If creation of customized software solutions is consistently getting cheaper and good enough in quality, the near future is about creating much more custom solutions for considerable smaller customer or consumer groups.
Mind that we still need people who understand tech and verify that a system does what it claims to do, in a safe and efficient way. Every non-technical vibe coder will at some point realize, that he maybe can prompt away every problem he has, but that is still considerable effort and also includes all the mistakes a professional already eradicated from his habits. Many vibe coded projects will also collapse under their own weight, rethinking a strategy - with tech in mind - is also professional effort.
Even if LLMs would produce perfect, high quality code all the time, instructing the "perfect" prompt is still a human problem. LLMs cannot mind read and fully understand the environmental and social circumstances. Understanding these things and model them into solutions, are also human problems.
All this still requires profound technical knowledge, even more now considering security is under fire.
You’re not going to be a billionaire, just be happy doing a good job making niche things for companies. You don’t need 800,000 users. You need 8 small businesses that are paying you $2000/mo.
Yes, they might be able to build software that works for (relatively) close to free now. But that still has marginal cost in terms of extra resource to build it. Then it needs to be maintained, upgraded to meet changing internal requirements, it needs to be secure, they need to be able to trust it does what it's supposed to.
Sure, the cost of all of that has come down, but it's still a lot of work when they could just entrust another company to do that for a cost they're willing to pay. And companies are often happy to pay a lot in B2B contracts.
Just to reinforce this: look at the cost savings from cloud-exits - yet companies still readily build out in the cloud. FOSS has existed for decades, yet companies still pay for proprietary alternatives. Build vs buy exists on more dimensions than just cost alone.
When a software suite costs a company $70-100k per year that does a bunch of stuff they don’t want, they’ll definitely pay you to build bespoke tools for $24k per year.
Literally doing this now.
Maybe I'm overthinking things. There were companies paying out the ass for relatively basic WordPress sites in the past (and probably still)
I’m on vacation right now, but my main customer is constantly adding new feature requests, etc. and until I went on vacation their work was as good as 2 or 3 customers per month, “oh can you do this? What about this?” I honestly am looking forward for them to throttle back a little because I could use another similar volume customer, but I hardly have enough time to really invest to make that happen until they get all the things they want and while they’re paying me I ain’t going to stop.
It was also pretty cool, because there’s a young engineer working there in a non-engineer role as a human forklift. I said, “hey, I need help implementing all this stuff” now he has a raise, and he is kind of like an embedded customer support person, and I don’t have to stress about it so much.
Regardless, just build.
The phone call automation for their front desk saves something like 40 hours of work a month just of people looking up customers to call about their schedule etc. And that’s just one tool and I deployed it in like 4 days. It’s really not that hard, just go out and make people’s lives easier and stop trying to scale or whatever.
It was something that looked like it was originally written in visual basic and than rewritten in react for tablet devices.
I'm still under NDA but the above figures related to per company\ per month sales are about right
Am I missing something, are you juggling like 5 or more of these types of jobs?
No-one pays $2k/mo for a fractional CFO.
No-one pays $2k/mo for a fractional sales head.
No-one pays $2k/mo for environmental paperwork consulting for a manufacturer.
They can do it all in house. Why would they?
Right?
Except all of these actually do happen, of course, and each is a big industry.
As soon as this industry lost the inscrutability of the syntax of the work product, it began catastrophizing about the total end of any commercial demand at all.
Yet by this logic there should be almost no service providers at all for any industry that lacks legal certification barriers.
Good lord guys…
Microsoft just introduced MXC:
"...for running untrusted code (model output ..."
Spinning jennys are neat but if theyd been invented in a world where use of star trek replicators was routine I think theyd be more curiosity than revolutionary.
"Artisanal code" would definitely die off if the cp command didnt work perfectly or cost thousands of dollars to run but it doesnt hence why the metaphor is at best mistaken (and at worst dishonest, e.g. when frontier labs are desperately pushing it).
And, the flip side is that artisanal clothes would probably make a huge comeback if star trek replicators were invented and nobody would want cheap sweatshop made crap any more. Why would you when handmade Gucci silk clothing could be yours for a couple of bucks?
Except it doesn't seem the software is getting cheaper for the end user, even though it is arguably getting cheaper to build.
Paradoxically, the costs of running the software seem to keep rising, both for running it on a local machine or as a subscription.
Some of those will go on to be successful and need technical people to support it
If handmade one appears it is as some centerpiece, and remaining ones are machine-made.
Software... a lot of software is basically the same thing (database, api, frontend), the only difference is what data and business rules. But the act of writing code isn't very different. It's the what code to write where software engineers come in.
I.e. in order to get to the point where you didn't have to manually touch this thing, you likely did have to learn deeply about its underlying concepts by manually doing things.
Operating machines doesn't always have the same phenomenon. E.g. experience with a hand-powered drill is unnecessary to use an electric drill.
The "only" difference? Wow.
What's left is a lot of very different software which have very few things in common.
Currently, learning programming is the lever to unlock architecture understanding. We will need a few new layers of abstraction before this changes.
Yes, and it’s worth pointing out the class of people buying ikeas rugs were NOT buying Persian wool/silk rugs before…they had bare floors or make coverings out of cloth or woven grass.
Also worth pointing out that since 1979, regardless of whether it is secondhand or not and which country you are procuring it from, rugs made in Iran (Persian rugs) have been totally banned for import to the U.S. Tribal rugs now come more from places like Turkey and India. So the market is being extremely artificially suppressed, boosting ikea rugs even more.
Can you expand on this please? I don't see the reasoning trace that got you to that conclusion.
I am not even sure the market has shrunk, because most people never owned them.
But indeed, the answer in the article’s context is no, probably not. And don’t go to university at all, because you will burn through money you will never replace and develop debt you will never pay off.
Learning a physical skill, or at least a physically based skill, is better, as is learning a skill that is chartered as a profession or at least where there are functional unions.
The future is bad. Really, really bad. Only learn jobs an AI can’t ruin.
... and I'm reminded of all the folks that have Accounting degrees. Their degrees ended up being proof that they could track a lot of rules.
That proof meant they got hired and their job was not to ... "account", but to "fit into our business".
Perhaps that's the majority of CS folks going forward?
"Your CS degree proves you can help me not get stuck in technical problems so I can go solve [business/engineering/scientific/...] problems"...?