Sure there is, you said it yourself. You can make all those changes because it's easy, the lock-in effect is waning. We can move around and take better deals and choices.

This is actually a scary side of AI for providers: we use our own AI to research better choices and escape dark UI patterns and vendor lock-in. That information asymmetry and the difficulty of leaving a provider used to be their moat.

On a system level I think AI code is more like biological diversity, it hedges against monoculture risks. We don't all fall down at the same time if we don't replicate the same code.

I don’t really see what lock-in means for 90% of what AI is replacing. It’s more of a fear of commitment which isn’t exactly new. Enterprise space architects have designing systems to have pluggable everything from language, frameworks to carbon based life form.

As for the bio-diversity, I guess we’ll see the next time us-east-1 goes down.

It's surely subjective and changes project to project. I built a personal app on iOS with GPT last month because I didn't really like any of the flash card apps I tried for free. The way it works works very well for me and if I have any feature requests, I get to actually tell a thing to implement them, rather than sending a dev an email and hoping maybe they'll consider my idea.

At work I've been building an end to end system to do a certain process. The codebase is definitely more spaghetti than ideal and I really am concerned about maintenance down the road. But on the other hand I was able to POC it faster than anyone on the team would've before LLMs came along. We're already getting useful results from it too.

There's value to me! I've never been happier about my tools.

Your post above describes the value. All the annoying restrictions and UI/UX decisions made by SaaS providers that don't work for you. The value is being able to essentially wish into existence your ideal tooling, unburdened by the tradeoffs and decisions that some product designer thought was best for the masses

> decisions made by SaaS providers that don't work for you

Unfortunately this starts to break when there's more than one you on the team.

I see a lot of hand-rolled NIH solutions that create value for one person only, and are a net negative on the team.

In a few days, I created a few apps with AI. One saves multiple mechanics 5-15 minutes per day and another can save multiple hours of mistakes during the project, and one saves a lead engineer 15 minutes per day. These savings should add up over multiple years assuming all keeps running as it does now. I’m having good hopes because there have been few bugs so far. Mostly just tweaking.

Enjoy your maintenance responsibilities and hopefully compensation.

I’d never tell people what to do with money or free time. If someone wants to build many apps to help them personally, all power to them.

I can’t imagine a worse hell in a team or collaborative setting though. Imagine (or you don’t have to imagine since it’s already happening) asking a coworker “how they check how feature X is doing in prod” and their answer isn’t a query (regardless of how long it is) or some slightly complicated script to run. Instead their answer is a 27k line custom Rust desktop app. Then 2 days later you discover that the big green “All Systems Operational” is just a bit of static text, and in fact not all systems are operational. The app just doesn’t check things correctly.

I don’t care much about both. Just like to be doing something useful for a change (I did a PhD before this).