Software design is now cheap (opens in new tab)

Yeh even if LLMs are 10x better than today you probably still don't want to implement cryptography from scratch, but use a library.

I also like the 3d printing analogy. We will see how good LLMs get, but I will say that a lot of AI coded tools today have the same feeling as 3d printed hardware. If no engineer was involved the software is cheap and breaks under pressure because no one considered the edge cases. It looks good on the surface but if you use it for something serious it does break.

The engineer might still use an LLM/3d printer but where necessary he'll use a metal connection (write code by hand or at least tightly guide the LLM) to make the product sturdy.

You know what would happen if all the people who handwrote and maintained those libraries revoked their code from the training datasets and forbid their use by the models?

:clown face emoji:

This LLM-maxxing is always a myopic one-way argument. The LLMs steal logic from the humans who invent it, then people claim those humans are no longer required. Yet, in the end, it's humans all the way down. It's never not.

I think it's the opposite -- if you have a good way to design your software (e.g., conceptual and modular), LLM will generate the understanding as well. Design does not only mean code architecture, it also means how you express the concepts in it to a user. If software isn't really understood by humans, I doubt LLMs will be able to generate working code for it anyway, so we get a design problem to solve.

LLM's are only as good as they are because we have such amazing incredible open source software everywhere. Because their job is to look at the types of really good libraries that have decades of direct and indirect wisdom poured into them, and then to be a little glue.

Yes the LLM can go make you alternatives, and it will be mostly fine-ish in many cases. But LLMs are not about pure endless frivolous frontiersing. They deeply reward and they are trained on what the settlers and town planners have done (referencing Wardley here).

And they will be far better at using those good robust well built tools (which they have latently built-in to their models some!) than they will be at re-learning and fine-tuning for your bespoke weird hodgepodge solution.

Cheap design is cheap now. Sure. But good design will be ever more important. Model's ability, their capacity, is a function of what material they can work with, and I can't for the life of me imagine shorting yourself with cheap design like proposed here. The LLM's are very good, but but honing in on good design is hard, period, and I think that judgement and character is something the next orders of magnitude of parameters is still not going to close the gap on.

For example, when a designer sends me the SVG icons he created, I no longer need to push back against just using a library. Instead, I can just give these icons to Claude Code and ask it to "Make like react-icons," and an hour later, my issue is solved with minimal input from me. The LLM can use all available data, since the problem is not new.

But many software problems challenge LLMs, especially with features lacking public training data, and creating solutions for these issues is certainly not cheap.

GenAI generally makes software cheaper. But there is a huge difference in how much. Prototypes and jigs may be 90% cheaper (just making up numbers here), while for production software it may be closer to 10%.

AI is taking over Senior Devs' Work is the same as IKEA is taking over carpenter's moat - no, no, and again no way.

AI lets you do some impressive stuff, I really enjoy using it. No doubt about that.

But app development, the full Software Delivery Life Cycle - boy, is AI bad. And I mean in a very extreme way.

I talked to a carpenter yesterday about IKEA. He said, people call him to integrate their IKEA stuff, especially the expensive stuff.

And AI is the same.

Configuration Handling: Works on my machine, impressive SaaS app, fast, cool, PostgreSQL etc.

And then there is the final moment: Docker, Live Server - and BOOM! deployment failed.

If you ever happen to debug and fix certain infrastructure and therefore deployment fails - you wish you were doing COBOL or x86/M68000 assembly code like it is 1987 all over again - if you happen to be a very seasoned Senior Dev with a lot of war stories to share.

If you are some vibe coder or consulting MBA - good luck.

AI fails so bad at doing certain things consistently well - and it costs company dearly.

Firing up a Landing Page in React using some Tailwind + ShadCN UI - oh well...

Software Design, Solution Architecture - the hard things are getting harder, not cheaper.

IKEA is great - for certain use cases. It made carpenter's work only more valuable. They thrived because of IKEA, they didn't suffer. In fact, there is more work for them to do. Is their business still hard, of course, but difficult in a different way (talent).

And all doomer's talking about the dev apocalypse - if AI takes over software development, who is in trouble then? Computer Science, software development? Or any and every job market out there?

Think twice. Develop and deploy ten considerably complex SaaS apps using AI and tell me how it went.

Access to information got cheaper. A fool with a tool is still a fool.

Less maintenance and flexibility. You're not really "designing software" until you have a 20+ year old product.

Vibe coders really embody the "temporarily embarrassed billionaire" mindset so perfectly.

There’s a reason why most vibe coded apps I’ve seen leak keys and have basic security flaws all over the place.

If you don’t know what you’re doing and you’re generating code at scale that you can’t manage you’re going to have a bad time.

The models are trained on all the slop we had to ship under time pressure and swore we’d fix later, etc. They’re not going to autocomplete the good code. They’re going to autocomplete the most common denominator code.

I don’t agree that design is cheap. Maybe for line-of-business software that doesn’t matter much.