Nice! Earlier this week I discovered another enterprising engineer working on a digital sim of the Mesa Mark IIC+ preamp using a discrete component modeling approach [1]. Pretty cool stuff coming out in the digital audio production space these days.
Show HN: I used AI to recreate a $4000 piece of audio hardware as a plugin
101–110 of 118 posts
Re: Show HN: I used AI to recreate a $4000 piece of audio hardware as a plugin
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
You’re ignoring Jevons paradox. Everyone, both people and companies, will be making exponentially more software with these tools. Software that both needs to get created, debugged and updated to realize the intention of it. That’s what our time will be spent on as programmers.
Do you have any evidence that the demand for developers is largely price elastic? People are already struggling to find work from oversupply of talent and not enough demand
At the same time ability to write software is exploding we are watching large entities in the market consolidated and small businesses end up on the down side of the K shaped economy. Programmers demand and pay should go down as supply increases just like every other person in an economy.
Re: Show HN: I used AI to recreate a $4000 piece of audio hardware as a plugin
#103I was hoping that the video was a walkthrough of your process - do you think you might share that at some point? > I'm not a programmer anymore. I'm something else now. I don't know what it is but it's multi-disciplinary, and it doesn't involve writing code myself--for better or worse! Yes, I agree. I think the role of software developer is going to evolve into much more of an administrative, managerial role, dealing…
As someone who works at a place where we do a lot of code analysis and also research AI's effect on code quality, if you do not even so much as look at your code anymore, I do not believe you are creating maintainable, quality software. Maybe you don't need to, or care to, but it's definitely not what's sustainable in long-term product companies. AI is a force multiplier - it makes bad worse, it _can_ make good bette…
> if you care about long-term sustainable, quality software
If software becomes cheaper to make it amortizes at a higher rate, ie, it becomes less valuable at a faster clip. This means more ephemeral software with a shorter shelf-life. What exactly is wrong with a world where software is borderline disposable?
I’ve been using Photoshop since the 90s and without having watched the features expand over the years I don’t think I would find the tool useful for someone without a lot of experience.
This being said, short-lived and highly targeted, less feature-full software for image creation and manipulation catered to the individual and specific to an immediate task seems advantageous.
Dynamism applied not to the code but to the products themselves.
Or something like that.
Re: Show HN: I used AI to recreate a $4000 piece of audio hardware as a plugin
#104Nice! Earlier this week I discovered another enterprising engineer working on a digital sim of the Mesa Mark IIC+ preamp using a discrete component modeling approach [1]. Pretty cool stuff coming out in the digital audio production space these days. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcdyOtO5Id0
Nice. Thank you for this!
Re: Show HN: I used AI to recreate a $4000 piece of audio hardware as a plugin
#105I was hoping that the video was a walkthrough of your process - do you think you might share that at some point? > I'm not a programmer anymore. I'm something else now. I don't know what it is but it's multi-disciplinary, and it doesn't involve writing code myself--for better or worse! Yes, I agree. I think the role of software developer is going to evolve into much more of an administrative, managerial role, dealing…
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Re: Show HN: I used AI to recreate a $4000 piece of audio hardware as a plugin
#106awesome, in 2025 I made a few apps for my small business that I have spent hours trawling the web looking for, and I have little coding skills. Sometimes it feels like I'm living in a different world, reading the scepticism on here about AI. I'm sure there enterprise cases where it doesn't make sense, but for the your everyday business owner it's amazing what can be done. maybe it's a failure of imagination but I can…
With all due respect you are living in a different world. Not in a bad way, it’s just you haven’t experienced what maintenance on a large complicated code base is like.
Maybe the problem is large complicated codebases?
