Software Bonkers

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• Hacker News
• okay
  by calldacopsidgaf
• Lost me at "Claude Code".
  by xqb64
• The phenomenon this describes is the most important effect of LLM coding tools, and this is my favorite description of it.
  by natbennett
• ARE we still in the dorks-only phase? i am certainly a gigantic loser, but i am not sure i am the sort of dork being invoked and i have been doing and thinking about the exact same kinda stuff. i think the genie is out of the bottle or whatever
  by 0gs
• reading articles like this, i really wish people would before headlines before a group of paragraphs so i can scan the progression/points and see if its worth reading... a wall of paragraphs and a title like "software bonkers" doesn't help

  just my 2c

  by andrekandre
• Maybe not the most interesting article on HN, but I need to agree. Accounting in general is way too completex. For a Non business case (no tax involved), I decided to use hledger, but my "UI" to it is just an LLM. It was nerver so simple to make "okay enough" book keeping.
  by seblon
• As impressive as it sounds, I don’t think this is representative of the AI panorama. It’s difficult for non tech people to build tailored software just like that, and unless things change drastically, I don’t see the majority of the population building their own software just like they use mobile phones
  by danshipt
• yeah, i disagree. i think i am essentially ~non-technical and it is not difficult to build one-user applications at all. it's not even difficult to build "real" software!
  by 0gs
• I think the end goal the author describes:

  > I can imagine soon-to-arrive interfaces where you just drag and drop components while narrating your desires with your voice, the models able to perform the “brainstorming,” “planning,” and “work” — operations that can take ten minutes or longer today — in mere seconds tomorrow.

  Is impossible without ASI and more. This very vision failed to materialize in the past (4th-generation languages?) and still routinely fails, not only with models/agents, but also with humans and entire teams of humans on the other side. For a model to be that useful, ASI is the first enabling factor, but it also needs to develop mind-reading hardware and software and convince people that it's not breaching their privacy. I don't think this is going to happen. Not this millennium, at least.

  There is a good case for prototypes, MVPs, and personal mods. I can imagine more and more users making use of the freedom to modify the open-source code. Technically, it was always possible, but for a normal user, it was not a realistic choice (learn to code (long and hard) or hire a programmer (expensive and inconvenient)). Even for me - a programmer by trade - fixing bugs in random pieces of software I might use (or not) once in a while was something I very rarely had the spare time and energy to do. The capabilities of the current crop of AI models/harnesses make this WAY easier: cheap on a subscription and requiring much less of my time. But that's for personal code modification. Pushing vibe-coded changes to anywhere outside of my machine is still something I wouldn't do, because I can see how mediocre the output code is. Unless the models can always write code as good as the top 20% of human-written code, their output will remain a liability. It's OK if I'm the only user; it's wrong to push such a problem to others. The issue here is that non-programmers cannot recognize when the code is good enough, which is why I used the word "always" - otherwise, pushing LLM code to others is a coin toss whether it's helpful or detrimental (for the project, the maintainers, and other users).

  by klibertp
• I think the overarching trend is "Buy v. Build" has reversed as hard as Roe v. Wade

  If we haven't already crossed this point, the time that goes into software procurement, implementation, hand-off with the vendor, talking to support, getting customization will be less than just making something turnkey that solves exactly your problems

  But we're definitely at the point already where building something quickly with AI is a already much more fun and rewarding use of time for any semi-technical person

  by nylonstrung
• Bit late to the party mate. Everyone cycled into llm psychosis in December and had cycled out by February or so
  by xyzsparetimexyz
• This was posted in March 2026.
  by natbennett
• "cycled out" what. The tech world is still completely insane.
  by wffurr