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Comment by somesortofthing | Hacker News Reader

To be honest, I doubt the current state of things will hold much longer. Current AI can automate virtually all of my work as a pre-AI senior and is rapidly closing in on being able to automate the types of work that have emerged post-AI too. I have a hard time imagining a world where a drop-in end-to-end replacement for a full software team is more than a year away. I'm sure I'll have a job for a year or two past that, but there'll be some small stock market bump eventually and a bloodbath will begin the second the C-suite takes a closer look at what their engineers are even doing anymore.

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At which point the question will be: What are even the customers paying for? If they can get the product / service straight from their own chatbots, why pay a company for it? The companies that sell data, will probably somewhat safe - as long as they can have some moat between the users and data.

The death of SaaS could also be a thing in the (not so distant) future.

I mean, the same reason they do now. Time, taste, and amortized costs.

Just because it's faster and cheaper and requires less skill, doesn't mean it's instant and free and requires no skill.

I’m planning out my 2030 career in idle moments these days. I think it’ll be something akin to a carpenter who builds custom furniture.

I think we’ve barely scratched the surface of what software can do if it’s completely custom built, specifically for individuals or small businesses who could’ve never afforded it, pre-ai. Home automation, health and disease management, all sorts of administration, conversational ai over your life’s data - most people have no clue what’s possible once it’s custom built. With close attention, good design, creativity, and without giving away privacy or independence.

In my limited spare time I’m building up this tapestry of custom services for myself and my loved ones, and having a great time doing it, while trying to learn how I can offer this as a service.

Judging by the reactions I get when showing people what I can do with my phone, and no that’s not available on Google play, I think the demand will be there.

Woodworking and making furniture is fun! However, having made both furniture (and ceramics) myself - I think it’s hard to make a living this way. The overwhelming majority of people are used to paying little for these kinds of things. In the case of woodworking a large piece of furniture can take months so you might expect to only produce 3-4 / year unless you’re very good.

Not to say you shouldn’t! But it’s worth being realistic about income compared to (current) software salaries.

Sure. But you're taking my metaphor farther than I intended. Most people understand the basics of furniture, and still prefer to pay Ikea rather than a carpenter. In the case of custom ("bespoke", ugh) software, we'll have to both define and communicate a new category of service. And the customers are likely to be the same sorts of people who will pay a personal trainer or get a private tutor for their kids - and I think that includes a lot more people than are willing to pay for custom furniture. But generally I do agree, this vision is far more hand-wavy than concrete at this point. It is, though, a good time for hand-waving right now.

Ah I misunderstood your original comment then. I took it more literally as you eventually will become a carpenter (after software)

Engineer as intellectual artisan, not factory worker

I think we're looking at the end of commodity software, the end of software companies, and birth of every single company writing their own everything. A proprietary soup everywhere, and 1-2 100X developers overseeing it all. And those few developers will spend their time in communications tutorials to get the staff to be able to explain what they want and need, so they can then make it happen for that company's exclusive use.

It just doesn't really make financial sense, a lot of software is not a significant cost to many companies. For example my company pays something like $50/month for newsletter sending software. We could easily vibe code an alternative but why bother? $50 is a rounding error in our business costs, even a single bug or outage in the replacement would make it a terrible decision.

On the other hand if you're a business with 50k employees and you have to pay $10/seat for something that's a much more compelling case to build in house (but then it always was). So maybe with vibe coding it drops the cutoff to a lower number?

Or commodity software companies that are small and experts and creating AI custom solutions extremely quickly

Accountability. Suppose you had the ability to have robotically built highway bridges. Who is going to sign off on the work? Who is going to be held accountable? The same with software. The people who don't like to write software today aren't going to suddenly develop a love for deep testing and validation.

And now we are controlling models that can be hacked in so many different ways and literally blow up companies. It used to be accountability the software wouldn’t break. Now it’s accountability that in creating the software we don’t ruin the business.

if AI can kill SaaS, what limit the blast radius to only software. In theory any job that you can do on computer, AI should be able to do that as well.

And with the advance of robotic, what would we even do ?

> In theory any job that you can do on computer, AI should be able to do that as well.

It can, however, currently the issue is that sufficient intimate knowledge is required, and just a large complex code base and/or documentation is insufficient. However, intermediate representations to bridge the gap are on the way.

Consumers are unlikely to want to build their own software even if it's "easy" with AI. It doesn't really make sense to spend all that time vibe coding instead of paying $10/month for most people.

Businesses are more likely to build than buy, yes, but as we know from "Theory of the Firm" there are limits to this, it's not going to be correct to build _everything_.

