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An industrial piping contractor on Claude Code [video]

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Re: An industrial piping contractor on Claude Code [video]

#3

Post by steve_adams_86 »

I've more or less accepted this, and I think my future is in making software more resilient, secure, and fault tolerant. These people will likely want to scale these solutions up, tie different solutions together, and generally make their lives increasingly difficult. Often without realizing it.

My experience is that Claude starts to make quite a mess in this context, and it'll often cause as many problems as it solves unless you have the technical and domain knowledge to redirect and correct it frequently. Perhaps training will solve this, and it'll certainly get better, but I'm not sure how far it'll go and how fast.

My gut feeling is that software will only become more ambitious and interface with hardware and other systems in increasingly sophisticated ways. Things that seemed infeasible due to time and cost constraints will be on the table. It'll reveal new challenges, I think. I have a feeling it'll be humans with deep technical skills who are at the forefront of solving those challenges for a while yet.

Not claiming I have the skills and to be one of those people, just that it's where I'm pushing my career at the moment.

I'm stoked that people like this have the resources and newfound capabilities to create solutions like this. The reality is that previously, many people have been underserved due to the economics of software and inherent risks of trying things like this as a smaller business owner. So this is great. We can find more ways that software can be valuable, and people can do their jobs better in ways they've literally only imagined before. It's great.

Re: An industrial piping contractor on Claude Code [video]

#5

Post by c0wb0yc0d3r »

bayarearefugee wrote: post #2

For better or for worse, when everyone is a "potential software founder" nobody is because your potential customers can just use AI the same way you did.

I believe that it just changes the opportunity cost. There are still only 24 hours in a day. You can’t copy everything.

Re: An industrial piping contractor on Claude Code [video]

#7

Post by bob1029 »

I think there are many moats that non-experts won't attempt to cross even with AI assistance.

For example, we've built in a lot of complexity to areas like authentication. And for good reason. It's like electrical code. I'd pay good money to watch a muggle attempt to configure OIDC infrastructure. Even with the AI explaining everything to you, it's too much information to digest at once. You'd need an entire afternoon just to wrap your head around the idea of asymmetric cryptography. That's a lot of time not spent doing the thing your business is actually about.

Re: An industrial piping contractor on Claude Code [video]

#8

Post by mrweasel »

I absolutely love this, because to me, this is what software development should be about, solving actual problems and providing faster calculations, improving the workflow for people.

It does strike me as a little odd that they didn't hire a developer earlier and got the code written. Sitting back and waiting for someone to drop by and present a solution is a little naive, but it's also the world we built in the IT industry over the past 20 years. When I started my first job, we frequently had customers ask for bespoke solution, most of which was small one week to a few months of work. Multiple co-workers in the mid 2000s has side businesses, where they did contract development, most of which was these types of small one off solutions. Most of the software companies, in my area, that did these types of jobs are all gone now.

If AI accidentally created an environment where people can once again solve small programming problems on their own and massively improve the workflows I'm all for it. Serves the industry right for abandoning these customers.

Re: An industrial piping contractor on Claude Code [video]

#9

Post by edg5000 »

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #3

I've more or less accepted this, and I think my future is in making software more resilient, secure, and fault tolerant. These people will likely want to scale these solutions up, tie different solutions together, and generally make their lives increasingly difficult. Often without realizing it. My experience is that Claude starts to make quite a mess in this context, and it'll often cause as many problems as it solv…

What could happen is a reduction in the amount of programs used, with a smaller set of more sophisticated programs doing more work. This maps to what we saw pre-industrial revolution: lots of small family operations doing menial manufacturing work (woodworking, textiles, cooking). This got replaced by large factories. A smaller amount of companies producing the a larger volume of goods. With AI, a smaller group of engineers could handle more local complexity, thus allowing more sophisticated, general purpose software to be created, deleting the sea of small pieces of software we have today.

Will this means many will be jobless? No, they would do other things. They'd be using this software to support society, operating at a high level. Think low-code, but incredibly complex stuff; just not raw code anymore. Instead of making circuit boards out of descrete components, you now slap a few ICs on a board with some supporting passives and the work is then all done in software. Engineers use more high-level components rather then welding and machinijng things from scratch; you buy T-slot profiles and bolts rather than casting and milling steel from billets.

So the job of programmer may disappear simmilar to how we don't have bakers anymore, baking is done in factories, operated by a small staff. Current-day programmers will then increasingly shift to whatever high-level constructs we'll come up with, this high level work will be supported by the base infrastructure that those who still touch raw code will build.

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