7 ms·

Extensible Software in the age of LLMs

177 points by coloneltcb 28d ago

a2ff6eeb0 28d ago
As I said elsewhere: The future of tools like github is a platform for manual testing, where you write a prompt, the AI proposes a change and you can experiment with the UI and attach notes for the next iteration. AI can take user requests, prioritize, aggregate into tickets, and turn them into pull requests. For a lot of end users, this may be enough, no programmers will be needed to get software built and shipped. For the rest, it lets programmers fill the remaining gaps, doing the manual testing to make sure the system works correctly, test for regressions and make sure the LLMs add those to the test suite, and then manage monitoring the rollouts. The bulk of development work going forward is manual verification that the LLM understood the user request correctly. I'm not as sure that this idea of plugins will pan out; AI will want to make changes to support what it produces.
qsera 28d ago
I see a different future. A future where software developers are approached by clients with requirements in the form of an LLM generated program. They do it because they are at a point where LLM fails to make new changes without breaking existing stuff. Maybe it won't be a program, but just some LLM context as some data dump. This program or context will take up the role of a PM. Developers will refer to the program, or ask context for clarifications and the developer will build the actual program with or without the help from LLMs.
- nextaccountic 28d ago
  the program itself is kind of useless. the client will send it anyway to demonstrate a proof of concept but hopefully the dev will build from scratch what's important is the spec. the poc isn't a spec because the dev is being hired exactly because that software doesn't solve the problem fully - whatever it has missing is the important bits this spec will probably be generated by a llm, but there is some noise added. if the client can send their prompt, alongside the whole llm session (maybe with sensitive tool calls redacted), the dev would have everything
  - pwarner 27d ago
    Yeah this disposable prototype model is common I suspect. I see it used regularly
- lelanthran 28d ago
  > I see a different future. A future where software developers are approached by clients with requirements in the form of an LLM generated program. They do it because they are at a point where LLM fails to make new changes without breaking existing stuff. That's not gonna happen :-/ I've already had clients tell me they only want it modified, and their expectation is that it's only a days worth of work to make it work.
  - qsera 28d ago
    That is sad. But if what I imagine is true, they will grow wiser after they have lost enough $$$ with scammers who agree to do it in a day and pocket the funds and give back an even more broken program.
  - jollyllama 28d ago
    How is what you're describing technically different than the quoted section? GP was correct, they just didn't realize that they were describing something bad instead of something good.
  - bee_rider 28d ago
    Did they end up getting what they wanted? This LLM stuff is still quite new; I wouldn’t be surprised if people are still asking for your help wrong.
    - lelanthran 28d ago
      > Did they end up getting what they wanted? Who knows. I don't take on any dev work anymore that involves modifying existing applications, anyway. Too many have been of the form "Look, we did 99% of it, we just need you to do the 1% remaining" with the expectation that finding and fixing bugs in a vibed 90kSloC application is only a few minutes to a few hours of human labour. In reality, if you bring me something that Claude Code itself can't make changes to without breaking, it's going to be at least a week of billable hours before I know where to start.
      - tianaco_ny 27d ago
- pornel 28d ago
  I expect this to be automated too, and in the end boil down to paying for more tokens to fix the program. Code too messy to be editable by an LLM is already too horrible for humans to touch. Fixing vibecoded software as a service will boil down to reverse-engineering requirements from the messed up program, and prompting a better model to design it properly and rewrite. Eventually models will be trained to do this themselves, so it won't be a service you ask a dev for, it will be an extra charge on your AI subscription.
  - qsera 28d ago
    >Eventually models will be trained to do this themselves That is what I wonder. Two things. 1. Is there enough training data in that format, to do it? 2. Is there enough incentive for the LLM companies to do it? I mean they got to charge the client for the tokens upto that point..so..
    - pornel 28d ago
      1. In "verifiable" domains ML is not limited by training data any more. Models can help generate the training data and/or learn the objective through reinforcement learning. 2. Yes, because the most capable model is the only one that can charge a premium. The rest is a commodity.
      - qsera 28d ago
        >Models can help generate the training data They can, but I don't think they will be of sufficient quality. It is a fundamental thing. You can't generate new information from existing information. It has to come from the real world. Generating training data using existing models will only help the model to capture the exiting patterns more thourly.
        Brian_K_White 27d ago
        Ultimately the new data, the slight incrimental improvements to the body of code for training) will actually come from humans even though it was written by ais. ais write 1000 bits of garbage code for 1000 different users one-offs, the users judge that most of those didn't work out but 2 did. Only those good results that humans approved becomes part of the growing body of reference code. The others either get thrown away, or even if they still exist, they are somehow known to be low quality, or at least, not known to be high value. So an ai wrote some new code that worked and improved the total corpus that other/future ais reference, but it's not just ai output feeding ai input, it's ai output filtered through humans who nixed most of it. (Maybe exists on github but not used by anyone. It isn't known to be bad, it's just ranked lower, but if nothing else fits as well, it's there to try. That way obscure code that's good eventually becomes known to be good.)
- amadeoeoeo 28d ago
  This is already happening. Clients come and show me their proof of concept, fully vibecoded, because they do not know / do not have the time to take it to prod. Other comments saying this will be automated in the future... may be. But even if that is the case, time and attention are still needed to make things happen. With the extendended capabilities IA brings, having an IT person in-house makes more sense than ever, even for small shops.
- brookst 28d ago
  So, a requirements document for updates to a legacy system?
meerita 28d ago
