases costs for companies, which grows the economic pie, and frees up more spend and more companies spin up and start spending
A world where we've saturated out software would seem utopian compared to right now
Yeah, I don't that does not necessarily mean everyone is looking for the latest and greatest. Many businesses are still reliant on technologies like custom spreadsheets and Microsoft Access because they do exactly what they want them to do, have a fixed rate, and rarely require any additional modifications/maintenance. Once you step outside of the bubble so many of us are stuck in you'll realize that many, many people aren't interested in upgrades, but rather they just want the old shit they know to just work.
The row count limit in Excel has been hit many times over the years.
imagine if we got new shit that worked better
Switching costs are real. It's not that hard to make an improvement, but it's very hard to make an improvement that justifies the cost in both money and time.
clearly we were able to keep making improvements! the ceiling is nowhere near reached yet
Who would profit from such a company?
But that puts 90% of developers out of a job.
And I don't see why it couldn't become 99%.
If Windows would stay the same (and not grow) it would be much faster on newer CPUs...
I'm not saying your entire point is invalid, just that half of it is not correct, and so things might turn out worse than expected.
Every business needs an accountant and a lawyer on hand. In the past, hiring one software engineer to build custom software for your small or midsized business was not worth it. What can one software engineer build? Maybe an MVP in a year? No chance it was worth it for the vast majority of businesses. Outside of corporations or tech companies, employing a software dev was simply not a thing.
Nowadays, your kindergarten might employ a full time or part time software engineer to build custom software. One dev can build a lot more a lot faster.
That said, I think the average or below average dev won’t earn $200k/year anymore. However, the top devs will earn more than ever. If AI increases an average dev’s productivity by 10x, then it will increase a top tier dev’s by 100x.
SWEs are more leveraged than ever and we've seen comp drastically rise for top performers
No they won’t. Productivity does not determine the wage rate.
1. They can build and sell their own products or services. We are already seeing 1-2 person software companies earning real money. Top devs don’t have to stay in corporate if they think they can generate more revenue on their own.
2. When companies get rid of their B devs without losing productivity, they can pay their A devs more.
I’m in the #2 camp right now. My team shrank by 50% through attrition in the last year. We didn’t hire anyone new when someone left. My pay has increased.
I’m a CEO and I don’t see this at all. There will be more consolidation for whom the economics are viable to pay good wage rates. The rest? Nah.
The crap ones will be out of a job. The best ones will fight fiercely amongst each other to keep their jobs and existing wage rates. Let alone increase.
We already have CEOs is vendors trying to scare people away from vibe coding their contract away, while I diligently vibe code their contract away.
Not much new here as my entire career has been coding away 3rd party contracts, and it’s now easier than ever.
I threatened to leave to start my own company unless they gave me enough money to make me not want to do it. They did.
Regardless, I didn't say "many". I said top tier. How you define that is up to you.
There is already ample evidence for top dev talent earning way more than before whether it's through corporate or starting their own company.
Junior wages won’t change, and may even get lower.
But, at least at present, the top devs are earning more than ever as their skills are much more leveraged.
I don’t see that changing anytime soon.
most top swe comp comes from equity in the company, which benefits from productivity
not only that but the leveraged nature of swe means top performers are in perpetual shortage and low performers contribute negative productivity
anecdotally weve seen comp rise as the best candidates have multiple competing offers as well as the freedom to start their own business
Top devs make more than before
The AI companies will skim all the extra profits.
...or if there's an increase of demand for software, but mostly of the kind that can be completely automated by AI, no need for developers.
Not all software but how many movies you can watch, books read? Similarly how many games you can play? How many ads you can watch during a day?
Eventually projects will have to be profitable. And even if everybody will make a great game most of them won’t be profitable because you competing for limited eyeballs time
Jervons Paradox
Or humans are relegated to the co-processor role. The AI does 99% of the thinking and work and consults the human for the 1% it needs. Whether that extra contribution is essentially a random number generation, creativity / outside the box input, or esoteric problem solving remains to be seen.
Anytime we became more productive in the past we become in a way that didn't remove engineers, just increased the abstraction an engineer would work in. And we did it at times of rapid expansion of computing and internet, meaning way more need for engineers counter-balancing the increased productivity.
>The world’s appetite for software has been insatiable so far.
Has it? The expansion of IT has reached global saturation, we're getting desparate, and try to push shit like Blockchain and IoT, and shoving "smart" features even where people don't want them.