Re: Show HN: I used AI to recreate a $4000 piece of audio hardware as a plugin
#107We are all glorified QA testers with software architect title now. Sure we set the structure of what we want but everything else the AI does and most of our time is now spent testing and complaining to the AI. Pretty soon AI will do the QA portion as well. It will generate any piece of software, even games for a cool $200/month from a vendor of choice: Microsoft (OpenAI) or Google Companies will stop paying for SaaS…
Maintenance still has cost and will surely exist in some fashion?
But if that is going to be the case, I want to be the best of the best at understanding it all so that I’m the first hired and last fired lol
Re: Show HN: I used AI to recreate a $4000 piece of audio hardware as a plugin
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
As someone who works at a place where we do a lot of code analysis and also research AI's effect on code quality, if you do not even so much as look at your code anymore, I do not believe you are creating maintainable, quality software. Maybe you don't need to, or care to, but it's definitely not what's sustainable in long-term product companies. AI is a force multiplier - it makes bad worse, it _can_ make good bette…
> if you care about long-term sustainable, quality software If software becomes cheaper to make it amortizes at a higher rate, ie, it becomes less valuable at a faster clip. This means more ephemeral software with a shorter shelf-life. What exactly is wrong with a world where software is borderline disposable? I’ve been using Photoshop since the 90s and without having watched the features expand over the years I don’…
> What exactly is wrong with a world where software is borderline disposable?
The quality of everything will become lower. There's no way to reliably capture thousands of business requirements and edge cases in every short-lived disposable iteration. The happy flows will probably mostly work.
We used to laugh at Eastern Europe and Soviet Union, and later China, because their knock-off products were, without exception, worse than ours. Now we're willingly doing the same to ourselves.
Re: Show HN: I used AI to recreate a $4000 piece of audio hardware as a plugin
#109I don’t think we were ever supposed to be programmers. A lot of us are scared because they assumed knowing every detail of a system or language and being able to conjure a system with code was the point of your profession. But it was always building things, or, engineering, just with different tools. If we get to the point where we can ask AI to 3d print a spaceship and also build JARVIS into it for navigation, then your job will become something else, like figuring out how to build brain computer interfaces as we get on our way to becoming cyborgs or whatever for FTL journeys. Building interfaces will not be a thing we will do anymore, as UIs will just be conjured on the fly, contextually, by the AI.
Our challenge will always be to keep track of all the foundational knowledge so we can rebuild it all if it comes crashing down (AI or some other event tries to end us).
You should feel exited about it, and level up to the next thing where you will be needed, which is to build reliable heterogeneous, self healing systems, often without having a contract between them.
This will mean you can conjure up an entire tax management system, a financial system, a government management system, quickly and have them all talk to each other so people can just go about their lives.
A dam is built, and you immediately have a system that can operate it and all of its equipment.
This may give manufacturers freedom to innovate without worrying about breaking things. Just install it and let the AI learn it, tell you if it needs to calibrate the new equipment, or adjust the existing system to better integrate it, take better advantage of it, etc.
There is so much to do in that and many other directions (I mean healthcare, etc, why not eat bigpharma’s lunch?) that we should be excited and not afraid. Of course current AI is nowhere near this, and maybe what enables this will be in an entirely different shape, but that we’re all putting effort into getting there instead of worrying about Angular vs React is what I love the most.
Re: Show HN: I used AI to recreate a $4000 piece of audio hardware as a plugin
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
> if you care about long-term sustainable, quality software If software becomes cheaper to make it amortizes at a higher rate, ie, it becomes less valuable at a faster clip. This means more ephemeral software with a shorter shelf-life. What exactly is wrong with a world where software is borderline disposable? I’ve been using Photoshop since the 90s and without having watched the features expand over the years I don’…
> What exactly is wrong with a world where software is borderline disposable? The quality of everything will become lower. There's no way to reliably capture thousands of business requirements and edge cases in every short-lived disposable iteration. The happy flows will probably mostly work. We used to laugh at Eastern Europe and Soviet Union, and later China, because their knock-off products were, without exception…
I am not talking about knock-off Photoshop.