This is exactly what I did a few days ago: I created my own "small software" to solve my own need: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49330939 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49330939. Let me tell you: it works, it works really well, and I don't feel like, "Hey, the options out there are better." In fact, the options available are outdated in terms of frameworks and bloated with features to please all kinds of customers. They try to do everything but end up doing everything poorly.
bensyverson 28d ago
This is the right general idea, but it does read as an ad for Cloudflare OS. Every tech company is scrambling to be the stable foundation for people in enterprise to build cute little one-off apps safely. It's a perfectly fine pattern, but it's hard to imagine a world where Cloudflare becomes the default. Much easier to imagine Google or Microsoft adopting whatever UI/UX patterns work well and tying into enterprise data natively.
- giancarlostoro 28d ago
  > Cloudflare OS I hate that they called it that. I hope they change the name, to me an OS implies... an OS. I don't want to hear marketing excuses about that, I don't need every other company copying CloudFlare butcher a useful descriptor and now we have a bunch of "AI OS" type apps out there. Just call it what it is... an Agent Workspace. They could have called it CloudFlare Agents or something to that effect?
  - 21asdffdsa12 28d ago
    The wizzard of OS runs a might elephant graveyard for hype products.
  - benatkin 28d ago
    It isn't the only wrong thing they're calling it. They're also calling it a successor to sandstorm.io, which it clearly is not.
    - kentonv 28d ago
      Eh? Why do you feel it's inaccurate to call it a successor to sandstorm.io?
      - kentonv 28d ago
        For the record. I am the lead engineer on Cloudflare OS (and Cloudflare Workers). I am also the creator of Sandstorm.io. And I'm the one calling it a successor. Wasn't some marketing decision -- that's directly from me. Honestly really interested to know why you feel this isn't accurate. FWIW, I didn't choose the name Cloudflare OS -- but I did frequently describe Sandstorm as being an OS, back in the day. Sure, it layers on top of Linux, but it's an environment where you install apps and run them, with the platform managing the execution environment, permissions, resource management, etc. That's sort of what an OS does. Cloudflare OS does all that as well.
lelanthran 28d ago
> It took me thirty minutes with Codex and GPT-Sol. The thing is fast, it does not ask me for anything, and it does the one job I wanted: it launches applications. This is quite funny, actually. When I wanted something similar (just play MP3s, without playlists, special indexes, etc), it also took me 30 minutes. In 2002. I still use it daily - a wish application displays entries matching the filter using the locatedb to get a list of all MP3s to find them and mpg123 to play them. This is the application that I have used the longest in my life, unchanged and unmodified from day 1, and it still tickles me that it took 30m. I'm pretty certain, had LLMs not existed, that I can make an application finder using locatedb (perhaps store a private index as well) and a GUI in about 30m using wish as the front-end. (Just for reference, here's my no-frills MP3 player) --------------------------------------------- #!/usr/bin/wish # Copyright Lelanthran K. Manickum 2002, provided under BSD license # set version "1.0" proc playSong {songname} { set rc [catch { exec killall -9 mpg123 }] if {$songname=="\[Stop Playback]"} { .midFrame.lblPlaying configure -text "Stopped" return 0; } set rc [catch { exec mpg123 --loop -1 "$songname" & }] if {$rc==0} { .midFrame.lblPlaying configure -text "Playing: $songname" } } proc locateSongs {pattern} { .lstResults delete 0 999999999 set tmpvar [split [exec locate -i "*$pattern*.mp3"] "\n"] .lstResults insert 0 "\[Stop Playback]" foreach title $tmpvar { .lstResults insert 1 $title } } frame .topFrame frame .midFrame entry .topFrame.entSearchString -text "Search String" button .topFrame.btnSearch -text "Search" -command {locateSongs [.topFrame.entSearchString get]} listbox .lstResults -yscrollcommand {.sby set} -xscrollcommand {.sbx set} scrollbar .sby -orien vert -command {.lstResults yview} scrollbar .sbx -orien horiz -command {.lstResults xview} label .midFrame.lblPlaying -text "Stopped" locateSongs "" focus .topFrame.entSearchString bind .topFrame.entSearchString <Return> ".topFrame.btnSearch invoke" bind .lstResults <Double-B1-ButtonRelease> {playSong [.lstResults get active]} bind .lstResults <Return> {playSong [.lstResults get active]} grid .topFrame -row 0 -column 0 -sticky nsew grid .topFrame.entSearchString -column 0 -row 0 -sticky nsew grid .topFrame.btnSearch -column 1 -row 0 -sticky nsew grid .midFrame -column 0 -row 1 -sticky nsew grid .midFrame.lblPlaying -column 0 -row 0 -sticky nsew grid .lstResults -column 0 -row 2 -sticky nsew grid .sby -column 1 -row 2 -sticky nsew grid .sbx -column 0 -row 3 -sticky nsew grid rowconfigure .topFrame 0 -weight 1 grid columnconfigure .topFrame 0 -weight 1 grid rowconfigure . 2 -weight 2 grid columnconfigure . 0 -weight 2 wm protocol . WM_DELETE_WINDOW { set rc [catch { exec killall -9 mpg123 } ] destroy . } wm title . "Simple Music Player - v$version" wm geometry . 700x500
13415 28d ago
I doubt that future. Traditionally, only hardcore power users are interested in extending software. Normal end users want reliable software that does what they want it to do. Some of them also want a certain amount of shiny buttons and UI effects to look at. I'm not saying there is no market for heavily personalized software, just that it is not going to be big. Of course, people also want AI that acts like a friend or expert and does amazing things. However, I don't believe the two worlds mix well. IMHO, AI substitutes a person working for you whereas traditional software is a tool that persons and AI use.
- bevr1337 28d ago
  The experience can be vastly different than deeply configuring a system like a power user. My nontechnical, 87-years-old grandfather is putting together apps to help him with his language practice. He uses Google iirc. The chatbot is a familiar interface since his time working did overlap with IRC, email, early internet, yada yada. I don’t want to necessarily argue about merit or quality, but I have seen that custom software can be accessible to a general audience.
- zahrevsky 28d ago
  > Normal end users want reliable software that does what they want it to do. But how does that contradicts the idea of extendable software? If anything, extendable software will better do what the user wants it to do. It's just right now we think of extending the software as if it's a complex operation. It looks to me like the article envisions a future, where extending your software is as simple as, say, creating a new google doc or opening a link. It is doubtable, however, that such level of ease of extendibility can be achieved at all. There might be enough essential complexity, like answering lots of questions, which, I agree, most users won't be doing.
  - 13415 27d ago
