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AI, Tools and Transformation

ben-evans.com

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Re: AI, Tools and Transformation

#31

Post by mcrk »

zacksiri wrote: post #4

The way I see it is AI collapses hierarchy. Abstraction layers will become more flat both in software and in society. Because ultimately software and layers of heirarchy in society exists to serve a function. But now those functions are being replaced. Imagine this you used to need a library for common things in your software project. Even if you just need one function but because it was easier to just import a libra…

> Now not anymore you just need to tell the LLM and it does it in both, and you get better results too.

That's weird I just asked fable to build airbnb app clone and it didn't do a good job. Am I using the wrong model?

Re: AI, Tools and Transformation

#32

Post by weiran »

piker wrote: post #14
yoz-y wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am honestly _astonished_ that the current crop of agents are not all written natively for every platform. I tried porting a moderately complex workout app that I’ve built over years (and which includes a whole agentic loop) from web to iOS native. It took me a couple of evenings. There is now no excuse to not offer a native experience for every supported platform when you are a bigger company. Make one of the platf…

Because it’s too complex and not worth the effort. Most users will not care about or perceive the benefit. If they delegate that responsibility to Google via Electron, they can focus on features/bug fixes that move the needle.

Also the part people forget is the significant coordination cost of having multiple teams work on multiple native codebases.

I hate Electron apps with a passion, but I can understand why the AI companies are using it.

Re: AI, Tools and Transformation

#33

Post by weiran »

testdelacc1 wrote: post #27
kolinko wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If just for yourself, get an Apple Dev account and use TestFlight

Do I need to upload a new build of the app every 90 days? I’d prefer the app to just work forever without thinking about it.

You need a paid dev account for that. I think self signed installs can run for a year.

Re: AI, Tools and Transformation

#34

Post by oakejp12 »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #28

> But with AI, now you can make that tool in five minutes, and you don't need to be an engineer, and you don’t need to write code. I really wish those farcical statements would stop (I know it's not really made by the author itself). I'm a software engineer, my partner isn't. She used AI to vibe-code scripts to help her analyze large Excel files. It worked, except the script only looked at the first tab of the Excel…

So you’re working two jobs now?

Re: AI, Tools and Transformation

#35

Post by simianwords »

piker wrote: post #18
yoz-y wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What effort ? I’ve started seeing this attitude more and more. We had a thing that took a week to do before. Now it takes a morning. So we refuse to spend half a day polishing it because it’s too annoying. Once the initial port is done, keeping platforms in sync is fast. Not to mention that a harness that would automate this would be valuable. I run codex on an old rpi, it eats 190M of ram for what essentially is a t…

You're mistaken if you think it has ever taken a week to port (and support) an application to native primitives.

?? Bun rewrite?

Re: AI, Tools and Transformation

#36

Post by simianwords »

ryuuseijin wrote: post #2

> You need audit, security, maintenance and accountability. I think this is where the role of humans will move towards in the future. Things like accountability can't really be outsourced to AI. This relates to solving the alignment problem: if you give the AI a specific goal and it has to plan sub-goals, how can you be sure the sub-goals align with your interests. For tasks in an isloated environment, this doesn't r…

False. Accountability is the result of difficulty of things. As things get easier you need fewer accountable people.

Like, you need a guy who understands Linux and be accountable for Linux working well in your company. But if Linux does a good job that doesn’t leak, you don’t need a Linux guy.

Re: AI, Tools and Transformation

#37

Post by pprotas »

kolinko wrote: post #23
testdelacc1 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a question about web to iOS native. How do you distribute that app? I’m assuming you’re paying $99 yearly to distribute through the App Store? Is this app meant just for you or for anyone to find? Reason I’m asking is because I’d like to make native iOS apps just for myself rather than progressive web apps. But I haven’t understood the best way to distribute.

If just for yourself, get an Apple Dev account and use TestFlight

Or just build and deploy to your iPhone from XCode. No need for TestFlight or paying money for a dev account.

Re: AI, Tools and Transformation

#38

Post by petra »

newyankee wrote: post #8

A lot of the long tail tools are used so rarely or for some very specific functions in certain organisations that there is a good case to be made that these can definitely be targets of simpler GPT guided automation. There are a lot of redundancies within the tools and the pricing is such that one cannot do much about it, generally some companies pay for the brand, and some tools like SAP are integral to companies of…

>> however this might be the biggest fear of middle managers who will never let it happen easily

Will this be different in a company like Amazon, or the new internet companies, that we're born with a deeper understanding of disruption and has it in their DNA?

Re: AI, Tools and Transformation

#39

Post by totetsu »

zacksiri wrote: post #4

The way I see it is AI collapses hierarchy. Abstraction layers will become more flat both in software and in society. Because ultimately software and layers of heirarchy in society exists to serve a function. But now those functions are being replaced. Imagine this you used to need a library for common things in your software project. Even if you just need one function but because it was easier to just import a libra…

Or it actually entrenches hierarchies.. and it's just that so many CS majors got caught up in the discursive pleasure of poopooing social sciences that they don't actually have a good graspe on how power operates in society..

Re: AI, Tools and Transformation

#40

Post by Xirdus »

zacksiri wrote: post #4

The way I see it is AI collapses hierarchy. Abstraction layers will become more flat both in software and in society. Because ultimately software and layers of heirarchy in society exists to serve a function. But now those functions are being replaced. Imagine this you used to need a library for common things in your software project. Even if you just need one function but because it was easier to just import a libra…

Maybe not all AIs, but LLMs benefit immensely from abstraction. They are trained on human code, and human code usually uses very high abstraction - so high abstraction is overrepresented in training data compared to low level implementations. It also drastically reduces number of tokens, and that has downstream effect of better utilization of context window and whatnot. We are not yet at the point where AI can use low-level code as building snippets the same way it can use high-level libraries; most likely we won't be for a long time.
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