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Comment by professoretc | Hacker News Reader

In this hypothetical future, why would I (or my business) buy software from any company, when I can just prompt the equivalent into existence myself? We talk a lot about AI killing software engineering as a profession, but if the AI future comes, it will kill software development as a type of business.

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Because there are only 24 hours in a day, and you have other problems you want to solve. You don't have time to design a car from scratch, you just buy one because you need one to get to work. At most you buy a cellphone holder from the gas station or that one you saw on TikTok. And a bumper sticker. Yeah, if that software is bread and butter for your business then sure. Go right ahead. But business is about delegating. To employees and to vendors. It comes down to data interchange. What does your business have as inputs, and what does it have has outputs? For some, it's emails with PDF attachments, others it's an API accessible via http. Others it's raw ingredients and the output is food. Sometimes you go to a restaurant and pay someone else to do the cooking. Other times, you cook yourself.

I give you 2 bucks for using that vibe coded tangled mess i percieve as working?

Read the git log from this software and it will be very clear very quickly. This can only be done with careful guidance from experienced developers. It doesn't work at all for a vibe coder.

Maybe that'll change I guess, but this repo is very bad evidence for that.

Nobody is disputing that this requires software engineering. Look at their architecture alone for the evidence.

We're talking about employment here.

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