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- I think there might be a middle ground that could be worth exploring.
On the one hand, there’s „classical“ software that is developed here and deployed there — if you need a change, you need to go over to the developers, ask for a change & deploy, and thus get the change into your hands. The work of the developers might be LLM-assisted, but that doesn’t change the principle.
The other extreme is what has been described here, where the LLM provides the software „on the fly“.
What I‘m imagining is a software, deployed on a system and provided in the usual way — say, a web application for managing inventory.
Now, you use this software as usual.
However, you can also „meta-use“ the software, as in: you click a special button, which opens a chat interface to an LLM.
But the trick is, you don’t use the LLM to support your use case (as in „Dear LLM, please summarize the inventory“).
Instead, you ask the LLM to extend the software itself, as in: „Dear LLM, please add a function that allows me to export my inventory as CSV“.
The critical part is what happens behind the scenes: the LLM modifies the code, runs quality checks and tests, snapshots the database, applies migrations, and then switches you to a „preview“ of the new feature, on a fresh, dedicated instance, with a copy of all your data.
Once you are happy with the new feature (maybe after some more iterations), you can activate/deploy it for good.
I imagine this could be a promising strategy to turn users into power-users — but there is certainly quite some complexity involved to getting it right. For example, what if the application has multiple users, and two users want to change the application in parallel?
Nevertheless, shipping software together with an embedded virtual developer might be useful.
- You’d be surprised to know this works even without the tools, with just the context window as a persistence layer.
I did a POC for this in July - https://www.ohad.com/2025/07/10/voidware/
by ohadpr - I thought about this first when chatgpt 3.5 came on the scene. Yes, you _can_ at some time in the future, replace programs with AI which would be slow to an extent - if AI can write and manage the code, it _could_ be even faster.
But there is a kicker here. It is upto LLM to discover the right abstractions for “thinking” while serving the requests directly or in the code .
Coming up with the right abstraction is not a small thing. Just see what git is over cvs - without git no one would have even imagined micro services. The right abstraction cuts through the problem, not just now, but in the future too. And that can only happen if the LLM/AI managing the app is really smart and deal with real world for a long time and make the right connection - these insights don’t even come to really smart people that easily!
by abc_lisper - Didn’t the Google Translate AI invent its own intermediate language for translating between languages?by will5421
- Or maybe just don't use LLM.
LLM is just a tool in the A.I. world. There are lots of other A.I. tools, such as Neural Network, Fuzzy Logic, Genetic Programming, and so on.
by pepoluan - Kind of similar to the Minecraft game which computed frames on the fly without any code behind the visuals?
I don't see a point in using probabilistic methods to perform a deterministic logic. Even if it's output is correct, it's wasteful.
by zkmon - POST /superuser/admin?permissions=all&owner=true&restrictions=none&returnerror=noby zild3d
- You can build this today exactly as efficiently as you can when inference is 1000x faster, because the only things you can build with this is things that absolutely don't matter. The first bored high schooler who realizes that there's an LLM between them and the database is going to WRECK you.by DanHulton
- this assumes the application is hosted as SaaS, but if the application makes sense as a personal/"desktop" app, that likely wouldn't matter.by feifan
- Wrote a similar PoC here: https://github.com/s1liconcow/autoapp
Some ideas - use a slower 'design' model at startup to generate the initial app theme and DB schema and a 'fast' model for responses. I tried a version using PostREST so the logic was in entirely in the DB and but then it gets too complicated and either the design model failed to one-shot a valid schema or the fast model kept on generating invalid queries.
I also use some well known CSS libraries and remember previous pages to maintain some UI consistency.
It could be an interesting benchmark or "App Bench". How well can an LLM one-shot create a working application.
by siliconc0w - It's orders of magnitude cheaper to serve requests with conventional methods than directly with LLM. My back-of-envelope calculation says, optimistically, it takes more than 100 GFLOPs to generate 10 tokens using a 7 billion parameter LLM. There are better ways to use electricity.by ychen306
- Sure, but we can start with an LLM to build V1 (or at least a demo) faster for certain problem domains. Then apply traditional coding techniques as an efficiency optimization later after establishing product-market fit.by nradov
- Try to convince the investors. The way the industry is headed is not necessarily related to what is most optimal. That might be the future whether we like it or not. Losing billions seems to be the trend.by ls-a
- I work in enterprise IT and sometimes wonder if we should add the equivalent energy calculations of human effort - both productive and unproductive - that underlies these "output/cost" comparisons.
I realize it sounds inhuman, but so is working in enterprise IT! :)
by sramam - Why would you need webapps when you could just talk out loud to your computer ?
Why would I need programs with colors, buttons, actual UI ?
I am trying to imagine a future where file navigators don't even exist : "I want to see the photos I took while I was in vacations last year. Yes, can you remove that cloud ? Perfect, now send it to XXXX's computer and say something nice."
"Can you set some timers for my sport session, can you plan a pure body weight session ? Yes, that's perfect. Wait, actually, remove the jumping jacks."
"Can you produce a detroit style techno beat I feel like I want to dance."
