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The rise of industrial software

chrisloy.dev

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Re: The rise of industrial software

#81

Post by cryptica »

pydry wrote: post #75
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.

This was already true before LLMs. "Artisinal software" was never the norm. The tsunami of crap just got a bit bigger. Unlike clothing, software always scaled. So, it's a bit wrongheaded to assume that the new economics would be more like the economics of clothing after mass production. An "artisanal" dress still only fits one person. "Artisanal" software has always served anywhere between zero people and millions. L…

Agreed, software was always kind of mediocre. This is expected given the massive first mover advantage effect. Quality is irrelevant when speed to market is everything.

Re: The rise of industrial software

#82

Post by tosapple »

ofalkaed wrote: post #27
elAhmo wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and for a little more I can throw in the accounting and tax software As someone who has worked in two companies that raised millions of dollars and had hundred people tackling just half of this, tax software, you are in for a treat.

Sure, that is still a ways off, but being able to hire a programmer to meet my personal modest software needs is almost there. Also, the needs of any company that required a hundred people and millions of dollars is very different from the needs of a small restaurant or the like; anyone with enough ambition to run a small restaurant can manage the accounting and taxes for that restaurant, the same can not be said for…

Business*, if your "tax-accounting" manager made THAT mistake with numbers you would be screwed.

Re: The rise of industrial software

#83

Post by zkmon »

bodegajed wrote: post #56
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…

code has no use-value. it is like being a baker in an island. the value comes from its user base.

User base comes from the value you provide. Value comes from the product features. Features come from code. If code is easy, anyone with 10K bucks in their pocket can provide those features and product. The only thing missing is, is the product battle-tested? That fortunately remains out of reach for AI.

Re: The rise of industrial software

#84

Post by ofalkaed »

ofalkaed wrote: post #23

Personally I think AI is going to turn software into a cottage industry, it will make custom software something the individual can afford. AI is a very long ways off from being able to allow the average person to create the software they want unless they are willing to put a great deal of time into it, but it is almost good enough that the programmer can take the average person's idea and execute it at an affordable…

I find it interesting but not surprising that this got downvoted. Sure my idea of the craft is different than the article's and of many people but if the craft only there if it is pure hand written code then it is a craft which the vast majority can not afford. I can pay a luthier a few thousand and get my dream guitar and would happily spend that sort of money on getting custom software but that is not going to happen if I insist on 100% handwritten code, just as getting my dream guitar would not happen if I insisted on the luthier only using hand tools.

Re: The rise of industrial software

#85

Post by japhyr »

> Previous industrial revolutions externalised their costs onto environments that seemed infinite until they weren't. Software ecosystems are no different: dependency chains, maintenance burdens, security surfaces that compound as output scales. Technical debt is the pollution of the digital world, invisible until it chokes the systems that depend on it. In an era of mass automation, we may find that the hardest problem is not production, but stewardship. Who maintains the software that no one owns?

This whole article was interesting, but I really like the conclusion. I think the comparison to the externalized costs of industrialization, which we are finally facing without any easy out, is a good one to make. We've been on the same path for a long time in the software world, as evidenced by the persistent relevance of that one XKCD comic.

There's always going to be work to do in our field. How appealing that work is, and how we're treated as we do that work, is a wide open question.

Re: The rise of industrial software

#86

Post by baq »

ReptileMan wrote: post #32
baq wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You either see what codex and opus are capable of and extrapolate the trendline or you don’t; the author clearly saw and extrapolated. Not that I disagree: I’m on record agreeing with the article months ago. Folks in labs probably seen it coming for years. Yes we’ve seen major improvements in software development velocity - libraries, OSes, containers, portable bytecodes - but I’m afraid we’ve seen nothing yet. Claud…

And if we extrapolate 5% economic growth per year we will consume all the energy in our light cone in 1000 years.

of course, but no need to look that far into the future - 400 years at 2.3% pa is enough to boil oceans.

AI capabilities are growing exponentially thanks to exponential compute/energy consumption, but also thanks to algorithmic improvements. we've got a proof that human-level intelligence can run at 20W of power, so we've got plenty of room to offset the currently-missing compute.

Re: The rise of industrial software

#88

Post by perlgeek »

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?

Basically every company that does anything non-trivial could benefit from tailor-made software that supports their specific workflow. Many small companies don't have that, either they cannot afford their own development team, or they don't know that/how software could improve their workflow, or they are too risk-averse.

Heck, even my small family of 4 persons could benefit from some custom software, but only in small ways, so it's not worth it for me to pursue it.

Once we're at the point where a (potentially specialized) LLM can generate, securely operate and maintain software to run a small to medium-sized business, we'll probably find that there are far more places that could benefit from custom software.

Usually if you introduce, say, an ERP system into a company that doesn't use one yet, you need to customize it and change workflows in the company, and maybe even restructure it. If it were cheap enough to build a custom ERP system that caters to the existing workflows, that would be less disruptive and thus less risky.

Re: The rise of industrial software

#89

Post by sriku »

sriku wrote: post #87

I find it hard to think of code as being the output of programming. I keep re-reading Naur's "Programming as theory building" paper and it still feels relevant and closer to how the activity feels to me, AI or no AI. https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf

The frame set by the OP completely out me off and dissuaded me from reading the rest of the article beyond the first paragraph. Didn't feel like much throught was given to what was being said.

Re: The rise of industrial software

#90

Post by ofalkaed »

tosapple wrote: post #82
ofalkaed wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, that is still a ways off, but being able to hire a programmer to meet my personal modest software needs is almost there. Also, the needs of any company that required a hundred people and millions of dollars is very different from the needs of a small restaurant or the like; anyone with enough ambition to run a small restaurant can manage the accounting and taxes for that restaurant, the same can not be said for…

Business*, if your "tax-accounting" manager made THAT mistake with numbers you would be screwed.

Occasionally when right clicking on a misspelled word to correct it, I bump the track pad and accidentally add the misspelled word to my dictionary. Business is one of those words I apparently did that with. I have never been able to figure out how to remove words from my dictionary, but honestly never looked that hard, for some ridiculous reason I think people will focus on what was said instead of looking for nits to pick despite all the evidence suggesting otherwise.
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