    The vast majority of users buy the software that does what they want it to do right from the start. If you reflect on it, you will likely find that this is also what you do. That behavior is not just normal for software, though, it's the standard for almost any product. You have a certain problem or need, look around until you find something that solves the problem or satisfies the need, and then you might buy it. Think about cars for comparison. Some people like tinkering with them and tuning them. However, most people look for the features they need or desire and buy the car that satisfies their requirements and budget best. Sometimes extensibility is part of the requirements to solve a problem or fulfill a desire but normally it isn't.
deleted 28d ago
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sroerick 28d ago
I built a Lisp interpreter and hosted it on an OCaml http core, and it does exactly this for me. I've been using it for the last three months for basically all my computing. I always wanted a Smalltalk type environment, and this finally scratches this itch. Creating an endpoint is just defining a lisp function. There's still a billion things to clean up but it works really well. My LLMs say that if you followed this same pattern in pure clojure or racket it would be comfortably <10k lines of code. That said, I do enjoy implementing my own lisp and I think the OCaml core gives it some stability and security.
wim 28d ago
We're building a collaborative IDE but for notes/tasks as a local-first web app [1], built to be malleable with plugins. In terms of tradeoffs we're taking a middle road I guess: the app is malleable, but plugins stay contained within the web app. Because of end-to-end-encryption and privacy/ownership concerns, we can't run plugin code on a server node somewhere. But for some types of apps, server-side extensions alone also feel too restrictive. An advantage of a malleable app over just one-shotting a completely custom app (and to be clear I think both will be popular!) is that extending and customizing something is often exactly what you want vs starting over, but you can't really do that when you can't do things like deeply customizing the UI. So you can just ask a (local) agent "add me this functionality" and it will likely be possible. It's still sandboxed inside the browser though, so this way you can do things like permissions, allowing admins to restrict who installs team plugins and so on (which is also important for malleable multiplayer apps). [1] https://thymer.com https://thymer.com
launchforge 28d ago
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william-evans 28d ago
I’m building one of these Podda [1], though pointed at households/small communities rather than companies, so ordinary people can keep the apps they’ve made by talking to Claude or ChatGPT and share them with their friends. Passing code only the things it’s allowed to use works on the server because you start from zero, so our generated code holds no credentials at all and its only way out is a proxy that allows exact origins and methods. You can’t really do that in the browser. CSP only restricts which origins the code can reach, not the method or the path, so approving one destination means anything the code can read can go anywhere there. The difficult part is that if we're writing an honest consent prompt to our users then it has to say that, and it sounds a lot worse than "allow network access?". This is hard especially when our target users are non/less-technical. There are other versions of the same problem everywhere, like revoking an origin not actually taking effect until a refresh. [1] https://podda.app https://podda.app
- masterj 28d ago
  For client side there is https://hardenedjs.org/ https://hardenedjs.org/ And Cloudflare OS does some fancy things with iframes + capnweb iirc
  - william-evans 28d ago
    Will take a deeper look into the Cloudflare OS source - thanks!
    - kentonv 28d ago
      We (Cloudflare OS) run an app's client-side code in a null-origin iframe sandbox that is denied access to everything that we can possibly deny access to. Its only communication line to the outside world is via a Cap'n Web RPC session over postMessage() to the parent frame, which in turn forwards the session on to the app's own server, which runs in a Dynamic Worker sandbox on its end. So the app client can only talk to the app server and nothing else. Or at least, ideally. Unfortunately, content-security-policy today has a few exotic holes. WebRTC, for instance, cannot be blocked; the standard simply doesn't cover it. So it's not suitable as a sandbox against malicious code trying to leak data by any means possible. Instead it's protection against the AI doing something stupid, perhaps prompted by a user who doesn't know better. (We would love to get those CSP holes plugged, though...)
zahlman 28d ago
> It’s become readily apparent that LLMs are really quite excellent at building Software for One. Personal apps that side-step all of the complexity and accountability of enterprise software and are custom fit for a single person’s workflow. > … > However most of our existing examples of pluggable software are local software: AI agents, developer IDEs, mods for video games, Blender add-ons, CAD extensions. These tend to be professional tools with a high barrier to entry. The web is the most successful software distribution system in the world. It shouldn’t be left behind. My hypothesis is that there is a new opportunity for Extensible Software on the web. I don't follow. If this is really supposed to be "software for one", why would it need to be on the Internet? Why does it need a client/server model? Why do I care about "distribution"? People develop for web because native development gets painful when there are many flavours of "native". But you only use one of them yourself, and the LLM isn't bothered by its quirks. Why not just work on designing pluggable local software that isn't so "professional"?
- wild_egg 28d ago
  Data point of 1 but I prefer all my personal software to be web based so I can easily access it from my phone, laptop, and desktop and not worry about syncing things or installing or updating when I switch devices. Also makes it trivial to extend access to family members as needed. It's very rare that I reach for local software these days.
  - josephg 27d ago
    Pity. Local software runs faster and feels native on the computer. And you can use local files. I’m keen to build up a better local stack for building local programs more easily, running them over the internet without installing and syncing data. I don’t want to need the cloud to make my computer work.
    - wild_egg 27d ago
