Where is all the new, good software?

dude250711

> Software teams are capturing a lot of the speedup in the form of more leisure or quasi-leisure time. (To greatly simplify: software teams are offering 2x speedups to their companies. They're then using tools that allow them to work 10x as efficiently, and taking nice long coffee breaks.) If the leadership (C-suite) is afraid to take the full responsibility over AI output, then the only rational choice for developers is to "pace the frontier" themselves.

latentsea

Well we're starting to see game mashups and photoshop clones. So, the effects are becoming more outwardly visible.

cft

AI coding is great but the distribution channels have been closed for a while. App stores are effectively closed for new apps and old internet is dead.

sunaurus

> We are in fact seeing software improvement, in the form of fewer bugs and better performance. Anecdotally, completely disagree. Maybe this is nostalgia, but I perceive a distinct and massive drop in software quality over the past few years. Worst offenders for me are the poster children for LLM-based development. I run into bugs and performance issues with both Claude and Codex literally every day. I don't think I'm an outlier here, either.

steviee

> Software teams are capturing a lot of the speedup in the form of more leisure or quasi-leisure time. (To greatly simplify: software teams are offering 2x speedups to their companies. They're then using tools that allow them to work 10x as efficiently, and taking nice long coffee breaks.) Writing code is not the bottleneck anymore, making decisions is. Making the right decisions needs context and thinking. A coffee break might actually help productivity. Driving a Ferrari full speed in a crowded city - only because you can - doesn't make the outcome better.

zuInnp

I don't buy that. We see nothing. > Software teams are capturing a lot of the speedup in the form of more leisure or quasi-leisure time. (To greatly simplify: software teams are offering 2x speedups to their companies. They're then using tools that allow them to work 10x as efficiently, and taking nice long coffee breaks.) That is just an insult. With AI we are working more than ever, either because of "you should be faster now" or because half the people are getting layed-off ...

dalemhurley

Coding is only one part of software. There is resourcing, financing, research, planning, design, development, testing, distribution, training and support.

nope1000

My suspicion is that software is saturated. Everything that people need (and a lot more that people do not need) has been built already.

pacificat0r

Article didn't really explain where this new, good software is :D

feverzsj

Because you still need human to review all the slops, which puts the cart before the horse.

pu_pe

> Software teams are capturing a lot of the speedup in the form of more leisure or quasi-leisure time. (To greatly simplify: software teams are offering 2x speedups to their companies. They're then using tools that allow them to work 10x as efficiently, and taking nice long coffee breaks.) This might be the biggest factor in my opinion. Corporate incentives usually don't reward someone delivering 2x-10x, so an employee who suddenly found a way to multiply their productivity might be keeping that method to themselves and freeing up some time instead.

Mikhail_Edoshin

AI is a search engine. A good one, better than what was before that. (Which is not saying much, because the search landscape is severely distorted. For example, searching dispropotionately dominates browsing.) It can speed up searching and exploration. This is the natural limit of possible gains.

rbreve

The software I create for myself has improved a lot. I also see a lot of improvements in current software and games and fast iterations. But nothing new that is revolutionary.

cyco130

Almost all of the trending repos on GitHub are _about_ AI: zillion of harnesses and similar AI orchestration tools. So most of the extra efficiency gained by AI usage seems to be spent on building more AI tools and not software for end users or libraries for AIs and humans to build such software.

bambax

This is just speculation with zero facts. Anyone can come up with those explanations; the interesting part would be to either prove or disprove them.

scotty79

It's on my computer. It has one user and it was never intended to have more. So basically answer 6 on the list.

Destiner

I personally made a bunch of net new, really good software that I use myself and that is much better than alternatives. You will not see that software though, because: 1. Marketing (and distribution) of said software is a chore, and doesn't really give me any benefits 2. It's tailored to me rather than to average Joe.

elohimus

There's more of the stuff that's well known and understood. Any software with an ecosystem of integrations and connectors added a lot of connectors lately. CRMs, CMS and similar extended their functionality. What we've seen very little of is fundamentally new ideas, usage paradigms, user experiences or similar.

caaqil

It doesn't really matter if we are making better software now, in the end, we know it will be better. Think of it like this: you have a very sick patient, and you prescribe a drug/protocol known to make them worse before they get better. So the intermediate step is not informative in any meaningful sense. Human coders usually ask this question in a malicious way to imply that this technology doesn't just have to be faster than humans (which it is), it also has to produce better code (which it usually does) as cohesive product (so fixing features or refactoring in projects/products do not count) in record time (this is the trap because these models are not even a year old in their current advanced format). It's hopeless.

jrowilliams

> Software teams are capturing a lot of the speedup in the form of more leisure or quasi-leisure time. (To greatly simplify: software teams are offering 2x speedups to their companies. They're then using tools that allow them to work 10x as efficiently, and taking nice long coffee breaks.) I am yet to see the advancements in AI manifest in more leisure-time. It is simply that the amount of work we're expected to be able to pump out has increased, and the actual programming work is no longer what slows us down.