I don't doubt the first part, but how true is the second?

Is there a shortage of React apps out there that companies are desperate for?

I'm not having a go at you--this is a genuine inquiry.

How many average people are feeling like they're missing some software that they're able to prompt into existence?

I think if anything, the last few years have revealed the opposite, that there's a large/huge surplus of people in the greater software business at large that don't meet the demand when money isn't cheap.

I think anyone in the "average" range of skill looking for a job can attest to the difficulties in finding a new/any job.

There are lots of simple internal apps that are useful, also just the ability to script.

I have a friend in IT who never knew how to code but is now saving a lot of time every month with just basic scripts.

I think there is plenty of demand for software but not enough economic incentive to fulfill every single demand. Even for the software that is being worked on, we are constantly prioritizing between the features we need or want, deciding whether to write our own vs modifying something open source etc etc. You can also look at stuff like electron apps which is a hack to reduce programmer dev time and time to market for cross platform apps. Ideally, you should be writing highly performant native apps for each.

IMO if coding models get good enough to replace devs, we will see an explosion of software before it flattens out.

"Is there a shortage of React apps out there that companies are desperate for?"

tech always shortage because its a kitchen sink problem, corporation want to reduce headcount so it saves money in the long run

Are you sure about that?

We're several years in now, and have lots of A:B comparisons to study across orgs that allowed and prohibited AI assistants. Is one of those groups running away with massive productivity gains?

Because I don't think anybody's noticed that yet. We see layoffs that makes sense on their own after a boom, and cut across AI-friendly and -unfriendly orgs. But we don't seem to see anybody suddenly breaking out with 2x or 5x or 10x productivity gains on actual deliverables. In contrast, the enshittening just seems to be continuing as it has for years and the pace of new products and features is holding steady. No?

You’re not making the argument you think you’re making when you ask “Where was the [I]ntwenet 2 years into it?”

You may be intending to refer to 1971 (about two years after the creation of ARPANet) but really the more accurate comparison would be to 1995 (about two years since ISPs started offering SLIP/PPP dialup to the general public for $50/month or less).

And I think the comparison to 1995, the year of the Netscape IPO and URLs starting to appear in commercials and on packaging for consumer products, is apt: LLMs have been a research technology for a while, it’s their availability to the general public that’s new in the last couple of years. Yet while the scale of hype is comparable, the products aren’t: LLMs still don’t anything remotely like what their boosters claim, and have done nothing to justify the insane amounts of money being poured into them. With the Internet, however, there were already plenty of retailers starting to make real money doing electronic commerce by 1995, not just by providing infrastructure and related services.

It’s worth really paying attention to Ed Zitron’s arguments here: The numbers in the real world just don’t support the continued amount of investment in LLMs. They’re a perfectly fine area of advanced research but they’re not a product, much less a world-changing one, and they won’t be any time soon due to their inherent limitations.

They're not a product? Isn't Cursor on the leaderboard for fastest to $100m ARR? What about just plain usage or dependency. College kids are using chrome extensions that direct their searches to chatgpt by default. I think your connection to the internet uptake is a bit weak, and then you've ended by basically saying too much money is being thrown at this stuff, which is quite disconnected from the start of you arg.

Both your and her usage is currently being subsidized by venture capital money.

It remains to be seen how viable this casual usage actually is once this money dries up and you actually need to pay per prompt. We'll just have to see where the pricing will eventually settle, before that we're all just speculating.

I pay for chatgpt and would pay more.

> And I think the comparison to 1995, the year of the Netscape IPO and URLs starting to appear in commercials and on packaging for consumer products, is apt

My grandfather didn’t care about these and you don’t care about LLMs, we get it

> They’re a perfectly fine area of advanced research but they’re not a product

lol come on man

We’ll need at least three more years to sort out the Lycos, AltaVista, and HotBots of the LLM world.

what makes you more productive, say C++ compiler + IDE or LLM? Do C++ compilers and IDE have similar valuation?

It does let beginners do a lot more than they are capable of currently.

But these are people that wanted to be in programming in the first place.

This "my mom can now code and got a job because of LLMs" myth, does this creature really exist in the wild?

No, it lets good engineers parallelize work. I can be adding a route to the backend while Cline with Sonnet 3.7 adds a button to the frontend. Boilerplate work that would take 20-30 minutes is handled by a coding agent. With Claude writing some of the backend routes with supervision, you've got a very efficient workflow. I do something like this daily in a 80k loc codebase.

I look forward to good standard integrations to assign a ticket to an agent and let it go through ci and up for a preview deploy & pr. I think there's lots of smaller issues that could be raised and sorted without much intervention.