Malleable Software

Malleable software will eat you whole.

None of this makes any sense. Do you know how computers work?

This "AI" summer has turned into a drug fueled orgy of magical thinking. I am at my tether's end. I need to leave this industry to preserve my sanity at this point.

Rigidity helps in trusting the system.

Malleability / flexibility can introduce unreliability.

We need to get over a hump, where software becomes more humanlike, but just like with good engineers over time we can probably arrive at a place where we can trust our new malleable solutions just like a new colleague turning out to be great.

A lot of people been saying this lately, that LLMs are going to make SaaS obsolete because you will be able to build the alternative yourself without the need to pay.

But (and I'll copy & paste a comment I wrote a few days ago) I disagree. This existed way before LLM. Open source alternatives to most products are already available. And install them and deploy them is much easier than do it with LLMs, and you get updates, etc.

People don't want the responsability to keep them updated, secured, deployed, etc. Paying a small amount will always be more convenient than to maintain it yourself. The issue was never coding it.

Is this just low code all over again, except this time with some nondeterminism thrown in?

For six years I worked in a SaaS startup that built an applicant tracking system (a tool to manage recruitment efforts in big/mid-sized companies) tailored for the local market of the country we lived in. My experience tells me that our main value was in forcing them to rethink their recruitment processes, not adapting to their existing ones that were usually all over the place.

As much as I want to believe the opposite to be true as a “power user”, good tools often force you to adopt better practices, not the other way around.