      Who said anything about cloud? I run all my apps on my desktop and access them over tailscale. All web apps and I install on phones as PWAs. Super ergonomic. As for this: > Local software runs faster What? Why? Is this some assumption about network requests? None of my personal software ever has a loading spinner or lag. If it's designed well, each interaction should fit in a single TCP packet so network round trip is imperceptible. If your web software is slow, that's a choice you've made. Plenty of slow local software around to balance the scales too. EDIT: Using local files with a web stack is also easy these days. The only con of web software is lacking that native aspect. But native appearance is rare anyway these days with every company just shipping electron bloatware.
ryanrasti 28d ago
> "code can only take actions via the references it has been passed" The cool part is a move to capabilities composed in code brings back everything great about software itself: composability, encapsulation, type systems. I've been working on this for SQL: instead of giving clients a handle to endpoints, you give them scoped query builders they can compose with (e.g., hand out a scoped `users` object and client can do `users.where(u => u.isActive()).orderBy(u => u.createdAt)`). The result is you define a data-model (schema, computed columns, relations) and expose that instead of an endpoint per desired client query. (if interesting: https://typegres.com/ https://typegres.com/)
deleted 28d ago
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socketcluster 28d ago
Sandboxed execution is definitely one aspect... But IMO, this is still not secure enough for vibe coders. They will want to have data-driven apps to share among small groups of people, then the security of the sandbox doesn't matter if they expose some external endpoints and if the access control logic which guards data is flawed. Even if each user gets their own sandbox, they will still want to configure different access rules for different kinds of data which they host. That said the idea that each user could control and host their own data is interesting and could work. I imagine you could have apps which link data from many different user sandboxes via remote foreign keys. You could have a centralized data schema controlled by the application owner but the data itself would be held/scattered across a large number of sandboxes.
BobbyJo 28d ago
Me and a Cofounder are building something along these lines on top of K8s. The wisdom that "if give the LLM clear boundaries and you get better results" definitely holds IME, even with frontier models like fable. It's impossible to specify all the guardrails you need to keep models from violating priors without writing the code yourself, so the only move is to remove their ability to do so, or to even recognize that the option exists.
sakuraiben 28d ago
Why is lovable not enough here by the way?
0xbadcafebee 28d ago
Extending software makes it more complex. As you keep adding extensions, the complexity grows until the app is unusable. Doesn't matter if it's built-in or a plugin, result is the same. But there is a proven alternative that works well. Write completely separate small apps, and it's a different result. You get reliable functionality without an increase in complexity. Don't add a "file search extension" to your application (consider that if any other application wants this functionality, now they have to implement their own extension). Instead you make one completely separate app, called 'grep'. You then call that one 'grep' app, from any application. It's a very old-fashioned idea to programmers who have only ever known custom-integrated REST APIs and microservices and giant monolithic frameworks. But this old-fashioned idea is the reason AI agents are even useful at all. They call those old-fashioned single-purpose external tools, and suddenly the agent has useful features, no custom extension needed. Another thing you don't need: "a platform for platforms". There's already a platform designed to run interoperable applications. It's called an Operating System. It runs these little independent things called applications. They all have data object storage input-output access. Even internal communication between processes. And they're all compatible.
harlan_pdx 28d ago
The long tail of unmet features is real. Most apps serve the common cases well, and LLM-generated extensions could fill that gap without bloating the core product.
_mu8n 28d ago
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hboon 27d ago
I really enjoy working on my inhouse orchestration tool because it brings me back to the days of working in Smalltalk image where I can tweak my development IDE as I go along.
rtpg 27d ago
I've been saying it to anyone who cares to listen: Salesforce is basically the biggest "Smalltalk" deployment out there. Super malleable, has a lot of ... decent rules for how to get software out into the world, every environment is basically its own universe at one point. Someone should really attack SFDC from the "malleable Business OS" side of things. Unfrotunately everyone seems to attack it from the CRM side of things and lose the plot a bit. Def agree that "have the thing I just came up with running in some environment that is sharable" is still a pretty gnarly problem, and LLM stuff doesn't... I don't think they've really made much progress on it. At one point someone really needs to make an easy to manage box metaphor for all the stuff. It's not Docker. Google scripts is almost there but you really want to have the database be a thing you can drag and drop as well (SQLite people: get excited!) Dropbox for business apps. If anyone runs with this at least send me an email thanking you for the metaphor.
- folkrav 27d ago
  Having worked with Salesforce deployments over the last two years. I'd only call it malleable as long as you fit in its definition of what's malleable. I'm half-expecting it to have its own definition of a wheel at this point.
  - rtpg 27d ago
    Don't you feel like it's still fairly far ahead of other systems, if you buy into the model? I think there are other systems that kinda get there but SFDC is the only one of these kinds of systems that give you a lot of options on the backend and frontend side of things to just ship your own things and have them be integrated.
    - folkrav 27d ago
      Maybe. Honestly, it's just been the number one source of deployment issues in our stack, by a large margin, so that may be the frustration talking. It basically requires us to treat our Salesforce environments very differently from the rest of our technological stack in ways that can be pretty alien to what's pretty standard development best practices in the rest of the industry. To give one specific example, the way some things cannot be expressed through metadata or updated through API makes it very hard to have any kind of repeatability between environments, making things like e2e testing and CD a lot trickier to deal with. As for your specific question, I'll be honest, I'm not familiar enough with what the competition has to offer, because I tend to avoid these behemoth monolithic locked-in platforms like the plague if I can help it, and my experience with Salesforce so far isn't really making it easy for me to change my mind on the subject.
tianaco_ny 27d ago
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Brenndalampe1 26d ago
[flagged]

