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- Hacker News
- This article hints at what I feel is one of the not-yet-realized transformations that LLM coding brings: can we finally drop Electron/React Native and just have LLMs automate the work of transforming Figma/wireframes and behavior specs into truly native apps for each platform?
For CRUD apps, the API spec and UI mockups -- or even a photo of how it looks on the already coded platform -- would go a long way. That's exactly the kind of well defined task work LLMs do well with. It should be possible to automate a lot of the equivalence testing too.
Is there still an excuse for "maybe we'll add Android someday" or "not enough Mac/Linux users"? And is there still a justification for not building those less-used flows like password reset into the iOS app instead of throwing up random WebViews?
For those apps that do have non-trivial logic on device, LLMs have shown a lot of promise at rewriting to cross-compiling-is-easy languages like Go or Rust.
- I feel as though the author really missed an opportunity here: "The Emacsulation of Software"
- Your Emacs (or my VIM) config was simple text file, that you can open in a simple text editor, and customize it as needed, and you know where is what. My VIM config is 20 year old. A year or 2 ago, I just dumped the manual package management, and started using a plugin manager.
There are no gatekeepers, no dependencies!
This, require you to have pay $20-$200 to a 3rd party corporation, or have a kind of beefy GPU (to run locally), run some instructions on text file, keep editing till it might does what you intend it to.
You are knowingly adding a dependency, which probably will become a hard dependency when everything goes jumbled up for human reviews, either on a beefy GPU or sending your data to a shareholder pleasing corporation.
Let's distinguish, how these are not the same, and the real price we pay
by t_mahmood - "Personal Software" i.e. programs that one writes for oneself, was the original vision of home computing back in the 1960s. The PC wasn't really anticipated, but the thought was that everyone would have a computer terminal at home, and write programs to do whatever was needed. It was imagined that programming would become easy enough that anyone could learn to do it. We're not there yet but with LLMs we're getting closer.by SoftTalker
- Emacs has this property because it uses Lisp. The general tendency for programmers to start writing everything themselves was noted, for Lisp, but was named “The Lisp Curse”¹. It is a curse because programmers stop collaborating. Everyone becomes their own wizard in their own tower, and overall progress stops, and a dark age sets in.
1. <https://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Lisp_Curse.html#ma...>
by teddyh - I've absolutely engaged in making personal software [0] thanks to the age of LLMs.
But to be honest, my time using Emacs didn't teach me to "build personal software". My Emacs set up was extremely brittle, and it was a nightmare when I tried to use it across Windows & macOS. My university project was written using an unholy combination of org-mode & some workflow to create a beautiful LaTeX file, and I couldn't tell you how to recompile it (if I were to try, I'd probably get an LLM to literally translate it to LaTeX).
I want my life to have as little maintenance as possible, and making my own software for everything isn't always compatible with that.
[0]: A rewrite of a NETFX application in Rust, simply because the 20 minute installation time irked me: https://github.com/bevan-philip/wlan-optimizer
by shaokind - Software that today is overwhelmingly prepackaged and usually professional, which I think at this point the nerds should reclaim:
* Podcast apps
* Music listening apps
* Feed readers
* Bluesky clients
* Note-taking apps
* Desktop bookmarking/read-later apps
* Chat and instant messaging
* Time trackers
* Recipe managers
These are all things that you can get better-than-replacement-grade results from Claude on --- not necessarily the best, not necessarily the most globally competitive, but certainly an application more closely tailored to exactly what you want it to do for your own idiosyncratic work style.
Music.app is a miserable experience, and I can just tell as I use it that it's miserable trying to serve me. But Apple long ago factored all the meaningful bits out of Music.app into MusicKit. Why am I still using Music.app? MusicKit is the real product now. This is new.
by tptacek - This is so exactly right and I've been saying it to whoever will put up with me...(and now am embarrassed I have no link to show for it. oh well, shame is good for writing. envy too!)
Software production is now so easy that everything is a .emacs file (pronounced "dot emacs" btw): meaning, each individual has their own entirely personal, endlessly customizable software cocoon. As tptacek says in the OP, it's "easier to build your own solution than to install an existing one" - or to learn an existing one.
Another good analogy, not by concidence, is to Lisp in general. The classic knock against it—one I never agreed with but used to hear all the time—is that Lisp with its macros is so malleable that every programmer ends up turning it into their own private language which no one else can read.
