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The rise of industrial software

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Re: The rise of industrial software

#121

Post by hnthrow0287345 »

zkmon wrote: post #20

A question that was not addressed in the article and contrasts software with industrialized products from the past is - who are the consumers of the software produced at industrial scale? Stitching of clothes by machines accelerated garment product only because there was demand and consumption tied to population. But software is not tied to population similar to food and clothes. It doesn't deprecate, it is not exclu…

>who are the consumers of the software produced at industrial scale?

Games have a ton of demand for code that isn't readily shareable but also needs to be done quickly.

Re: The rise of industrial software

#122

Post by analog31 »

The first thing I noticed was the graph of cost vs quality, with two quadrants. And I realize software is a unique industry, but in many other industries there's a third quadrant: Higher quality at lower cost. Electronics is an example. Virtually nobody wants or even remembers artisanal electronics.

In fact, getting out of the two quadrant mindset, and seeking the third, is part of the learning process for developing modern industrial products. And where I work, adjacent to a software development department, I think the devs are aware of this as well. They wanted to benefit from further automation -- the thing I think they're coping with is that it seems to be happening so quickly.

Re: The rise of industrial software

#124

Post by why_is_it_good »

gverrilla wrote: post #116
Havoc wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you still needed the captain driving the ship. The question is more what becomes of all the rowers when you’re switching from captain + 100 rowers to captain + steam engine They’re not all going to get their own boat and captain hat

They could do a revolution. 100 rowers vs 1 captain - easy. Labor vs capital.

You mean murder, before capital understands its critics are as moraly bankrupt as capital itself, and deploys killbots?

Re: The rise of industrial software

#125

Post by the_overseer »

tossandthrow wrote: post #35
zkmon wrote: post #20

A question that was not addressed in the article and contrasts software with industrialized products from the past is - who are the consumers of the software produced at industrial scale? Stitching of clothes by machines accelerated garment product only because there was demand and consumption tied to population. But software is not tied to population similar to food and clothes. It doesn't deprecate, it is not exclu…

> but decades of feedback, tuning and fixing On the contrary, this is likely the reason why we can disrupt these large players. Experience from 2005 just don't hold that much value in 2025 in tech.

It absolutely does. I cannot believe I am reading this on HN... Do you think the idea of a pointer changed? That you need locks when accessing variables when doing multithreading? That principles like "Be conservative in what you send, and liberal in what you accept" have changed? In fact, almost nothing changed from 2005 to now in any conceptual form.

Re: The rise of industrial software

#126

Post by weslleyskah »

motbus3 wrote: post #7

I'm not through yet but I don't know. As a developer for almost 30 years now, if I think where most of my code went, I would say, quantitatively, to the bin. I processed much data, dumps and logs over the years. I collected statistical information, mapped flows, created models of the things I needed to understand. And this was long before any "big data" thing. Nothing changed with AI. I keep doing the same things, bu…

This scares me to death.

This is why you need to find emotional significance for your life (traveling, family, art, etc...) outside of this claustrophobic work.

Re: The rise of industrial software

#127

Post by jungturk »

weslleyskah wrote: post #126
motbus3 wrote: post #7

I'm not through yet but I don't know. As a developer for almost 30 years now, if I think where most of my code went, I would say, quantitatively, to the bin. I processed much data, dumps and logs over the years. I collected statistical information, mapped flows, created models of the things I needed to understand. And this was long before any "big data" thing. Nothing changed with AI. I keep doing the same things, bu…

This scares me to death. This is why you need to find emotional significance for your life (traveling, family, art, etc...) outside of this claustrophobic work.

The code was just created to support some broader goal, which it presumably did much of the time. The value of those goals is where the meaning comes from.

A chef reflecting on their life would hardly lament that every meal they'd ever crafted ended up in the bin (or the toilet).

Re: The rise of industrial software

#129

Post by dcre »

physicles wrote: post #50
yosefk wrote: post #44

You could say the same things about assemblers, compilers, garbage collection, higher level languages etc. In practice the effect has always been an increase in the height of a mountain of software that can be made before development grinds to a halt due to complexity. LLMs are no different

In my own experience (and from everything I’ve read), LLMs as they are today don’t help us as an industry build a higher mountain of software because they don’t help us deal with complexity — they only help us build the mountain faster.

I see this response a lot but I think it's self-contradictory. Building faster, understanding faster, refactoring faster — these do allow skilled developers to work on bigger things. When it takes you one minute instead of an hour to find the answer to a question about how something works, of course that lets you build something more complex.

Could you say more about what you think it would look like for LLMs to genuinely help us deal with complexity? I can think of some things: helping us write more and better tests, fewer bugs, helping us get to the right abstractions faster, helping us write glue code so more systems can talk to each other, helping us port things to one stack so we don't have to maintain polyglot piles of stuff (or conversely helping us not worry about picking and choosing the best stuff from every language ecosystem).

Re: The rise of industrial software

#130

Post by the_sleaze_ »

pydry wrote: post #79
nchmy wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I generally agree. Industrialization puts a decent floor on quality, at low cost. But it also has a ceiling. Perhaps an industrial car is better than your or my artisanal car, but I'm sure there's people who build cars by hand of very high quality (over the course of years). Likewise fine carpentry vs mass produced stuff vs ikea. Or I make sourdough bread and it would be very impractical/uncompetitive to start sellin…

The difference between an artisinal car and a mass produced car is that the former can only be used by one person. This has never been true for "artisanal" software. It could be used by nobody or by millions. This is why the economic model OP proposes falls apart.

Exactly. Breadmaker is only as good as the last loaf. Software only needs to be perfect once.
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