177 points by coloneltcb 28d ago

As I said elsewhere: The future of tools like github is a platform for manual testing, where you write a prompt, the AI proposes a change and you can experiment with the UI and attach notes for the next iteration. AI can take user requests, prioritize, aggregate into tickets, and turn them into pull requests. For a lot of end users, this may be enough, no programmers will be needed to get software built and shipped. For the rest, it lets programmers fill the remaining gaps, doing the manual testing to make sure the system works correctly, test for regressions and make sure the LLMs add those to the test suite, and then manage monitoring the rollouts. The bulk of development work going forward is manual verification that the LLM understood the user request correctly. I'm not as sure that this idea of plugins will pan out; AI will want to make changes to support what it produces.

qsera 28d ago

I see a different future. A future where software developers are approached by clients with requirements in the form of an LLM generated program. They do it because they are at a point where LLM fails to make new changes without breaking existing stuff. Maybe it won't be a program, but just some LLM context as some data dump. This program or context will take up the role of a PM. Developers will refer to the program, or ask context for clarifications and the developer will build the actual program with or without the help from LLMs.

nextaccountic 28d ago
the program itself is kind of useless. the client will send it anyway to demonstrate a proof of concept but hopefully the dev will build from scratch what's important is the spec. the poc isn't a spec because the dev is being hired exactly because that software doesn't solve the problem fully - whatever it has missing is the important bits this spec will probably be generated by a llm, but there is some noise added. if the client can send their prompt, alongside the whole llm session (maybe with sensitive tool calls redacted), the dev would have everything
- pwarner 27d ago
  Yeah this disposable prototype model is common I suspect. I see it used regularly
lelanthran 28d ago
> I see a different future. A future where software developers are approached by clients with requirements in the form of an LLM generated program. They do it because they are at a point where LLM fails to make new changes without breaking existing stuff. That's not gonna happen :-/ I've already had clients tell me they only want it modified, and their expectation is that it's only a days worth of work to make it work.
- qsera 28d ago
  That is sad. But if what I imagine is true, they will grow wiser after they have lost enough $$$ with scammers who agree to do it in a day and pocket the funds and give back an even more broken program.
- jollyllama 28d ago
  How is what you're describing technically different than the quoted section? GP was correct, they just didn't realize that they were describing something bad instead of something good.
- bee_rider 28d ago
  Did they end up getting what they wanted? This LLM stuff is still quite new; I wouldn’t be surprised if people are still asking for your help wrong.
  - lelanthran 28d ago
    > Did they end up getting what they wanted? Who knows. I don't take on any dev work anymore that involves modifying existing applications, anyway. Too many have been of the form "Look, we did 99% of it, we just need you to do the 1% remaining" with the expectation that finding and fixing bugs in a vibed 90kSloC application is only a few minutes to a few hours of human labour. In reality, if you bring me something that Claude Code itself can't make changes to without breaking, it's going to be at least a week of billable hours before I know where to start.
    - tianaco_ny 27d ago
pornel 28d ago
I expect this to be automated too, and in the end boil down to paying for more tokens to fix the program. Code too messy to be editable by an LLM is already too horrible for humans to touch. Fixing vibecoded software as a service will boil down to reverse-engineering requirements from the messed up program, and prompting a better model to design it properly and rewrite. Eventually models will be trained to do this themselves, so it won't be a service you ask a dev for, it will be an extra charge on your AI subscription.
- qsera 28d ago
  >Eventually models will be trained to do this themselves That is what I wonder. Two things. 1. Is there enough training data in that format, to do it? 2. Is there enough incentive for the LLM companies to do it? I mean they got to charge the client for the tokens upto that point..so..
  - pornel 28d ago
    1. In "verifiable" domains ML is not limited by training data any more. Models can help generate the training data and/or learn the objective through reinforcement learning. 2. Yes, because the most capable model is the only one that can charge a premium. The rest is a commodity.
    - qsera 28d ago
      >Models can help generate the training data They can, but I don't think they will be of sufficient quality. It is a fundamental thing. You can't generate new information from existing information. It has to come from the real world. Generating training data using existing models will only help the model to capture the exiting patterns more thourly.
      - Brian_K_White 27d ago
        Ultimately the new data, the slight incrimental improvements to the body of code for training) will actually come from humans even though it was written by ais. ais write 1000 bits of garbage code for 1000 different users one-offs, the users judge that most of those didn't work out but 2 did. Only those good results that humans approved becomes part of the growing body of reference code. The others either get thrown away, or even if they still exist, they are somehow known to be low quality, or at least, not known to be high value. So an ai wrote some new code that worked and improved the total corpus that other/future ais reference, but it's not just ai output feeding ai input, it's ai output filtered through humans who nixed most of it. (Maybe exists on github but not used by anyone. It isn't known to be bad, it's just ranked lower, but if nothing else fits as well, it's there to try. That way obscure code that's good eventually becomes known to be good.)
amadeoeoeo 28d ago
This is already happening. Clients come and show me their proof of concept, fully vibecoded, because they do not know / do not have the time to take it to prod. Other comments saying this will be automated in the future... may be. But even if that is the case, time and attention are still needed to make things happen. With the extendended capabilities IA brings, having an IT person in-house makes more sense than ever, even for small shops.
brookst 28d ago
So, a requirements document for updates to a legacy system?

