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Perfect Software – Software for an Audience of One

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Re: Perfect Software – Software for an Audience of One

#31

Post by sigmarule »

Lyngbakr wrote: post #21

I was nodding along enthusiastically right up until LLMs and that point we sharply diverge. For me, part of creating "perfect" software is that I am very much the one crafting the software. I'm learning while creating, but I find such learning is greatly diminished when I outsource building to AI. It's certainly harder and perhaps my software is worse, but for me the sense of achievement is also much greater.

Are you writing software for the sense of accomplishment or to create software you wish you had?

Re: Perfect Software – Software for an Audience of One

#33

Post by Lyngbakr »

sigmarule wrote: post #31
Lyngbakr wrote: post #21

I was nodding along enthusiastically right up until LLMs and that point we sharply diverge. For me, part of creating "perfect" software is that I am very much the one crafting the software. I'm learning while creating, but I find such learning is greatly diminished when I outsource building to AI. It's certainly harder and perhaps my software is worse, but for me the sense of achievement is also much greater.

Are you writing software for the sense of accomplishment or to create software you wish you had?

The two aren't mutually exclusive.

Re: Perfect Software – Software for an Audience of One

#34

Post by andy99 »

I guess software is going to be like furniture - there was some (possibly imagined) period where it was very well made and bought for the long term, and (obvious where this is going) now there’s lots of ikea crap that is easy and cheap but doesn’t survive a move or getting water spilled on it, and is essentially Formica over cardboard.

Overall both are net positives, I have some nice wood furniture and also a $7 Lack bedside table, and of course I rely on some industrial long term software (Linux e.g.) but almost every day vibe code some throwaway thing for a specific task.

Re: Perfect Software – Software for an Audience of One

#35

Post by criddell »

2001zhaozhao wrote: post #26

What we really need is well-built open source software base with flexible and well-documented plugin SDKs where people can just vibecode their own extensions on top of them. The software needs to be designed from scratch expressly for the purpose of being extended in this way, and the SDK should place appropriate limits to allow multiple extensions to be combined easily. Otherwise, there is too much you have to do ri…

So, something like Excel?

Re: Perfect Software – Software for an Audience of One

#36

Post by criddell »

1313ed01 wrote: post #11

Someone just discovered why some of us enjoy shell scripts and Emacs so much. No need for LLM, just small hacks to solve specific problems in limited contexts that works well enough, most of the time, for one user.

Even phones these days have pretty good scripting environments (thinking of Shortcuts on iOS).

I’ve had really good luck with Claude helping me write shortcut scripts. For example, I wore a CGM this year for a bit and I couldn’t find an easy way to get the raw data. It did log everything to Apple Health and a shortcut was able to extract it and append it to a spreadsheet where each row was a reading.

Re: Perfect Software – Software for an Audience of One

#37

Post by resonious »

analogpixel wrote: post #24
Lyngbakr wrote: post #21

I was nodding along enthusiastically right up until LLMs and that point we sharply diverge. For me, part of creating "perfect" software is that I am very much the one crafting the software. I'm learning while creating, but I find such learning is greatly diminished when I outsource building to AI. It's certainly harder and perhaps my software is worse, but for me the sense of achievement is also much greater.

I find that most of the time, programming is just procrastination, and having the LLM there breaks through that procrastination and lets me focus on the idea I was thinking on without going into the weeds. A lot of the time, the LLM outputs the code, I test my idea, and realize I really don't care or the idea wasn't that great, and now I can move on to something else.

I hope at some point people don't feel the need to justify using or not using LLMs. If you feel like using them, use them. If you regret doing that, delete the code and write it yourself. And vice versa - if you are in a slog and an LLM can get you out, just use it.

Re: Perfect Software – Software for an Audience of One

#38

Post by Pepp38 »

I see it as just another tool. Like any other tool, you have to learn it and integrate it into your workflow.

And as a learning tool, it’s extraordinary. Not because it replaces understanding, but because it accelerates it: you can explore unfamiliar domains, compare approaches, and iterate with feedback that used to take days or weeks.

The responsibility to think, judge, and decide still sits entirely with the developer.

Re: Perfect Software – Software for an Audience of One

#39

Post by golemotron »

lll-o-lll wrote: post #14

This article triggers all my “written by an LLM” spidey senses. Which is ironic considering the subject matter. “Perfect”, but artificially constructed. “Just for me”, but algorithmic slop. I agree that you can do so much more custom tailoring of bespoke software with the speed an LLM brings. But something inside of me still revolts at calling this anything other than “convenient”. “Perfect” I will reserve for things…

Look at it this way. The carver doesn't have to grow the tree. Using an LLM for coding is a lot like being a carver. You can take broad or small strokes and discard what you don't like.

Re: Perfect Software – Software for an Audience of One

#40

Post by sombragris »

Very OT, and this betrays my age, but...

When I saw "Perfect Software" in the title, I thought it referred to Perfect Software, the developer who produced the Perfect Writer word processor, Perfect Calc spreadsheet, and Perfect Filer database. These were a suite of office software products developed in the early '80s for CP/M and MS-DOS computers.

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