And the world is full of software nobody or very few care for or use/subscribe/buy. App Store have huge "long tails" of stuff nobody cares for.
And with autonomous agents we designed something to replace the engineer altogether. So even if the demand for software increases, that can be like "spawn more agents" not "get more developers".
Some human supervisors per N agents? Sure. Equal human demand as what's now? Unlikely.
In general "we did it 5 times, to we'll surely do it 6" is not a real argument, just a hope that something will never end.
I used to work at an overnight NOC many years ago, and I literally learned bash and python just to save time so I could spend more time watching netflix or whatever instead of working. Instead, my scripts handled so many alerts that they laid off someone and gave me a promotion to being a sys admin :(
I've been chasing the dream of automating my job away and collecting a paycheck for doing nothing for decades now, and I keep getting promoted...
I think we are past this point personally. Lots of blasphemously useless crap being built.
If I wanted to build something that is specific to my needs, this would be prohibitively time consuming and expensive. Even today with all the latest models – even if what I want is relatively mundane.
To add on to that, what would be produced would be ideal for me but less ideal for other people. Other people need things that I don’t, and they don’t need things that I do. And people’s needs change over time. So the actual range of software that there is appetite for is the result of a huge combinatorial explosion of features, for every single type of application out there.
The appetite you are thinking is satisfied today is merely “there is an app that does X” but the appetite that is actually present once we are able to create software much more efficiently is more along the lines of “everybody gets their own custom app that does X”.
I don’t think the appetite for software can be quenched until we have just-in-time feature generation. That is definitely not within present day capabilities.
Edit: Yes, I see, as a former gamer and game developer, I am unemploying myself by creating games with AI to play myself instead of ennriching the pockets of Gabe Newell and other billionaires, hence the downvote.
There will never be a human who can beat Stockfish ever again, digital intelligence has simply accelerated away from human intelligence in that regime.
There is no other human alive who can beat Magnus Carlsen. Stockfish crushes Magnus.
But Magnus and Stockfish playing together crush any conceivable combination of just human or just computer. And no serious chess player would train without a computer or decline the assist if the contest mattered.
And this is in a regime where the dominance of the machine is total, structural, and permanent, far more so than any existing AI's impact on the outcome distribution of any recent development on any white-collar knowledge work include even the most sophisticated software engineering done anywhere. The demonstrated as opposed to completely conjectural lift on SWE outcomes with Claude Code (and even that's controversial, let's take the high end of the claims) is real and changes the geometry of the situation not at all.
Nor is there any apparent limit on how much arbitrarily sophisticated software the world has an appetite for, you could take someone at the absolute top of the field (I'm a big Carmack fan let's go with Carmack), and give him cutting edge AI assist, and the best program a person can write just got better. Sweet!
And this applies anywhere from junior to Carmack: however good they were, they're better now. We can build harder things. We can have extreme quality software where previously we were stuck with some Electron jank, across the board. Does anyone think Slack would lose market share if it went back to its gaming roots and was gorgeously 3D accelerated on every surface against a backend that could instant and perfectly synchronize an arbitrary workspace on a flakey cell connection and never have an outage or data loss? Or would they rapidly shred the remaining competition and become the favored tool of everyone?
In adversarial regimes like trading or drone warfare, you better believe the best hackers have arbitrary assist if you're going to play against them.
I think the thing to be hand-wringing about isn't AI, it's that capitalism no longer seems to be an adversarial regime. The worst software rivalries in the industry look more like a pillow fight than a battle of will.
And if there is any lasting reduction in headcount, it's leaders lacking ambition agreeing tacitly to not play very hard, not AI, that is to blame for that. None of the HFT shops nor amusingly the frontier labs have reduced their hiring or compensation at all. If anything, it's going up!
The engineers who can manage large scale projects using agents will, on the other hand, probably get a hefty salary bump.
Those people don't exist.
These people will see a brutal job market that is forcing them to take more responsibility and work at a higher level of abstraction.
This is nothing new - A bunch of people simply don't thrive well as knowledge workers. The bar for being a knowledge worker is going to go up - by a lot.
I question the obsession engineers have with their "code writing" being replaced by a machine.
Do you really think that's the value you bring to the table?
Non-engineers don't want to sit down and think about anything, they don't want to sit down and test that thinks actually work, they don't want to think about all the failure cases that could go wrong besides a few shallow tests, and they definitely don't want to have to pick up the mess if something does go wrong...
This is what you get paid to do. Coding is a small part of that.
Not all can do that.