Tangential to that was Mark Tarver's 2007 piece "The Bipolar Lisp Programmer" which had much discussion over the years (https://hn.algolia.com/?query=comments%3E0%20The%20Bipolar%2...). He wrote about the "brilliant bipolar mind" (BBM) - I won't get into how he introduces that or whether fairly or not, but it's interesting given how "AI psychosis", in both ironic and unironic variants, is frequently mentioned these days.
From Tarver's article (https://www.marktarver.com/bipolar.html):
The phrase 'throw-away design' is absolutely made for the BBM and it comes from the Lisp community. Lisp allows you to just chuck things off so easily, and it is easy to take this for granted. I saw this 10 years ago when looking for a GUI to my Lisp [...] No problem, there were 9 different offerings. The trouble was that none of the 9 were properly documented and none were bug free. Basically each person had implemented his own solution and it worked for him so that was fine. This is a BBM attitude; it works for me and I understand it. It is also the product of not needing or wanting anybody else's help to do something.
Sounds pretty 2026, no? He goes on:
The C/C++ approach is quite different. It's so damn hard to do anything with tweezers and glue that anything significant you do will be a real achievement. You want to document it. Also you're liable to need help in any C project of significant size; so you're liable to be social and work with others. You need to, just to get somewhere. And all that, from the point of view of an employer, is attractive. Ten people who communicate, document things properly and work together are preferable to one BBM hacking Lisp who can only be replaced by another BBM (if you can find one).
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When production is so easy, consumption becomes the bottleneck [1], and suddenly sharing is a problem. This is why the Emacs analogy is so good. A .emacs file is as personal as a fingerprint. You might copy snippets into yours, but why would you ever use another person's? (other than to get started as a noob). You just make your own.
The more customized these cocoons get, the harder they are for anybody else to understand—or to want to. It isn't just that another's cocoon has too high a cognitive cost to bother learning when you can just generate you own. It's also uncomfortable, like wearing someone else's clothes. The sense of smell somehow gets involved.
I would call this, maybe not AI psychosis, but AI solipsism.
In software it's fascinating how configuration management (that boringest of all phrases) is becoming the hard part. How do you share and version the source? What even is the source? Is it the prompts? That's where the OP heads at the end: "share it somewhere — or, better yet, just a screenshot and the prompts you used to make it." But when I floated a couple trial balloons about whether we might use this for Show HN—i.e., don't just share the code you generated, because that's not the source anymore; instead share the prompts—we got a lot of pushback from knowledgeable people (summarized here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47213630).
These dynamics can only be what's behind the pipe-bursting pressure that Github has been under. What a Github successor would look like is unclear, but as a clever friend points out, there will have to be one. Projects and startups along these lines are appearing, but we seem to be in the horseless carriage phase still.
Even more importantly, what happens to teamwork? If we are all a BBM now—or rather, if we all have personal armies of BBMs, locked in a manic state, primed at all hours to generate things for us-and-only-us—how do we work together? How do cocoons communicate, interoperate? What does a team of ai solipsists look like? It sounds oxymoronic.
My sense is that a lot of software teams, startups and so on, on the cutting edge of AI-driven / agentic development, are currently contending with this, not (only) philosophically but practically, e.g. how does my generated code compose with your generated code. With these frictions we presumably end up giving back some portion (how much? who can say?) of the productivity gains of generated code [2]. One would expect such effects to show up over time, as the systems being built this way grow in complexity and maintenance/development tradeoffs become things.
I don't see many talking about it publicly yet though, which is a pity. No one wants to be the first to stop clapping and sit down during an obligatory standing ovation, but it's a bummer if you can't (yet) tell interesting stories about downsides and instead have to pretend that this is the first free lunch, the only downsideless upside that ever existed. It makes the discussion performative and probably slows evolution, since the experiments, ironically, are happening in silos.
These are the people doing the most serious and real and advanced work with the new tools (edit: I mean in the field of software dev), so it sucks if all talk of downsides is left to the cynical/curmudgeonly contingent, who for whatever good points they may, er, generate along the way, are obviously wrong about AI having no value for software dev. It's easier to talk about AI wiping out the human race than, say, bug counts going up or productivity levelling off after a while.
Mostly I just want to know what's really going on! and how people are dealing with it and how it is developing over time. Do I have to like go to meetups or something?
[1] That's why a recent paper used the title "Easier to Write, Harder to Read" - https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6726702
[2] Ran across this saying the same thing, a bit more strongly, the morning after I posted the above. https://x.com/fchollet/status/2054917282015445076. Maybe we'll get the conversation after all!
by dang