Remember how Brick and Mortar was dead because of online shopping? Who knew in 2024 I'd be more likely to head out to an actual store than risk purchasing some sketchy product off Amazon, but I can imagine that if we do eventually actually get to a future where the world is filled with the white noise of SAAS garbage coming out left and right anyone actually interested in mitigating risk for their business is going to learn quickly to err on the side of caution.
If anyone and everyone can emit noise then that becomes the baseline, and people will catch on quick to find those that rise above.
This gives us the tooling to A.) burn through those faster. B.) solve more complex problems.
If your entire job as an engineer is “take tickets with very clear acceptance criteria and turn into component / basic business logic”, I’d be worried for sure. I was initially worried myself when all this landed two years ago, but using it daily and now building enterprise scale apps with it, I know we’ve got at least another decade or two before it’s able to tackle the full breadth of an engineers role.
It’s over! All websites can now just be slightly tweaked templates. Go home, we no longer need any web dev whatsoever.
It’s not like the bar will raise. No, everyone will expect the exact same level of quality as of 2024 and bloated, AI diarrhea using 200x resources is fine now and will always be fine.
Nobody needs to differentiate and we will all copy each other endlessly and eventually the whole software world will be basically one single product.
This tech currently just makes each engineer more efficient. There’s an infinite space of problems to solve. I guess we’ll must be digging through that space faster and wider from now on.
Besides, any sufficiently complex field has a lot of business rules that you can't derive from screenshots.
The level of delusion regarding AI makes me want to completely ignore anything that touches it and come back in 10-20 years when people learned something.
Maybe OP meant "all CRUD TODO-like SaaS is toasted".
I have seen this said before. Would you show some of these sites that you have knocked out in one day fully working? If not, would you be willing to do the community a service and over the course of a weekend, live-stream or video yourself duplicating this site[0]? Just the publicly available parts.
It would be eye-opening for many I think, and in the process would make you one of the most famous developers in the world (or at least in the US), since at least two very well-known developers/influencers do not think it is currently possible and dunking on them live or on video screen recording would really be a sea-change in our sector. Not to mention, settling once and for all the "LLMs are going to take our jobs" vs. "lol, that are just a fancier autocomplete" argument within the industry.
I am not joking about this or trying to bait you, I would seriously like to know if I am wasting my time with traditional development and really need to re-orient my skills and job prospects. So far, I have seen many people do demos, but none were anything other than relatively simple, error-prone, SPA apps. It is more complex ones, I am interested in. The link below[0] is not that complex for a traditional developer, but it isn't super-simple either. From your comment, it sounds like you have the experience and ability to do it.
If you dont think this will not happen, you have not used cursor.sh with sonnet 3.5. I am working on a startup that is effectively a copy of existing products. My flow goes:
1. Screen shot competitor UX
2. Drop screen shot into cursor.sh, ask it to code it (there will be issues)
3. Screen shot individual components in the above screenshot
4. Have cursor.sh fix each component one by one
5. Go back through and tell it each issue by highlighting the code
6. Iterate a bit
7. 90% of the UI has been copied in one day, with a working backend.
This is with a next.js/supabase app deployed on vercel. For complex B2B saas.
Its over. In a year the models will get so much better