The rise of industrial software • Hacker News Board

Re: The rise of industrial software

#161

Post by bwest87 » Wed, Dec 31, 2025, 10:48 PM UTC

gamblor956 wrote: post #151

bwest87 wrote: post #141

One thing that has become clearer to me over the years is that reasoning by analogy (like this article does) sounds a lot smarter than it is. If you look from first principles, it's clear that physical goods and software don't share the same properties and thus the analogy falls apart. Physical goods like clothes or cars have variable costs . The marginal unit always costs > 0, and thus the price to the consumer is a…

Digital goods do have a marginal cost. It's a lot lower than with physical goods, but there is a cost: at the very minimum, a digital good takes up storage space. A streamed digital good requires bandwidth and electricity (and in most of the world, both are metered resources). Also, most consumers don't choose on quality; they choose on price. This is why free mobile games became huge and paid mobile games are a dyin…

Sure there is some minimal marginal cost, but it's so close to zero that it's usually negligible, and the incentive is to basically give it away and "monetize" something else. Your point about games actually just makes my original point. Software is already usually free or dirt cheap, which is why reducing the cost to make the software can't create some "low cost / low value" quadrant. Unless your talking about bespoke software that has such a small market size it isn't worth making today. I could maybe see that area opening up, but even that software would not fit the OP's description of software that "has no owner and is not meant to be maintained"

Re: The rise of industrial software

#162

Post by npunt » Wed, Dec 31, 2025, 11:45 PM UTC

RyanHamilton wrote: post #138

npunt wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never found a term I liked for this particular concept at the intersection of education & business so I made one up a while back: A Knowledge Pool is the reservoir of shared knowledge that a group of people have about a particular subject, tool, method, etc. In product strategy, knowledge pools represent another kind of moat, and a form of leverage that can be used to grow or maintain market share. Usage: Resour…

The term is Institutional knowledge. "An organization's collective memory, encompassing the unique expertise, experiences, processes, and cultural insights built over time by its members, acting as a vital asset that guides operations, decision-making, and continuity, often residing in seasoned employees' tacit understanding but also in documented procedures and data. It includes deep technical skills..."

Institutional knowledge is scoped to members of an organization and covers things related specifically to the institution's operations. What I'm talking about is the knowledge of the general population, often as it relates to an institution's products.

For instance, tons of people know how to use Adobe products like Photoshop, by way of deliberate inaction on the part of Adobe around product piracy outside of workplaces. With this large knowledge pool entering into the workforce, users were able to convince workplaces to adopt Adobe products that they were already familiar with.

That wouldn't be institutional knowledge, but a pool of knowledge that institutions could take actions (or inaction, as the case above) to influence.

Re: The rise of industrial software

#163

Post by dzonga » Thu, Jan 01, 2026, 12:01 AM UTC

sometimes I wonder if people who write such articles know that 85% of commercial software is not for the Consumer Market but Enterprise / Businesses etc where unspoken, odd rules, mismatched integrations rule the day.

something "simple" as reverse ETL - a lot of value is locked within that - & you can even see players such as Palantir etc trying to bring unified data view with a fancy name etc

it's also the same reason Workday, Salesforce etc charge a lot of money

Re: The rise of industrial software

#164

Post by array_key_first » Thu, Jan 01, 2026, 12:18 AM UTC

gamblor956 wrote: post #151

bwest87 wrote: post #141

One thing that has become clearer to me over the years is that reasoning by analogy (like this article does) sounds a lot smarter than it is. If you look from first principles, it's clear that physical goods and software don't share the same properties and thus the analogy falls apart. Physical goods like clothes or cars have variable costs . The marginal unit always costs > 0, and thus the price to the consumer is a…

Digital goods do have a marginal cost. It's a lot lower than with physical goods, but there is a cost: at the very minimum, a digital good takes up storage space. A streamed digital good requires bandwidth and electricity (and in most of the world, both are metered resources). Also, most consumers don't choose on quality; they choose on price. This is why free mobile games became huge and paid mobile games are a dyin…

I feel like we can round down fractions of a cent to zero. In practice, it's basically zero.

And, I think, consumers would like to balance both cost and quality. The problem is cost is obvious, quality is purposefully obfuscated. You really can't tell what is or is not quality software without spending an unreasonable amount of time and requiring an unreasonable amount of knowledge. Same with most modern physical goods.

Re: The rise of industrial software

#165

Post by cpgxiii » Thu, Jan 01, 2026, 12:26 AM UTC

godelski wrote: post #153

WJW wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I read the article. I still think it's incorrect. Most software (especially by usage) is already not artisanal. You get the exact same browser, database server and (whatsapp/signal/telegram/whatever) messenger client as basically everyone else. Those are churned out by the millions from a common blueprint and designed by teams and teams of highly skilled specialists using specialized tooling, not so different fr…

> You get the exact same browser, database server and (whatsapp/signal/telegram/whatever) messenger client as basically everyone else. Hey! I'm going to passionately defend my choice over a really minor difference. I mean do you see how that app does their hamburger menu?! It makes the app utterly unusable! Maybe I'm exaggerating here but I've heard things pretty close in "chrome vs Firefox" and "signal vs ..." threa…

> It just creates entrenched players and monopolies in domains where it should be near trivial to move (browsers are definitely trivial to jump ship)

I think this is understating the cost of jumping. Basically zero users care about the "technological" elements of their browser (e.g. the render engine, JS engine, video codecs) so long as it offers feature equivalence, but they do care a lot about comparatively "minor" UX elements (e.g. password manager, profile sync, cross-platform consistency, etc) which probably actually dominate their user interaction with the browser itself and thus understandably prove remarkably sticky ("minor" here is in terms of implementation complexity versus the rest of a browser).

