Alternate take: what agents can spit out becomes table stakes for all software. Making it cohesive, focused on business needs, and stemming complexity are now requirements for all devs.

By the same token (couldn’t resist), I also would argue we should be seeing the quality of average software products notch up by now with how long LLMs have been available. I’m not seeing it. I’m not sure it’s a function of model quality, either. I suspect devs that didn’t care as much about quality hadn’t really changed their tune.

Honestly, in many ways it feels like quality is decreasing.

I'm also not convinced it's a function of model quality. The model isn't going to do something if the prompter doesn't even know. It does what the programmer asked.

I'll give a basic example. Most people suck at writing bash scripts. It's also a common claim as to LLMs utility. Yet they never write functions unless I explicitly ask. Here try this command

  curl -fsSL https://claude.ai/install.sh | less

(You don't need to pipe into less but it helps for reading) Can you spot a fatal error in the code where when running curl-pipe-bash the program might cause major issues? Funny enough I asked Claude and it asked me this

  Is this script currently in production? If so, I’d strongly recommend adding the function wrapper before anyone uses it via curl-pipe-bash.                

The errors made here are quite common in curl-pipe-bash scripts. I'm pretty certain Claude would write a program with the same mistakes despite being able to tell you about the problems and their trivial corrections.

The problem with vibe coding is you get code that is close. But close only matters in horseshoes and hand grenades. You get a bunch of unknown unknowns. The classic problem of programming still exists: the computer does what you tell it to do, not what you want it to do. LLMs just might also do things you don't tell it to...

Why wouldn't we find new things to do with all that new productivity?

Anecdotally, this is what I see happening in the small in my own work - we say yes to more ideas, more projects, because we know we can unblock things more quickly now - and I don't see why that wouldn't extend.

I do expect to see smaller teams - maybe a lot more one-person "teams" - and perhaps smaller companies. But I expect to see more work being done, not less, or the same.

What new things would we do? I do contracting so maybe I'm lowest-bidder-pilled but I feel like drops in price in lean organizations sre going to eat the lunch of shops trying to make more quality software in most software disciplines.

How much software is really required to be extensible?

There is tons of stuff to do. Lots of technologies out there that need to be invented and commercialized. Tons of inefficient processes in business, government, and academia to improve.

None of this means that it will be the kinds of professional specialized software development teams that we're used to doing any of this work, but I have some amount of optimism that this is actually going to be a golden age for "doing useful things with computers" work.

You sound bored. If we triple head count overnight, we'd only slow our backlog, temporarily. Every problem we solve only opens up a larger group of harder problems to solve.

If LLMs are good at writing software, then there's lots of good software around written by LLMs. Where is that software? I don't see it. Logical conclusion: LLMs aren't good at writing software.

Presumably they are writing the same quality software faster, the market having decided what quality it will accept.

Once that trend maxes out it’s entirely plausible that the level of quality demanded will rise quickly. That’s basically what happened in the first dot com era.

I'm not convinced. Honestly it seems like we're in a market of lemons and I don't know how we escape the kind of environment that is ripe for lemons. To get out requires customers to be well informed at the time of purchase. This is always difficult with software as we usually need to try it first and frankly, the average person is woefully tech illiterate.

But these days? We are selling products based on promises, not actual capabilities. I can't think of a more fertile environment for a lemon market than that. No one can be informed and bigger and bigger promises need to be made every year.