meerita 28d ago

This is exactly what I did a few days ago: I created my own "small software" to solve my own need: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49330939 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49330939. Let me tell you: it works, it works really well, and I don't feel like, "Hey, the options out there are better." In fact, the options available are outdated in terms of frameworks and bloated with features to please all kinds of customers. They try to do everything but end up doing everything poorly.

bensyverson 28d ago

This is the right general idea, but it does read as an ad for Cloudflare OS. Every tech company is scrambling to be the stable foundation for people in enterprise to build cute little one-off apps safely. It's a perfectly fine pattern, but it's hard to imagine a world where Cloudflare becomes the default. Much easier to imagine Google or Microsoft adopting whatever UI/UX patterns work well and tying into enterprise data natively.

giancarlostoro 28d ago
> Cloudflare OS I hate that they called it that. I hope they change the name, to me an OS implies... an OS. I don't want to hear marketing excuses about that, I don't need every other company copying CloudFlare butcher a useful descriptor and now we have a bunch of "AI OS" type apps out there. Just call it what it is... an Agent Workspace. They could have called it CloudFlare Agents or something to that effect?
- 21asdffdsa12 28d ago
  The wizzard of OS runs a might elephant graveyard for hype products.
- benatkin 28d ago
  It isn't the only wrong thing they're calling it. They're also calling it a successor to sandstorm.io, which it clearly is not.
  - kentonv 28d ago
    Eh? Why do you feel it's inaccurate to call it a successor to sandstorm.io?
    - kentonv 28d ago
      For the record. I am the lead engineer on Cloudflare OS (and Cloudflare Workers). I am also the creator of Sandstorm.io. And I'm the one calling it a successor. Wasn't some marketing decision -- that's directly from me. Honestly really interested to know why you feel this isn't accurate. FWIW, I didn't choose the name Cloudflare OS -- but I did frequently describe Sandstorm as being an OS, back in the day. Sure, it layers on top of Linux, but it's an environment where you install apps and run them, with the platform managing the execution environment, permissions, resource management, etc. That's sort of what an OS does. Cloudflare OS does all that as well.

lelanthran 28d ago

> It took me thirty minutes with Codex and GPT-Sol. The thing is fast, it does not ask me for anything, and it does the one job I wanted: it launches applications. This is quite funny, actually. When I wanted something similar (just play MP3s, without playlists, special indexes, etc), it also took me 30 minutes. In 2002. I still use it daily - a wish application displays entries matching the filter using the locatedb to get a list of all MP3s to find them and mpg123 to play them. This is the application that I have used the longest in my life, unchanged and unmodified from day 1, and it still tickles me that it took 30m. I'm pretty certain, had LLMs not existed, that I can make an application finder using locatedb (perhaps store a private index as well) and a GUI in about 30m using wish as the front-end. (Just for reference, here's my no-frills MP3 player) --------------------------------------------- #!/usr/bin/wish # Copyright Lelanthran K. Manickum 2002, provided under BSD license # set version "1.0" proc playSong {songname} { set rc [catch { exec killall -9 mpg123 }] if {$songname=="\[Stop Playback]"} { .midFrame.lblPlaying configure -text "Stopped" return 0; } set rc [catch { exec mpg123 --loop -1 "$songname" & }] if {$rc==0} { .midFrame.lblPlaying configure -text "Playing: $songname" } } proc locateSongs {pattern} { .lstResults delete 0 999999999 set tmpvar [split [exec locate -i "*$pattern*.mp3"] "\n"] .lstResults insert 0 "\[Stop Playback]" foreach title $tmpvar { .lstResults insert 1 $title } } frame .topFrame frame .midFrame entry .topFrame.entSearchString -text "Search String" button .topFrame.btnSearch -text "Search" -command {locateSongs [.topFrame.entSearchString get]} listbox .lstResults -yscrollcommand {.sby set} -xscrollcommand {.sbx set} scrollbar .sby -orien vert -command {.lstResults yview} scrollbar .sbx -orien horiz -command {.lstResults xview} label .midFrame.lblPlaying -text "Stopped" locateSongs "" focus .topFrame.entSearchString bind .topFrame.entSearchString <Return> ".topFrame.btnSearch invoke" bind .lstResults <Double-B1-ButtonRelease> {playSong [.lstResults get active]} bind .lstResults <Return> {playSong [.lstResults get active]} grid .topFrame -row 0 -column 0 -sticky nsew grid .topFrame.entSearchString -column 0 -row 0 -sticky nsew grid .topFrame.btnSearch -column 1 -row 0 -sticky nsew grid .midFrame -column 0 -row 1 -sticky nsew grid .midFrame.lblPlaying -column 0 -row 0 -sticky nsew grid .lstResults -column 0 -row 2 -sticky nsew grid .sby -column 1 -row 2 -sticky nsew grid .sbx -column 0 -row 3 -sticky nsew grid rowconfigure .topFrame 0 -weight 1 grid columnconfigure .topFrame 0 -weight 1 grid rowconfigure . 2 -weight 2 grid columnconfigure . 0 -weight 2 wm protocol . WM_DELETE_WINDOW { set rc [catch { exec killall -9 mpg123 } ] destroy . } wm title . "Simple Music Player - v$version" wm geometry . 700x500

