Software Is Becoming Marketing • Hacker News Board

Re: Software Is Becoming Marketing

#31

Post by DauntingPear7 » Sun, Jun 28, 2026, 1:03 AM UTC

wavemode wrote: post #11

> Implication 1: Lower entry barrier makes software lower-respect field Maybe? This one's kind of subjective. I'm sure there are some people who will feel this way, and many who won't. Do you respect artists less, now that you can make AI images? As for pay, it seems unlikely to me that the job title of "software engineer" is going to see a significant decrease in median wage as a result of AI. Though there may simpl…

Ive gotten and seen some seemingly cathartic/hateful comments from blue collar workers about SWE being out of a job

Re: Software Is Becoming Marketing

#32

Post by mnky9800n » Sun, Jun 28, 2026, 7:19 AM UTC

victorbjorklund wrote: post #30

KolibriFly wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people saying "anyone can build software now" often seem to mean "anyone can generate code now"... which is not quite the same thing

And when they point out the rare exception it’s always ”well, as a UX designer/product manager/etc I spent thousands of hours now working with AI to build products and if I don’t understand something then I ask the AI to teach me” - congratulations you haven’t replaced developers you just became one

The truth to me is that ai in some ways makes coding more accessible even if the code it produces is labelled as bad

Re: Software Is Becoming Marketing

#33

Post by npodbielski » Sun, Jun 28, 2026, 9:15 AM UTC

SyneRyder wrote: post #13

npodbielski wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And how you do know that GLM is not subsidised? Maybe Chinese government is burning money to destroy US economy by making them lose money in AI companies that are just furnace burning dollars. Unless you have some compelling argument it is just a speculation.

It's because GLM 5.2 is offered on many inference providers, including providers in the US. Those companies only make their money by charging for inference, and yet they seem to be doing quite well while charging the exact same prices as Z.AI / GLM. In fact, there's a price war where some of the US inference providers are undercutting the pricing of Z.AI's own GLM hosting. Novita & AtlasCloud are both offering 8% and…

Sure I am not disputing that. But we can't say that z.ai is profitable because they charge the same as other providers per token. There is also training cost. And reaserch cost. Just inference is not all. Maybe there are profitable with all of it, I am not saying they are not, I do not know but at the same time I highly doubt that.

Unless somebody will find a way to actually do training by just updating weights with new data you have to train from scratch and this is very costly process.

Saying that some lab is profitable because they are profitable doing inference while disregarding training cost is not fair assessment.

Re: Software Is Becoming Marketing

#34

Post by pippoit » Mon, Jun 29, 2026, 10:29 AM UTC

software has always been marketing. You have to sell things for doing money. Does soemone remember in 90's, when star trek was very famous os2- warp ? was not that marketing ? nothing new under the sun ... we say here .

Re: Software Is Becoming Marketing

#35

Post by Havoc » Mon, Jun 29, 2026, 12:16 PM UTC

xlii wrote: post #4

While entry barrier might be low, the learning curve become more steep. E.g. recently I've been porting non-naive app to vibe-code app framework (from engineering managed to product managed). While I was doing so I had to answer plenty of implication bearing questions but also ask for a very software engineering like pattern. E.g. I had to plan for MIME types unsupported by vendor or use stubbed adapter for the yet u…

> I don't wish making this decision without any experience whatsoever

Not really a show stopper. It’ll be slower but you can just ask the LLM to draft you an analysis of the options and trade-offs. Not quite the same as true experience but works fine for the most part. LLMs are pretty good at reasoning through architecture choices these days

Worst case you just try both paths. Code is cheap now so may as well leverage that as a strength

Re: Software Is Becoming Marketing

#36

Post by terezatizkova » Wed, Jul 01, 2026, 7:21 PM UTC

just seen that someone posted my essay here, and just wanted to say thank you for the opinions. there is a lot of disagreement and lot of good debate, which motivates me to write an update on this.

Tereza