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The death of software development

mike.tech

11–20 of 29 posts

Re: The death of software development

#11
post #4

A Bloomberg Terminal doesn't cost $30K/mo. It's more like $30K/yr and less if you buy in bulk.

Why not just share a video of the "bloomberg terminal" clone he prompted in 2 hours?

Calling a Polymarket dashboard a "Bloomberg Terminal" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.

The value of a Bloomberg Terminal isn't the UI (which is famously terrible/efficient); it's the latency, the hardware, the proprietary data feeds, the chat network, and the reliability.

Building a React frontend that fetches some JSON from an API in 2 hours is impressive, sure, but it’s not the hard part of fintech. We need to stop conflating "I built a UI that looks like X" with "I rebuilt the business value of X."

Re: The death of software development

#12
> There’s only one problem with the Bloomberg Terminal — it’s fucking expensive. And old. And clunky.

Yes and no.

Obviously I have nowhere near the wealth to afford a Bloomberg Terminal, but an ex of mine had a father who has one. He told me that the terminal itself is kinda bullshit but the real value from it came from the fact that it essentially provides a way for you to network with other wealthy investors. The terminal itself, according to him, is pretty ornamental these days.

I won't actively defend his opinion if someone here knows better, but what he said made sense based on what I saw of it.

Re: The death of software development

#13
Bro is clueless. The opposite of what he believes is true: process barely changes outcomes comparatively to the models. No matter your process, you can't make Claude 3.5 do what 4.5 is capable of. There are tasks that you'd have to reroll 3.5 til the end of the universe that 4.5 would one shot.

Re: The death of software development

#14
post #3

The post itself is AI (or co-AI) slop, which means it can be just ignored. > If an idiot like me can clone a product that costs $30k per month — in two hours — what even is software development? (...) The new software developer is no longer a craftsman. It’s the average operator, empowered If entire industries employee counts are decimated and/or commodified, this means the "new software developer" wont find people t…

Yep. There's at least 4 posts on the front page which are slop. I'm getting very sick of this, it's almost all I comment about anymore.

Right now most AI-related posts are themselves slop, but most other posts aren't, so I could get by with ignoring all the AI-related posts. Unfortunately I'm quite interested in LLMs, and what other people think about them and are doing with them.

Re: The death of software development

#15
post #4

A Bloomberg Terminal doesn't cost $30K/mo. It's more like $30K/yr and less if you buy in bulk.

Why not just share a video of the "bloomberg terminal" clone he prompted in 2 hours?

Because to really have the "bloomberg terminal" is to have access to all of the sources that it aggregates. A vibe coded "bloomberg terminal" is just an interface for slop sources. It's the information sources and validation that makes it worth the price. "Vibe coding" is the most superficial of all possible implementations. "Slop coding" is a more appropriate term because the criteria is "looks passable to me".

Re: The death of software development

#16

I have a similar background, and I largely agree. What's dying is the programmer-first job. That guy whose main use is that he knows how computers work, and secondly that he is a human who can understand how some business works, and can do the translation. The other type of programmer is the business programmer. I started on this end before an incredibly long rabbit hole swallowed up my life. This is the person who t…

> the business programmer

I work in ERP. It is full of people like this. Accountants who learned SQL, some VB and you can get incredibly far.

They're also smart enough to know when they need an actual programmer, like I am smart enough to call them when it's time to do year end close / financial reporting

Re: The death of software development

#17
post #3

The post itself is AI (or co-AI) slop, which means it can be just ignored. > If an idiot like me can clone a product that costs $30k per month — in two hours — what even is software development? (...) The new software developer is no longer a craftsman. It’s the average operator, empowered If entire industries employee counts are decimated and/or commodified, this means the "new software developer" wont find people t…

Yep. There's at least 4 posts on the front page which are slop. I'm getting very sick of this, it's almost all I comment about anymore. Right now most AI-related posts are themselves slop, but most other posts aren't, so I could get by with ignoring all the AI-related posts. Unfortunately I'm quite interested in LLMs, and what other people think about them and are doing with them.

It’s exhausting and not at all that interesting.

Re: The death of software development

#18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not just share a video of the "bloomberg terminal" clone he prompted in 2 hours?

Calling a Polymarket dashboard a "Bloomberg Terminal" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. The value of a Bloomberg Terminal isn't the UI (which is famously terrible/efficient); it's the latency, the hardware, the proprietary data feeds, the chat network, and the reliability. Building a React frontend that fetches some JSON from an API in 2 hours is impressive, sure, but it’s not the hard part of fintech. We need to…

This.

Calling polymarket bot “bloomberg terminal” is like calling boiling kettle a rocket engine.

That bot can be written in a few hours without ai.

Re: The death of software development

#19
Coding/programming as a skill differentiator is most likely "dead" - software DEVELOPMENT will indeed live on but it will need a higher degree of well-roundedness and ownership (which also means leaner SRE/DevOps/PM/QA functions).

Re: The death of software development

#20
> "Obviously, I didn’t clone the full Bloomberg Terminal — I built the subset I needed for Polymarket analysis. But here’s the thing: cloning the full terminal would probably take a day or two of token usage. Not months. Not years. Days."

I have some experience with the Bloomberg Terminal and this was laugh out loud funny to me. This is like someone saying that they vibe-coded a rudimentary text editor with a spell checker, because that's all they really use, and that they would be therefore be able to pop out Microsoft Office 365 (or whatever its called now) in a couple more days.

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