13415 28d ago

I doubt that future. Traditionally, only hardcore power users are interested in extending software. Normal end users want reliable software that does what they want it to do. Some of them also want a certain amount of shiny buttons and UI effects to look at. I'm not saying there is no market for heavily personalized software, just that it is not going to be big. Of course, people also want AI that acts like a friend or expert and does amazing things. However, I don't believe the two worlds mix well. IMHO, AI substitutes a person working for you whereas traditional software is a tool that persons and AI use.

bevr1337 28d ago
The experience can be vastly different than deeply configuring a system like a power user. My nontechnical, 87-years-old grandfather is putting together apps to help him with his language practice. He uses Google iirc. The chatbot is a familiar interface since his time working did overlap with IRC, email, early internet, yada yada. I don’t want to necessarily argue about merit or quality, but I have seen that custom software can be accessible to a general audience.
zahrevsky 28d ago
> Normal end users want reliable software that does what they want it to do. But how does that contradicts the idea of extendable software? If anything, extendable software will better do what the user wants it to do. It's just right now we think of extending the software as if it's a complex operation. It looks to me like the article envisions a future, where extending your software is as simple as, say, creating a new google doc or opening a link. It is doubtable, however, that such level of ease of extendibility can be achieved at all. There might be enough essential complexity, like answering lots of questions, which, I agree, most users won't be doing.
- 13415 27d ago
  The vast majority of users buy the software that does what they want it to do right from the start. If you reflect on it, you will likely find that this is also what you do. That behavior is not just normal for software, though, it's the standard for almost any product. You have a certain problem or need, look around until you find something that solves the problem or satisfies the need, and then you might buy it. Think about cars for comparison. Some people like tinkering with them and tuning them. However, most people look for the features they need or desire and buy the car that satisfies their requirements and budget best. Sometimes extensibility is part of the requirements to solve a problem or fulfill a desire but normally it isn't.

deleted 28d ago

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sroerick 28d ago

I built a Lisp interpreter and hosted it on an OCaml http core, and it does exactly this for me. I've been using it for the last three months for basically all my computing. I always wanted a Smalltalk type environment, and this finally scratches this itch. Creating an endpoint is just defining a lisp function. There's still a billion things to clean up but it works really well. My LLMs say that if you followed this same pattern in pure clojure or racket it would be comfortably <10k lines of code. That said, I do enjoy implementing my own lisp and I think the OCaml core gives it some stability and security.

wim 28d ago

We're building a collaborative IDE but for notes/tasks as a local-first web app [1], built to be malleable with plugins. In terms of tradeoffs we're taking a middle road I guess: the app is malleable, but plugins stay contained within the web app. Because of end-to-end-encryption and privacy/ownership concerns, we can't run plugin code on a server node somewhere. But for some types of apps, server-side extensions alone also feel too restrictive. An advantage of a malleable app over just one-shotting a completely custom app (and to be clear I think both will be popular!) is that extending and customizing something is often exactly what you want vs starting over, but you can't really do that when you can't do things like deeply customizing the UI. So you can just ask a (local) agent "add me this functionality" and it will likely be possible. It's still sandboxed inside the browser though, so this way you can do things like permissions, allowing admins to restrict who installs team plugins and so on (which is also important for malleable multiplayer apps). [1] https://thymer.com https://thymer.com

launchforge 28d ago

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william-evans 28d ago

I’m building one of these Podda [1], though pointed at households/small communities rather than companies, so ordinary people can keep the apps they’ve made by talking to Claude or ChatGPT and share them with their friends. Passing code only the things it’s allowed to use works on the server because you start from zero, so our generated code holds no credentials at all and its only way out is a proxy that allows exact origins and methods. You can’t really do that in the browser. CSP only restricts which origins the code can reach, not the method or the path, so approving one destination means anything the code can read can go anywhere there. The difficult part is that if we're writing an honest consent prompt to our users then it has to say that, and it sounds a lot worse than "allow network access?". This is hard especially when our target users are non/less-technical. There are other versions of the same problem everywhere, like revoking an origin not actually taking effect until a refresh. [1] https://podda.app https://podda.app

masterj 28d ago
For client side there is https://hardenedjs.org/ https://hardenedjs.org/ And Cloudflare OS does some fancy things with iframes + capnweb iirc
- william-evans 28d ago
  Will take a deeper look into the Cloudflare OS source - thanks!
  - kentonv 28d ago
    We (Cloudflare OS) run an app's client-side code in a null-origin iframe sandbox that is denied access to everything that we can possibly deny access to. Its only communication line to the outside world is via a Cap'n Web RPC session over postMessage() to the parent frame, which in turn forwards the session on to the app's own server, which runs in a Dynamic Worker sandbox on its end. So the app client can only talk to the app server and nothing else. Or at least, ideally. Unfortunately, content-security-policy today has a few exotic holes. WebRTC, for instance, cannot be blocked; the standard simply doesn't cover it. So it's not suitable as a sandbox against malicious code trying to leak data by any means possible. Instead it's protection against the AI doing something stupid, perhaps prompted by a user who doesn't know better. (We would love to get those CSP holes plugged, though...)

