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"*: