Twitter consensus now is more like LLMs will be entirely commoditized, apps & features will be cheap, and only systems of record will have lasting value.
Non-deterministic behavior from your chatbot, like how the visual design artist's client keeps sending back and forth emails asking for it to "pop" more
why are you comparing to your buddy? we're talking about software products?
That's where we're heading.
Perhaps even by other people, and over time, continuously improving as we discover new use cases or that things are more complicated than they seemed on the first pass. Like... regular software, and not "do[ing] it all in Claude or Gemini or ChatGPT"
“Claude deploy this to dev”
vs
“Claude build me a tool that allows me to deploy to dev with a single click / command from CLI”
Orders of magnitude less expensive for the latter than the former. The former usually costs a few cents and the latter maybe a one time cost of 40 cents and then free forever afterwards.
You're thinking like a developer that needs to build and deploy software for other people to use, rather than as a user that wants to do something.
You're still thinking like a dev following traditional dev processes.
More like: "Claude do X".
"Claude, find an underserved niche of SaaS software where people aren't yet interested in using AI; generate a customer base through social engineering; and serve that customer base an app that they want. Here's my bank routing number."
"Claude do business."
"Claude build a nuclear reactor."
Your argument is thought-terminating. There's no way forward in this discussion if you believe that AI is capable of literally anything, and there's also no point in having a discussion in the first place if that's true because we're seconds away from singularity.
I'm under no illusion that we'll have cheap LLM access for much longer so I'm hedging my bets.
Who’s building the system that does that? Do you believe every request that we make - in every context that we make it - Claude will be able to intuit whether it’s something we only want to do once and is then just throw-away, or do it multiple times so a system should be built to facilitate that?
Even if Claude is somehow clairvoyant enough to know that, it still costs money to interpret my request in the first place. Why would I spend 5 cents to do something I could do for free? Maybe once, but across the day I’m doing hundreds or thousands of things and the money adds up. I’d rather have that money in my salary rather than having my employer pay for an AI subscription.
What’s the advantage of doing these things through a chat interface, aside from lining VC pockets? Vs clicking a button or invoking a CLI command? Just for the aesthetic of relinquishing control?
> Nothing wrong of doing it with voice / text request vs navigating to some ugly Jenkins , or half dead github actions etc .
I’ve automated away most of my daily browser activity using LLMs to generate tools. It’s become a lot easier recently. I do almost everything from a terminal, which makes it incredibly easy to e.g. pipe content into files for my LLMs to work with, like errors and stack traces. I understand some people have given access to their entire desktop to LLMs but that seems very solution-specific and I don’t want to commit days or even weeks getting my system to work with one piece of AI software just for another one to win the battle in the next few months. Too much churn. Text and terminal are evergreen.
If I think about what I do, like reading HN, reading some subreddits, watching series, asking LLMs things, ... I don't see how any of it can be usefully automated away, in such a way that it achieves an equivalent result.
If you just need a narrow subset of the functionality for now, might be cheaper in tokens to just vibe it than the attentional cost of searching for just the right software...let alone paying for it.
Enterprises needs to pay for API, they cannot use subs (for various reasons). In work environment it’s a higher chance you will pay raw token prices than have a sub.
With regular software I need an entire package of apps, a specially trained people , and a budget of at least $10k for the same service . Will my services be such a commodity very soon , sure .
Do I want to pay $10k now for manual software and people . Not really , what is the point ? Same way as accountant will not pay one day for the software , I will not pay adobe and designer today .