Re: The rise of industrial software

#166

Post by doug_durham » Thu, Jan 01, 2026, 1:16 AM UTC

WJW wrote: post #93

nchmy wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're getting caught up on the technical meaning of terms rather than what the author actually wrote. Theyre explicitly saying that most software will no longer be artisianal - a great literary novel - and instead become industrialized - mass produced paperback garbage books. But also saying that good software, like literature, will continue to exist.

Yes, I read the article. I still think it's incorrect. Most software (especially by usage) is already not artisanal. You get the exact same browser, database server and (whatsapp/signal/telegram/whatever) messenger client as basically everyone else. Those are churned out by the millions from a common blueprint and designed by teams and teams of highly skilled specialists using specialized tooling, not so different fr…

There is a large mass of unwritten software. It would add value but it is too bespoke to already have an open source solution. Think about a non-profit organization working with proprietary file formats and databases. They will be able to generate automation tools that they could otherwise not afford. This will be repeated over and over. This is what I think the author is getting at.

Re: The rise of industrial software

#167

Post by doug_durham » Thu, Jan 01, 2026, 1:20 AM UTC

furyofantares wrote: post #112

WJW wrote: post #47

This essay, like so many others, mistakes the task of "building" software with the task of "writing" software. Anyone in the world can already get cheap, mass-produced software to do almost anything they want their computer to do. Compilers spit out new build of any program on demand within seconds, and you can usually get both source code and pre-compiled copies over the internet. The "industrial process" (as TFA pu…

> It's like thinking the greatest barrier to producing the next great Russian literary novel is not speaking Russian. The article is very clearly not saying anything like that. It's saying the greatest barrier to making throwaway comments on Russian social media is not speaking Russian. Roughly the entire article is about LLMs making it much cheaper to make low quality software. It's not about masterpieces. And I thi…

I don't think it's "low quality" software, it's "low value" software.

Re: The rise of industrial software

#168

Post by throw0101d » Thu, Jan 01, 2026, 3:36 AM UTC

WJW wrote: post #47

This essay, like so many others, mistakes the task of "building" software with the task of "writing" software. Anyone in the world can already get cheap, mass-produced software to do almost anything they want their computer to do. Compilers spit out new build of any program on demand within seconds, and you can usually get both source code and pre-compiled copies over the internet. The "industrial process" (as TFA pu…

> What software developers actually do is closer to the role of an architect in construction or a design engineer in manufacturing. They design new blueprints for the compilers to churn out. Like any design job, this needs some actual taste and insight into the particular circumstances. That has always been the difficult part of commercial software production and LLMs generally don't help with that.

As Bryan Cantrill commented (quoting Jeff Bonwick, co-creator of ZFS): code is both information about the machine and the machine:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHPa5-BWd4w&t=4m37s

Whereas an architect creates blueprints which is information, that gets constructed into a building/physical object, and a design engineer also creates documents that are information that get turned into machine(s), when a developer writes code they are generating information that acts like a machine.

Software has a duality of being both.

How does one code and not create a machine? Produce a general architecture in UML?

Re: The rise of industrial software

#169

Post by throw0101d » Thu, Jan 01, 2026, 3:40 AM UTC

nchmy wrote: post #59

huevosabio wrote: post #13

I've been thinking about this for a while, and largely agree that industralization of software development is what we are seeing. But the emphasis on low quality is misplaced. Take this for example: ``` Industrial systems reliably create economic pressure toward excess, low quality goods. ``` Industrial systems allow for low quality goods, but also they deliver quality way beyond what can be achieved in artisanal pro…

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…

> 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.

I think automobiles are a bad example: I'd trust the reliability and quality of a mass produced Toyota or Honda over a hand-made Ferrari. (Of course there are bad mass produced cars as well.)

Re: The rise of industrial software

#170

Post by d-us-vb » Thu, Jan 01, 2026, 6:54 AM UTC

WJW wrote: post #47

This essay, like so many others, mistakes the task of "building" software with the task of "writing" software. Anyone in the world can already get cheap, mass-produced software to do almost anything they want their computer to do. Compilers spit out new build of any program on demand within seconds, and you can usually get both source code and pre-compiled copies over the internet. The "industrial process" (as TFA pu…

As others have said, you're missing the author's point. The author is claiming that the act of writing software is getting industrialized by LLMs. LLMs will produce small, useful, but completely disposable programs that under the previous "artisanal" model would normally take me or another programmer an hour or so to write or debug. Or for something a bit more complicated, it can be vibe coded in 10 minutes, whereas it otherwise would have taken 10 hours to write and debug. You wouldn't want to use this sort of software extensively or for very long, just like you probably wouldn't frame a photo posted on social media. It might just be something to do some random task with your computer that is nontrivial that no other software tool does out of the box.

I think the author's analogies are on point.