There has for sure been a reduction in the amount of effort to create software. But that friction that existed before helped in determining what was WORTH making. There will be a subsection of tools that are now creatable, that are needed. But there'll be a lot of tools that get created that will be abandoned precisely because they didn't solve enough of a problem.
Having a gating mechanism, in the past the friction and effort, was good.
Where internal tools shine is internal operational workflows that are being done manually. You're not replacing Slack or Salesforce, you're replacing the current process where a developer needs to SSH into the server to run a SQL query, or where the Operations team fills out a Google doc which the Finance team pastes into an Excel spreadsheet which runs a bunch of VBA calculations.
1. Software developer is required to do some mundane configuration/setup/data manipulation task at the request of some other internal team
2. Software developer thinks "I'll write an internal tool so the internal team doesn't have to bug me! They can change the configuration/extract the data on their own!"
3. Software developer spends X amount of time building an internal tool (can be quite quickly with AI)
4. Internal tool is released; the internal team looks at it and says, "uh, I don't want to deal with this, I'm just going to keep forwarding requests to the software team."
5. Software developer does the task and realizes it's easier for them to do the mundane configuration/setup/data manipulation with existing tools rather than the internal tool. Internal tool is never used.
The part I don't think you can leave to the agent is everything around the application: backups, authentication/access control and vulnerability scanning. Those things aren't rocket science, but getting them wrong can have a much bigger impact than a bug in the application itself.
That's what I'm building with https://AppHaven.eu My bet is that vibe-coded apps will become cheap and almost disposable, while the platform underneath them needs to provide those boring safety guarantees automatically.
It makes me wonder about the web a bit and whether it becomes glossier, more video driven but ultimately less directly maleable.
Do people prefer streaming text over static pages?
If you haven’t yet drunk the /grilling Kool Aid, give it a go
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This is the key distinction people need to understand, until then it just piles up and lot of companies main business is not software, something else.
You're aware that Slack has many more features besides chat, right?
This statement falls purely into the mistake #1 category.
Being able to build something that works just how you want with minimal investment is a huge value add.
I ditched web analytics platforms and just send events in jsonl format to disk.
I have a regularly scheduled job that imports it all into a duckdb database and updates a very custom report. I can also ask random questions like “is there a cohort of users who use feature A and B?”.
It’s super lightweight and incredible.
As long as the phase of the software and users are lighweight - agree these internal tools can be built, but as scale comes that is when the challenges show up is what I have observed.
How far we have come!
0. "The cost of achieving a given level of AI performance has fallen about 47% per quarter since 2023, or 13× per year." https://epoch.ai/publications/the-plunging-price-of-thought
But a few weeks later when you're trying to use it, you completely forget the syntax and all the little quirks that seemed so genius when you were writing the internal tool.
So you go back to existing tools.
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So, same end result (cost exceeds hiring a new engineer), but achieved differently.
The counter, I suppose, is the managers have to deal less with engineers telling them their ideas aren't good or well thought out.
1.) open weight models gain more popularity 2.) i'm making more money from these models than paying for them
if either happens, then I'll feel good about it either way
What do you mean? They need to recover hundreds of billions in sunk costs?
It's always about cheaper, better, faster. And when the thing being built extends beyond a single person, and still when working alone, conflict shows up in balancing the risks between these. The Strawman of Perfection is just that.
"It doesn't need to be perfect" is incredibly dismissive of the reality of the situation. Ignoring reality seems like a poor problem solving strategy.