AI is going to destroy a lot of software companies in a way I haven’t seen talked about yet: it will give CEOs exactly what they ask for.
Before you jump in with “AI produces garbage and isn’t reliable by design,” let me say I agree with you 100%, but for the sake of argument, assume for a moment it could produce a high quality product.
Once a company gets large enough, very often the CEO gets completely removed from how their company actually works. I know I’ve worked at several companies where the job of my boss was to shield me from corporate nonsense so I could make an actually good product. If I and/or my boss were replaced with AI that actually followed the corporate nonsense, the company would go belly-up quite quickly.
I think many CEOs are looking to replace huge fleets of workers with AI they can directly prompt. Even if it worked flawlessly, since they don’t know how their products actually bring value to their customers, they will speed-run torpedoing their company’s place in the market by their own ignorance, ego, and overconfidence.
Yup. Think we’re going to go through a technological dark age for a bit, but hopefully non-shit companies will rise from the ashes. That or I’m gonna have to get used to FOSS everything.
Foss everything
The only real option
There will be mainstream adoption of Open Source Software but you’re dreaming if you think it will remain free. Marketing alone to get the masses to adopt these options will have a cost that people will be paying for.
Free as in “Freedom”. not free as in “Beer”.
Not charging money for your product had NEVER been a requirement in open source. Most people just give out away and get their money from elsewhere because theoretically someone could just download the source code and compile it themselves.
But thats OSS. F(ree) / O(open) S(ource) S(oftware)
My gut tells me that you’re being satirical. But just in case…
“Free” as in Freedom, not “Free” as in Beer means that you are free to view, use, modify and distribute the underlying source code within the guidelines of whichever Open Source license that software falls under. It in no way implies that it is “Free of Charge/No Cost”
I really can’t think of any tasks I do regularly, or even occasionally, I’d want to use AI for.
Maybe I’m an outlier? Read above a 6th grade level (that’s half the US right there) with a background in software development. If someone was like “find all the words in this list that start with ‘ab’” I’d reach for grep or python or similar.
Edit: obligatory: I switched to Linux (pop!_os) full time this year. A few hiccups but on the whole very good.
I don’t understand how you don’t see that you’re on an extreme edge of outliers… Do you seriously think most people even know what grep or python is? (Hint: they don’t)
The vast majority of people have absolutely no experience or interest in coding. The majority of people live without an adblocker, that alone should tell you everything you need to know. It’s kinda funny IMO, comments like yours are so common here and you all seem completely unable to understand the very obvious and basic fact that you are extremely far removed from the average person in any of this. You and everyone else always write like you think most people can code and figure things out that require years of experience and knowledge, while the truth is that anything more complicated than clicking on a big green “install” button and having everything work perfectly is too much for 95% of humanity.
