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The rise of industrial software

chrisloy.dev

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Re: The rise of industrial software

#41

Post by swiftcoder »

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…

> but also they deliver quality way beyond what can be achieved in artisanal production

I don't think this is true in general, although it may be in certain product categories. Hand-built supercars are still valued by the ultra-wealthy. Artisanal bakeries consistently make better pastries than anything mass produced... and so on

Re: The rise of industrial software

#42

Post by swiftcoder »

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.

> Experience from 2005 just don't hold that much value in 2025 in tech

That would be why a significant portion of the world's critical systems still run on Windows XP, eh?

Re: The rise of industrial software

#43

Post by pyrale »

The article kind of misses that cost has two axes : development cost and maintenance cost.

low cost/low value software tagged as disposable usually means development cost was low, but maintenance cost is high ; and that's why you get rid of it.

On the other hand, the difference between good and bad traditional software is that, while cost is always going to be high, you want maintenance cost to be low. This is what industrialization is about.

Re: The rise of industrial software

#44

Post by yosefk »

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

Re: The rise of industrial software

#45

Post by zkmon »

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.

Software was never coded in a big-bang one shot fashion. It evolves through years of interacting with the field. That evolution takes almost same time with AI or not. Remember a version release has many tasks that need to go at human speed.

Re: The rise of industrial software

#46

Post by swiftcoder »

cryptica wrote: post #33
ciconia wrote: post #16

Hmm, I'm not sure I see the value in "disposable software". In any commercial service people are looking for software solutions that are durable, dependable, extensible, maintainable. This is the exact opposite of disposable software. The whole premise of AI bringing democratization to software development and letting any layperson produce software signals a gross misunderstanding of how software development works an…

Yes, software needs to be secure. If we accept the premise that software is going to be churned out in bulk, then the mechanisms for securing software must evolve rapidly... I don't see a world where there is custom software for everything but all insecure in different ways.

Not only secure. It needs to be reliable (don't corrupt my data). It needs to be durable (I need to be able to access my data 10 years from now). etc.

Re: The rise of industrial software

#47

Post by WJW »

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 puts it) of production and distribution is already handled perfectly well by CI/CD systems and CDNs.

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.

It's like thinking the greatest barrier to producing the next great Russian literary novel is not speaking Russian. That is merely the first and easiest barrier, but after learning the language you are still no Tolstoy.

Re: The rise of industrial software

#48

Post by pyrale »

choeger wrote: post #37

Thing is: Industrialization is about repeating manufacturing steps. You don't need to repeat anything for software. Software can be copied arbitrarily for no practical cost. The idea of automation creating a massive amount of software sounds ridiculous. Why would we need that? More Games? Can only be consumed at the pace of the player. Agents? Can be reused once they fulfill a task sufficently. We're probably going t…

> You don't need to repeat anything for software. Software can be copied arbitrarily for no practical cost.

...Or so think devs.

People responsible for operating software, as well as people responsible for maintaining it, may have different opinions.

Bugs must be fixed, underlying software/hardware changes and vulnerabilities get discovered, and so versions must be bumped. The surrounding ecosystem changes, and so, even if your particular stack doesn't require new features, it must be adapted (a simple example: your react front breaks because the nginx proxy changed is subdirectory).

Re: The rise of industrial software

#50

Post by physicles »

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.
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