So I mainly expect it to change what type of software gets sold, not the fact that it gets sold in the first place.

There's a lot of saas that costs a whole lot more than $10 a month and doesn't work exactly the way you'd want it to. Then it becomes very tempting to vibe code your own

most customers aren't paying for software at all

Restaurants exist despite grocery stores selling ingredients. Thing is, I need to eat every day and food goes bad. Software that I need to use doesn't decay in the same way.

>The death of SaaS could also be a thing in the (not so distant) future.

I suspect outsourcing is the first thing on the chopping block. Why bother with different timezones, cultures and languages when you can get your AI to do the same thing for less money.

Also the companies with leadership who bias towards outsourcing for cost cutting reasons, will 100% happily automate any Indian folk too.

Whenever I see comments like this I wonder if we're even in the same industry.

Vibe coding does not change the fundamental economics of the classic software business at all.

C-suite is as likely to be automated as engineers. It will probably be AI firing engineers on behalf of shareholders.

> C-suite is as likely to be automated as engineers.

Nah. C-suite has (a) money and (b) legal and fiscal obligation. You literally need a human being certain legal operations, like incorporation, salary, and lawsuits.

You need *a* human. And that human will be delegated to clicking approve on AI decisions.

I think a lot of people thought that every step of the way with the progress of AI or automation in general. Unless that C-suite is all shareholders with majority or near majority control of a company, I would think the passive shareholders (in a public or private company) would want the savings in cutting all of those high salaries to zero for a likely superior outcome with AI.

I wouldn't count on lawyers being deemed necessary by the law for as many actions as they have been so far.

> would want the savings in cutting all of those high salaries to zero for a likely superior outcome with AI.

Maybe. Or maybe the C-suite salary will be cut to $50K/yr. That would make them marginally more expensive than AI, but for that price the shareholders get an extra layer of insulation should things go awry (and they won't be held personally responsible for corporate malfeasance).

> I wouldn't count on lawyers being deemed necessary by the law for as many actions as they have been so far.

Maybe, but that's pretty far down the road and would require restructuring the whole jurisprudence system.

Who is C-suite going to blame for fuck ups and failures if the company is just a suit and a laptop?

The first truly independent agents will operate a cybercrime syndicate.

Middle management should be nervous. Plenty of people whose job it is to ask "is it done yet? when can I have it?!" -- they could be replaced today with better tooling and processes.

No. The C-Suite is safe, very safe. I participated in an AI survey of what is the information that a C-Suite operates upon, and it is largely unwritten information, it is a suspicion and manipulation game with all the other c-suite players, and the middle managers beneath them as the battle ground. There are Peter Principled members that maintain their positions by executing the corporations legally grey dirty work, and then there are serious 100x non-engineers that can launch $100M initiatives in short notice, with successful experience doing so to create divisions and more.

I know the software engineering world like to think the C-Suite are disposable, but that is only because you really have no idea what they really do.

Do shareholders know what they do? The C-Suite has bosses too.

People have been saying this for years. They’ve also been saying “have you tried n” model yet as well as “wait till n+1” model is here as the author mentions.

I just had fable 5.2 (high effort) review a change. It hallucinated 2 problems that I was only able to correct because I also understand the code.

LLMs can do any job _in theory_. It’s not a very interesting argument. Their effectiveness at various jobs is much more interesting.

> I also understand the code.

and the product, the team, and (no matter how shallowly) the organizational pressures and politics. Whether we like it or not, those are part of the problems developers solve. Even something as rudimentary as knowing what is feasible to test given your deadline isn't something you can encode in a model[1]. Code does not exist in a vacuum.

I say this even with the latest models, it seems as soon as your development practice falls out of the ideals written up in blogposts of the previous ZIRP decade, you have to course correct. I use this term because the AI is technically correct (the best kind of correct) but practically useless, if not also irresponsible.

Recent anecdote (literally today): we've been having Claude write exhaustive test suites to eat at the coverage backlog. Lately, we noticed that tests in develop are even more flakier than usual. Our whole suite runs in 30-40min but lately it could exceed an hour and then fail.

It seems Claude took "exhaustive tests" to mean "exhaust the compute resources of the Jenkins node". What's worse is it wrote those tests for features that have been disabled and would soon be rewritten anyway.[1] I've always said that LLMs are great for generating test suites and this is the first time an LLM "failed" this assignment for me.

Code is cheap. The right code (or lack thereof) for the right situation takes meatspacebrainpower.

