Expectations are a funny thing, a year ago I thought all software industry will cut at least 30% in a year. It's very far from happening. A big change is obviously coming but now I think I'm good enough to last at least the next 5 years, which suddenly feels like a long time if you see it coming.
The truth is despite these very impressive improvements, most impressive work done by agents require many iterations running in a loop, with tens of thousands of dollars in API pricing. And it's still far from being always reliable. Somewhere along the way hardware will get better, energy will be cheaper, the market will be flooded by chips. There a physical world issues that limit all of these for now, thank god. I think 5 years is a good number.
The real damage is that enterprise work became unbearable. Slop code with slop code review, and overly verbose emails with repetitive presentations. And on the other hand, I now enjoy "coding" for myself like I'm 16 again. All I want to do is sit at home and build apps for myself and family. I barely go to work
The history of the self driving car is apt to repeat as well. I remember thinking "2015, 2018 maybe at the latest." But as 2015 (and 2018) came and went, expectations were tempered.
We will see shortened development cycles, and maybe even orders of magnitude shorter development cycles.
But hard problems remain hard (there are only so many chips, materials research and biology are difficult problems). Manufacturing remains a choke point.
I'm more concerned that the absolute worst persons on the planet are in charge of many of these technologies. If those that are in charge are more concerned about allocating resources and power in their favor, the more dismal the future of all humanity will be (including for those in charge, but they can't see that due to self-interest bias)
I think the change might be orders of magnitude more software being written rather than an order of magnitude fewer developers. There is a HUGE induced demand coming when software is so cheap to write.
I've never been a professional, but I've been coding for nearly 30 years as an amateur, and I've "written" more code in the last year than the previous 29, and it was all tooling for my very non-tech small business. It's cut HOURS out of my week, and it's all software I could not have afforded to pay developers for. But with Lovable, just describe it and iterate.
What IS going to die is software as a service. I've cancelled hundreds of dollars a month of subs and rolled my own better tooling.
In the world of web apps, I find the agent's ability to write good e2e tests to be a real game changer. Turns out with enough rigor you can write pretty stable mostly not flaky e2e tests. And even flaky ones are fixed quickly due to a fuck ton of assertions at every step.
Test code looks like a mess, even more than the usual LLM code. takes a while to let it go. Test report looks beautiful though.
When the test code "looks like a mess", how do you get assurance it is testing the right properties?
Like you, I've found that LLMs can improve test coverage by decreasing the amount of developer time spent writing tests. But generally, it takes a lot of manual work to set up the initial testing framework, and even then, a lot of vigilance to ensure that what is actually tested corresponds to the description of the test.
I played with it for 10 minutes, very impressive. Couldn't get vscode to work, will try again later with different apps. (vscode is not that important anyway as it has a remote mode)
I understand (well, "guess" more than understand when it comes to graphic stack in Linux) that it being it's own compositor probably means running a full desktop environment in it is infeasible, but a good way to run software remotely is painfully missing in Linux right now, even one app at a time. The built in servers in kde/gnome are problematic in general and require the monitor to be turned on.
I might be mistaken, but both need a physical monitor turned on. If your monitor goes to sleep you can't connect/see a black screen.
The kde one doesn't support remote user login, and while the gnome one does on paper, I never got it to work. The remote connection situation in Wayland is a major regression.
Yeah that's fair, the KDE people have remote login as a goal but it's not there yet. Waypipe is definitely the more mature option at the moment if you need a headless workflow.
The maximum battery save mode on Samsung (or maybe on all android devices?) does just that - you can set the limit on which apps can be opend. Turn the display to greyscale. Homescreen only shows like 8 apps.
I think for most people, just putting an extra step between you and whatever toxic app(s) you have can be enough. It mostly works for me, and as an added bonus you get insane battery life. I would try that before buying a new phone.
Same. Only friction big enough for me is turning my smartphone off and using an actual dumbphone.
Been using one since January, only switching back occasionally to my smartphone when I have no alternative: https://www.maciuz.net/posts/rewiring-my-brain/.
Combine this with a "dumb profile" on most android phones (I think Samsungs support profiles) it's even more friction. It takes time to switch profile and it forces you to authenticate again
This is more like "just increase friction". For some people it's more than enough, for others it's barely anything. Personally speaking, I've found that just the act of removing the reddit app from my home screen makes it fairly less likely to be opened, as now I need to open my app drawer.
I mean... unironically yes. Different people have different levels of struggle with temptation, and one can pursue strategies to make it easier to say no. But at the very core of the matter, it is a personal choice that must be made by the individual. Everything else has to flow from that first step of self accountability.
I kinda miss that in the early 2000's kde and gnome shipped with a fuck ton of window decorations based on all those (then-not-so) old OS. Teenager me had fun switching them every day and playing with windowing behavior (focus follows mouse! hover to select and only one click needed!). I wonder what techy kids today do to explore and have fun.
Speaking of the early 2000's, man, Aqua was such a good design. I appreciate the nextstep paradigm and design, but Aqua was just so futuristic, in a good way.
In some ways X11 with it's focus follows mouse, don't raise on focus, select:middle click paste features provide a far more refined desktop experience then mac or windows ever could. No wait, stop laughing, sure X11 was a garbage fire when it came to consistent professional design, but because it was such a wild west of an environment there was place for real ui innovation. I know, I get grumpy fast without middle click paste. And I hate having to raise a window in order to click and type on it(A common access pattern for me is to read docs on the top window while I am operating the bottom window).
Very very strictly speaking relying on models in it's essence is not the problem I think. There is enough "meat" there you can build a nice small profitable company.
Those tools are better than vanilla agents by dedicating expensive human time on evaluating and fine tuning models. You can also build various integration, management and reporting features to add value. If you freeze model progress today, or 12 months ago when most of those companies started, it's a viable business I think.
But any gains you make on the first part will be lost to newer models, and the 2nd part is not as valuable when llms allow people to build fairly complicated features quickly.
I don't if worthless but all those companies have very limited time to gather customers and at least make themselves valuable for an acquisition
You cannot be profitable unless the service you rely on is also profitable. You might make some profits during their honeymoon period, but then they will squeeze you by the balls pretty soon and force you to enshittify as well.
The truth is despite these very impressive improvements, most impressive work done by agents require many iterations running in a loop, with tens of thousands of dollars in API pricing. And it's still far from being always reliable. Somewhere along the way hardware will get better, energy will be cheaper, the market will be flooded by chips. There a physical world issues that limit all of these for now, thank god. I think 5 years is a good number.
The real damage is that enterprise work became unbearable. Slop code with slop code review, and overly verbose emails with repetitive presentations. And on the other hand, I now enjoy "coding" for myself like I'm 16 again. All I want to do is sit at home and build apps for myself and family. I barely go to work
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