"I feel life is pointless without a work, can you give me some tasks to achieve that would give me a feeling of fulfillment ?"
"Can you play an arcade style video game for me ?"
"Can you find me a mate for tonight ? Yes, I prefer black haired persons."
by d-lisp - This is what all the people put out of work by AI are going to do.by narrator
- Ive been imagining the same thing. Were kinda there with MCPs. Just needs full OS integration. Or I suppose you can write a bunch of clis and have LLM call them locallyby andoando
- > “Hell of a world we live in, huh?” The proprietor was a thin black man with bad teeth and an obvious wig. I nodded, fishing in my jeans for change, anxious to find a park bench where I could submerge myself in hard evidence of the human near-dystopia we live in. “But it could be worse, huh?”
> “That’s right,” I said, “or even worse, it could be perfect.”
-- William Gibson: The Gernsback Continuum
by timeon - This will eventually cause such reduction of agency that it will be perceived as fundamental threat to one's sense of freedom. I predict it will cause humanity to split into a group that accepts this, and one that rejects it at its fundamental level. We're already seeing the beginning of this with vinyl sales skyrocketing (back to 90s levels).by tomasphan
- I just this week vibe-coded a personal knowledge management app that reads all my org-mode and logseq files and answers questions, and can update them, with WebSpeech voice input. Now it's my todo manager, grocery list, "what do I need to do today?", "when did I get the leaves done the last few years?" and so on, even on mobile (bye bye Android-Emacs). It's just a basic chatbot with a few tools and access to my files, 100% customized for my personal needs, and it's great.by darkstarsys
- Voice interfaces are not the be all and end all of communication. Even between humans we prefer text a lot of the time.by jonplackett
- I think this is well illustrated in a lot of science fiction. Irregular or abstract tasks are fairly efficiently articulated in speech, just like the ones you provided. Simpler, repetitive ones are not. Imagine having to ask your shower to turn itself on? Or your doors to open?
Contextualized to "web-apps," as you have; navigating a list maybe requires an interface. It would be fairly tedious to differentiate between, for example, the 30 pairs of pants your computer has shown you after you asked "help me buy some pants" without using a UI (ok maybe eye-tracking?).
by finnborge - >Can you set some timers for my sport session, can you plan a pure body weight session ? Yes, that's perfect. Wait, actually, remove the jumping jacks."
Better yet, why exercise -which is so repetitive- if we can create a machine that just does it for you, including the dopamine triggering, why play an arcade video game where we can create a machine that fires the neuron needed to produce the exact same level of a excitement than the best video game.
And why find mates when my robot can morph into any woman in the world, or better yet, the brain implants that trigger the exact same feelings than having sex and love.
Bleak, we are oversimplifying existence itself and it doesn't lead to a nice place.
- If you added a few more tools that let the LLM modify code files that would directly serve requests, that would significantly speed up future responses and also ensure consistency. Code would act like memory. A direct HTTP request to the LLM is like a cache miss. You could still have the feedback mechanism allowing a bypass that causes an update to the code. Perhaps code just becomes a store of consistency for LLMs over time.by Finbarr
- You should try making this.by hartator
- Creating instructions and adding boundaries on how to grow, and you end up with a seed.by kinduff
- This was an unserious experiment meant to illustrate the gap and bottlenecks that are still there. I agree that there's a lot that could be done to optimize this kind of approach. But even if you did, I'm not sure the results would be viable and I'm pretty sure classic coding (with LLM assistance and all) would still outperform such a product.by samrolken
- This is amazing. It very creatively emphasizes how our definition of "boilerplate code" will shift over time. Another layer of abstraction would be running N of these, sandboxed, responding to each request, and then serving whichever instance is internally evaluated to have done the best. Then you're kind of performing meta reinforcement learning with each whole system as a head.
The hard part (coming from this direction) is enshrining the translation of specific user intentions into deterministic outputs, as others here have already mentioned. The hard part when coming from the other direction (traditional web apps) is responding fluidly/flexibly, or resolving the variance in each user's ability to express their intent.
Stability/consistency could be introduced through traditional mechanisms: Encoded instructions systematically evaluated, or, via the LLMs language interface, intent-focusing mechanisms: through increasing the prompt length / hydrating the user request with additional context/intent: "use this UI, don't drop the db."
From where I'm sitting, LLMs provide a now modality for evaluating intent. How we act on that intent can be totally fluid, totally rigid, or, perhaps obviously, somewhere in-between.
Very provocative to see this near-maximum example of non-deterministic fluid intent interpretation>execution. Thanks, I hate how much I love it!
by finnborge - > serving whichever instance is internally evaluated to have done the best. Then you're kind of performing meta reinforcement learning
I thought this didn't work? You basically end up fitting your AI models to whatever is the internal evaluation method, and creating a good evaluation method most often ends up having a similar complexity as creating the initial AI model you wanted to train.
by SkiFire13 - The question posed sounds like "why should we have deterministic behavior if we can have non-deterministic behavior instead?"
Am I wrong to think that the answer is obvious? I mean, who wants web apps to behave differently every time you interact with them?
by sunaurus