I would say most acceleracionist/AI bulls/etc don't really understand the true essential complexity in software development. LLMs are being seen as a software development silver bullets, and we know what happens with silver bullets.
Is that what you mean and, if so, is there anything in particular you've seen that leads you to see these problems being solved well or on the 18 month timeline? That sounds interesting to look at to me and I'd love to know more.
You can't do point sampling to figure out where things are going. We have to look at the slope. People see a paper come out, look at the results and say, "this fails for x, y and z. doesn't work", that is now how scientific research works. This is why two minute papers has the tag line, "hold on to your papers ... two papers down the line ..."
Copy and paste the whole thread into a SOTA model and have meta me explain it.
They're doubting you because the non-digital portions of processes change at people/org speed.
Which is to say that changing a core business process is a year political consensus, rearchitecture, and change management effort, because you also have to coordinate all the cascading and interfacing changes.
You are thinking within the existing structures, those structures will evaporate. All along the software supply chain, processes will get upended, not just because of how technical assets will be created, but also how organizations themselves are structured and react and in turn how software is created and consumed.
This is as big as the invention of the corporation, the printing press and the industrial revolution.
I am not here to tutor people on this viewpoint or defend it, I offer it and everyone can do with it what they will.
OK, sure, we can parse a PDF reliably now, but now we need to act on that data. We need to store it, make sure it ends up with the right people who need to be notified that the data is available for their review. They then need to make decisions upon that data, possible requiring input from multiple stakeholders.
All that back and forth needs to be recorded and stored, along with the eventual decision and the all supporting documents and that whole bundle needs to be made available across multiple systems, which requires a bunch of ETLs and governance.
An LLM with a prompt doesn't replace all that.
I have worked in large systems, both in code and people, compilers, massive data processing systems, 10k business units.
B2B is different from B2C, so if one vendor has a handful of clients and they won't switch away, there's no obliterating happening.
What's opened up is even lower hanging fruit, on more trees. A SaaS company charging $3/month for the left-handed underwater basket weaver niche now becomes viable as a lifestyle business. The shovels in this could be supabase/similar, since clients can keep access to their data there even if they change frontends.
Most of what we think software is today, will just be a UI. But UIs are also dead.