[1] The solution here is to run your company/team 100% as agents so they have the full context of project timelines, resources, customer feedback, etc. ala stevey and gtan but my reasons why I don't believe in that has already been articulated elsewhere.

> I've always said that LLMs are great for generating test suites

I always found that LLMs aren't great at writing tests, they have no notion of CI maintainability and they write a lot of "is 1 = 1?" worthless type of tests.

You're holding it wrong. You saw the Fable 5.2 marketing. You're supposed to use it in a swarm of 1000 Fable 5.2 agents. Much better results. The RLCR training gains are real. You do have your own datacentre right?

> To be honest, I doubt the current state of things will hold much longer. Current AI can automate virtually all of my work as a pre-AI senior and is rapidly closing in on being able to automate the types of work that have emerged post-AI too.

reading HN these days feels like constant gaslighting. this is so far from my reality that i wonder what folks who are saying this are working on

I think people who were in mostly bs kind of roles, honestly.

I have become the “AI” guy at my place, unfortunately.

For some reason I can “hold it right” and others cannot and for the life of me I cannot figure out what it is. I am not more intelligent and certainly not an amazing programmer. I currently suspect I am better at separating what is and is not important. I find many people miss the forest for the trees and overindex on irrelevant details. The more technical they are the stronger this tendency seems to be.

I regularly, like almost daily, encounter colleagues claiming it cannot do something I either did the day before or will just demonstrate right in front of them. The response is usually rationalizing and claiming it wasn’t “that hard to begin with” AKA shifting goalposts.

I have never once encountered a work problem which I truly found impossible to automate, which is insane, but the institutional inertia is not worth overcoming. Devs are a thorny bunch and usually think they are special. I am a recovering one.

I think many are in for a rude awakening.

I'm guessing it's the copy-paste CRUD apps that used to be plagiarized from stackoverflow. I'm with you, I've never seen an AI agent do good work.

Idk, I have my fair-share of copy-paste CRUD work and I have yet to see good work come out the other end outside of a few very very isolated and constrained examples. And before "you're holding it wrong", I am constantly having to firefight and rework code produced by the most AI-pilled people at work.

Skill issue. It’s just that simple.

Nothing devs do is interesting or hard. “Rocket trajectory optimization” is not dev, it’s math. Dev work is very boring and very simple.

I regularly deal with people that think they have amazingly hard jobs and it usually boils down to it being undocumented, arcane and/or math-y. The software itself is always uninteresting (as it should be).

Everything is “CRUD”. Name something that does not amount to taking input, performing a transformation and producing output. I am so tired of this overused thought-stopping cliche.

AI is the ultimate generalist. You can make it do a lot of things well by asking the right questions. In a generalist job, many people can ask those questions.

I don't use AI that much. When I do, it's often surprisingly competent in the topics I'm a specialist in, and it can do a lot of good work quickly. But other people in other organizations still continue building upon my work instead of asking AI directly. Apparently because they don't know what to ask.

Nobody knows how long this will last. Hopefully long enough that I can afford to retire, because I'm old enough that I would face ageism if I had to find a different job.

And if we get there, we will probably have a serious political debate on how many digits should there be in the wealth tax rate.

  what folks who are saying this are working on

Astroturfing campaigns?

You know, Elon and the "superhero" DOGE team said they "couldnt imagine" why most of Govt was required. What happened?

Nothing really.

A lot of people died.

lol, no.

Security will always be a risk with AI tooling. The only way to avoid that risk is intelligent human reasoning. No, not human-in-a-loop. It’s human defining boundaries, carefully, and allowing agents to operate within them. Failure to do so will always lead to disaster given enough time.

Then who directs the swarm to create the most value? An executive can’t. They have other things to do so they delegate. That person will be an engineer and their attention is finite too so they will delegate. To other engineers.

Here’s the best part. You write back and say I’m wrong. Guess what? That’s engineering too. Some people have to sort out all this nonsense and the stakes are higher than they’ve ever been and now engineers are supposedly not relevant.

But yeah when you get everything under control, what’s the day to day look like? Pretty freaking cushy. And then it relies on intelligence to figure out what next. Clients always want things done and having those conversations won’t get much easier with AI. Keeping up to date. Jesus I’ve exhausted myself writing all this. So much work!!

What happened to all that "RTO is to keep to C-suite happy" talk around here? How are they going to prop up real estate or feed their egos or whatever the conspiracy was.

That's where my 1-2 year buffer comes from.

And your reaction is to accelerate the process by saying exactly what BigAI wants to hear? Totally believable.

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