minraws
a day ago
I don't think we've seen the last of anything in 2026/27. Lots of interesting projects are yet to start. I'd bet a good amount of money that some of the next Google/Microsoft-sized businesses will come from ideas in the AI harness/tooling space that no one has even noticed yet. No one is building them today, well, not exactly anyways.
And no one will see it coming except that one person in some remote part of the world (I don't say the US because, post-LLMs, I hardly think there's anything unique to US tech anymore. The best part was the sheer technical talent in the US, but that's worth a lot less with modern models and systems).
So no, I don't think we're anywhere near the end of innovation just yet. These will be some fun times, and I don't think the current way of building stuff will last too long. We'll definitely have better tools and ways of doing stuff, or so I hope. Keyboards have honestly lasted a lot longer than I would've expected, even though we've had STT tech for decades now.
Even today, office memes aside, it's just easier to type things out instead of speaking. For most people, typing is faster or fast enough anyway. Except when I'm on my phone.
athrowaway3z
a day ago
> The best part was the sheer technical talent in the US
This is just nonsense. What set the US apart is its mass and ecosystem.
What is just a good idea in any other country gets 10k users as a side project. Whereas in the US it can more easily become a multi-million VC backed 'homogenous' product for its massive population/market.
Popular tech is rarely the best at a technical level (even when the best is developed within the US), it just has more opportunity to acquire weight and momentum to become the default choice for a problem-space.
minraws
a day ago
> This is just nonsense. What set the US apart is its mass and ecosystem.
That's only in post 2010s period, aka post apps and social media.
The boom in 80s/90s/2000s all of it kicked off from the deep technical know-how that rest of the planet just didn't have.
People can feel free to disagree, but they are really lying to themselves if they think anywhere else on the planet there was the sheer amount of tech talent as US until even 2010s.
Things have changed since and US is now largely valued because of it's large market and stuff, hence the off-shoring of so much of the technical and even advanced work.
But this was not the case before. With AI pushing the cost of building stuff to near 0 I don't see why you even need the US market to scale up an idea enough to prove viability. Sure the company might have to move to US, but there is no reason for it to be built in US anymore.
loveparade
a day ago
Agree it feels super early for a lot of these tools. Don't think we have even scratched the surface of what working with LLMs will look like in 10 years. Just think about how many user interfaces can be completely replaced.
daveguy
a day ago
> Just think about how many user interfaces can be completely replaced.
Which ones? I don't see a single interface that can be replaced reliably. Complimentary maybe, but definitely not replaced. Would be interested to hear your opinion. It seems that even coding harnesses are a poor replacement for an ide. Drastically less information and if you think code doesn't even need to be read to be understood... Well, I guess we will just have to agree to disagree on that one. I think it needs to be engaged with at least as much as it was when written. Reading is the bare minimum.
loveparade
a day ago
A large part of software and websites I used before have been replaced by talking to LLMs. Just today I did some video editing, I would previously used OBS studio, but now I just prompt Claude with what I want, give me 10 options to pick from. Then my IDE, I don't use it anymore. Diagramming tools? Nope, prompting works better. Image editing? Prompts. Web design tools? Nope, prompts and give me 20 live previews to iterate on and narrow down. Web consoles to manage my servers? Nope. Excel spreadsheet for workout planning? LLM does calculations now based on my tracker API. I could go on.
So yeah I think we disagree. It feels so much better to me not having to switch between different tools anymore. When I read code it's not in my IDE but PRs on GitHub where I leave feedback for the LLM. I just tell it to keep iterating and monitoring PR comments until I approve.
minraws
a day ago
As much as I would like to say I agree, I don't really like the LLM ui replacements. I absolutely hate them, they are just horrible, claude code itself is a horrible way of producing code/output you aren't seeing the logical pieces of your project you are largely stuck in a text box with a diff viewer and unable to parse what's happening.
Something like codex desktop is slightly better but still a horrible interface for developing software in any form of serious capacity.
Sure it works because the friction of manually working is just so damn high. And there aren't good alternatives, the jump from pi to claude to codex being almost negligible for most folks is a very high signal this entire pattern just doesn't really work.
I don't yet know where we will land or will we suffer with the current bad type text in a box ux for the next few years but I am certain this is not it.
I am still trying to work out what is it though, so well we will see when we get there.
Not using tools is a good example of the issue, you give up a lot of control to do that, sometimes it's good enough often it's not, and often it's worse because you don't even realize how much control you have given up.
I don't think we will do natural language interactions with our computers, I honestly feel like we will do something more intent based. If LLMs can know from our words what we want to do, then they can certain infer from what we are doing stuff we are about to do.
Think auto complete but for user actions, without taking away user control and understanding intent almost perfectly. Maybe it would require neuralink or something to get good enough, but until that happens I don't think we are moving away entirely from our UIs/UXs entirely.
Some people will, the low skill, low requirements, but no-code has existed for a very long time for the same reason, visual scripting is a similar example.
A video made by LLMs by using Premiere Pro is always going to be worse than what a professional makes entirely on their own in Premiere Pro not in terms of quality but in terms of control hence intent.
Similar issues with software, you can not perfectly describe what you want to another person perfectly that just doesn't happen, otherwise we wouldn't have had companies with more managers than engineers it seems like.
There is a lot of loss of intent, imagine if every action was something where you lost some of your intent, then after 100 requests does any of your intent even remains in it.?
This might be too hypothetical but I don't see LLMs replacing UI in the short term, but I don't know what happens in longer term.
But I do think LLMs will change how the software the interfaces and tooling works almost entirely.
Today it's much easier to llm rather than sql. It's not even a question of whether it's 10% better or something the cognitive load of writing SQL is high enough in data analysis that LLMs are the only solution.
LLMs enable some pretty interesting ways to query data itself, you can ask the data to query itself, imagine being able to prompt inject the data.
But on a more useful case imagine being able to let data build itself, when ever an incident happens, LLMs can enable flags to collect more data automatically based on incidents add reporting apis and telemetry and so much more.
Incident analysis should have changed but it hasn't yet, a human for some random reason still needs to ask an LLM to do the work, then understand it somewhat and then reply to others.
argee
a day ago
It really does come down to control and intent. Some people want nothing to do with either. To those people, creation is not an act of service or creativity, merely a stepping stone on their road to mediocrity.
As as society we have decided this is okay, or even where we want the majority of people to be. Don't hate the player, hate the game.