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.
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.
This would be one of the greatest entertainment events of the 21st century! Shame about all the destruction that will happen as a consequence of course, but ...entertainment!
As self hosting with Docker and getting help from LLMs gets easier I can totally see a future where more companies self host. Having to deal with SaaS companies also takes a lot of time (licenses, hidden limits you can reach at any time, more complex privacy policy, approval from management), especially as they usually end up selling after a couple of years. The responsibility to self host isn't that bad all things considered.
I don't think we'll see companies vibe code the replacement of their software, but it might help them self host open source alternatives.
lmao
malleable software? what a joke
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.
But we started as a "boutique" company that implemented everything requested by our then small number of clients (mainly out of desperation, we were self-funded and we didn't have much leeway, we needed those clients). It was as flexible as it gets before the LLM times.
But after a while, you start noticing patterns, an understanding of what works and what doesn't in a given context. Our later customers rarely requested a feature that we didn't already have or we didn't have a better alternative of. It's not like we had a one-size-fits-all solution that we forced on everyone. We offered a few alternative ways of working that fit different contexts (hiring an airline pilot is a very different context than hiring a flight attendant). And in time, this know-how started to become our most important value proposition.
At some point we even started joking about leaving the software business and offering recruitment consulting services instead.
Our biggest value was getting customers to remove all the extra questions on their applications that had built up over years of management changes that no one had any idea why they were even asking.
I believe the presentation/analytics layer has become malleable, possibly parts of the business logic layer - you still need a higher % of trustworthiness than LLMs can provide for parts of the business and data layers.
Also training new people is annoying when things change too often; people can already use Jira/Linear/Monday/whatever , they don't want some completely flexible thing that is malleable.
Also, people are not all perfectionists with long term goals and visions. People who 'change' some part of their work flow that helps them NOW; they won't care about speed, scaling, deployment etc, so they will do something to make their work easier and then leave it there and possibly ignore it forever to rot. Which might have all kinds of fun implications.
I guess when we have AGI with a few 10 million+ context window for cheap, it will be different but the current llms would just leave a massive amount of rot all over the place, quickly forgotten and not usable by anyone but the original creator.
SaaS is a business model while malleable vs. rigid is a property of the software itself.
The parts of SAP that's composable workflow stuff? Doubt it, because the types of ABAP workflows in SAP that might be "malleable" are the sort of stuff that often legally requires correctness and reproducibility - kinda the exact opposite of a good LLM use-case.
And as much as I'd like to actually own my software, SaaS is preferable for major corporations for lots of legal and accounting reasons like easier revenue recognition. They're going to keep pushing it because it makes all the parts of being a software company that don't include writing the actual software easier.
But, at the same time, there are two issues:
- Companies can be really complex. The "create a system and parametrise it" idea has been done before, and those parametrisation processes are pretty intensive and expensive. And the resulting project is not always to be guaranteed to be correct. Software development is a discovery process. The expensive part is way more in the discovery than in the writing the code.
- The best software around is the one that's opinionated. It doesn't fit all the use cases, but it presents you a way to operate that's consistent and forces you to think and operate in certain way. It guides you how to work and, once going downstream, they are a joy to work with. This requires a consistent product view and enforcing, knowing when to say "no" and what use cases not to cover, as they'll be detrimental from the experience. It's very difficult to create software like that, and trying to fit your use case I'll guarantee it won't happen.
These two things tension any creation of software, and I don't think they'll go away just because we have a magical tool that can code fast.
This. And it isn't going to change.
The post avoids trying to answer "Why are opinionated tools popular and effective?"
The answer is that a standardized process that they encourage is often more efficient than whatever bullshit {random company} came up with in-house.
Malleable software needs to produce two equivalently good outcomes to beat opinionated:
1. Improve the underlying process at the customer's business (in terms of effectiveness)
2. Avoid a customization maintenance burden
The seductiveness of "just for you" bespoke solutions is they avoid (1) by telling the customer what they want to hear: you're so brilliant, your process is actually better, our product is a custom fit for your exact process, etc. That's bullshit -- a lot of customer processes are half-baked dumpster fires, and their companies would be better served by following standards.
To (2), I am incredibly skeptical on the long-term tech debt that malleable solutions will impose. What happens when there's a bug in the version only you use? Is that going to be the vendor's priority? Oh, you're supposed to fix it yourself? Congrats... we've just added a requirement that these tools are capable of making random mid-level in-house practitioners as competent as focused dev teams. That's a tall order.
Exhibit A that I'd want a follow-up post to address: SAP.
The above are the reason they realized they were trending in the wrong direction and have been dragging their customer base back to Clean Core.
Walk me through how malleable software would work better for SAP as a product, and I'll begin to believe...
good luck replicate this on financial,health,military,cyber etc field
Maybe we're in some kind of local-optimal, where all project management software has coalesced around a few user journeys, and there's some better approach out there to be discovered.. But I don't see why an accounting software company, games studio, or vehicle manufacturer, would dedicate even 1% of its resources into crafting a malleable bespoke project management software toolkit.
It goes against the concept of comparative advantage, and I can't think of any successful enterprise that's bet against comparative advantage and won.
I know that's not the point you're making, but I agree with you, alas that's already not the case today, e.g. random device updates nobody asked for, or you log in to your banking website because you need to pay something right now and half the features are gone or different.
Code has never been the bottleneck once you’re out of the CRUD boilerplate phase.
But quite honestly, the SaaS world is also due a culling - i'd argue if the software you work on as a SaaS business is replaceable by a malleable piece of AI software, you're closer to Pets.Com than a suitable business model.
Malleability is opposed to institution. When everything is hyper malleable everybody will need to be trained and change management will take up a large proportion of time.
The main reason why a lot of people go with Jira is not quality of the software - but the institutional buy-in. Employees, current and prospect, know how to work with the tool.
The greater change is likely labor disruption.
Just an FYI, this isn't the case at all. I've contracted and consulted at well over 20+ business at this point, and no one knows how-to use that hot garbage.
For anything more than single use there is a bit of a risk of it turning into a mess that collapses under it's own weight. A bit like a couple bad decisions at the start of a coding project comes back to haunt you later. So I struggle to see this replacing core infrastructure of anything in long run.
Even a visual tool like blender should expose their full GUI as a text API. It needs a bit of adapting, specifically for domain-specific structs (which should be retrievable via calls like 'select-bb' or 'select-coordinates'), but after that's done it's a game changer.
That class of software has a lot of proprietary GUI's that look slick and people are familiar with, but who cares about familiar in a world where the other software lets me point my LLM at its help file and build me whatever gui/tui/script/voice integration I can think of.
people who know how to formulate the problem already rule the world. AI will just be a catalyst.
If you have good market fit it means you were lucky or you knew which problem your potential customers had.
knowannoes•2h ago
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.
misiu1•2h ago
fuckaj•1h ago
tablet•1h ago