zahlman 28d ago

> It’s become readily apparent that LLMs are really quite excellent at building Software for One. Personal apps that side-step all of the complexity and accountability of enterprise software and are custom fit for a single person’s workflow. > … > However most of our existing examples of pluggable software are local software: AI agents, developer IDEs, mods for video games, Blender add-ons, CAD extensions. These tend to be professional tools with a high barrier to entry. The web is the most successful software distribution system in the world. It shouldn’t be left behind. My hypothesis is that there is a new opportunity for Extensible Software on the web. I don't follow. If this is really supposed to be "software for one", why would it need to be on the Internet? Why does it need a client/server model? Why do I care about "distribution"? People develop for web because native development gets painful when there are many flavours of "native". But you only use one of them yourself, and the LLM isn't bothered by its quirks. Why not just work on designing pluggable local software that isn't so "professional"?

wild_egg 28d ago
Data point of 1 but I prefer all my personal software to be web based so I can easily access it from my phone, laptop, and desktop and not worry about syncing things or installing or updating when I switch devices. Also makes it trivial to extend access to family members as needed. It's very rare that I reach for local software these days.
- josephg 27d ago
  Pity. Local software runs faster and feels native on the computer. And you can use local files. I’m keen to build up a better local stack for building local programs more easily, running them over the internet without installing and syncing data. I don’t want to need the cloud to make my computer work.
  - wild_egg 27d ago
    Who said anything about cloud? I run all my apps on my desktop and access them over tailscale. All web apps and I install on phones as PWAs. Super ergonomic. As for this: > Local software runs faster What? Why? Is this some assumption about network requests? None of my personal software ever has a loading spinner or lag. If it's designed well, each interaction should fit in a single TCP packet so network round trip is imperceptible. If your web software is slow, that's a choice you've made. Plenty of slow local software around to balance the scales too. EDIT: Using local files with a web stack is also easy these days. The only con of web software is lacking that native aspect. But native appearance is rare anyway these days with every company just shipping electron bloatware.

ryanrasti 28d ago

> "code can only take actions via the references it has been passed" The cool part is a move to capabilities composed in code brings back everything great about software itself: composability, encapsulation, type systems. I've been working on this for SQL: instead of giving clients a handle to endpoints, you give them scoped query builders they can compose with (e.g., hand out a scoped `users` object and client can do `users.where(u => u.isActive()).orderBy(u => u.createdAt)`). The result is you define a data-model (schema, computed columns, relations) and expose that instead of an endpoint per desired client query. (if interesting: https://typegres.com/ https://typegres.com/)

deleted 28d ago

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socketcluster 28d ago

Sandboxed execution is definitely one aspect... But IMO, this is still not secure enough for vibe coders. They will want to have data-driven apps to share among small groups of people, then the security of the sandbox doesn't matter if they expose some external endpoints and if the access control logic which guards data is flawed. Even if each user gets their own sandbox, they will still want to configure different access rules for different kinds of data which they host. That said the idea that each user could control and host their own data is interesting and could work. I imagine you could have apps which link data from many different user sandboxes via remote foreign keys. You could have a centralized data schema controlled by the application owner but the data itself would be held/scattered across a large number of sandboxes.

BobbyJo 28d ago

Me and a Cofounder are building something along these lines on top of K8s. The wisdom that "if give the LLM clear boundaries and you get better results" definitely holds IME, even with frontier models like fable. It's impossible to specify all the guardrails you need to keep models from violating priors without writing the code yourself, so the only move is to remove their ability to do so, or to even recognize that the option exists.

sakuraiben 28d ago

Why is lovable not enough here by the way?

0xbadcafebee 28d ago

Extending software makes it more complex. As you keep adding extensions, the complexity grows until the app is unusable. Doesn't matter if it's built-in or a plugin, result is the same. But there is a proven alternative that works well. Write completely separate small apps, and it's a different result. You get reliable functionality without an increase in complexity. Don't add a "file search extension" to your application (consider that if any other application wants this functionality, now they have to implement their own extension). Instead you make one completely separate app, called 'grep'. You then call that one 'grep' app, from any application. It's a very old-fashioned idea to programmers who have only ever known custom-integrated REST APIs and microservices and giant monolithic frameworks. But this old-fashioned idea is the reason AI agents are even useful at all. They call those old-fashioned single-purpose external tools, and suddenly the agent has useful features, no custom extension needed. Another thing you don't need: "a platform for platforms". There's already a platform designed to run interoperable applications. It's called an Operating System. It runs these little independent things called applications. They all have data object storage input-output access. Even internal communication between processes. And they're all compatible.

harlan_pdx 28d ago

The long tail of unmet features is real. Most apps serve the common cases well, and LLM-generated extensions could fill that gap without bloating the core product.

_mu8n 28d ago

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hboon 27d ago

I really enjoy working on my inhouse orchestration tool because it brings me back to the days of working in Smalltalk image where I can tweak my development IDE as I go along.

rtpg 27d ago

I've been saying it to anyone who cares to listen: Salesforce is basically the biggest "Smalltalk" deployment out there. Super malleable, has a lot of ... decent rules for how to get software out into the world, every environment is basically its own universe at one point. Someone should really attack SFDC from the "malleable Business OS" side of things. Unfrotunately everyone seems to attack it from the CRM side of things and lose the plot a bit. Def agree that "have the thing I just came up with running in some environment that is sharable" is still a pretty gnarly problem, and LLM stuff doesn't... I don't think they've really made much progress on it. At one point someone really needs to make an easy to manage box metaphor for all the stuff. It's not Docker. Google scripts is almost there but you really want to have the database be a thing you can drag and drop as well (SQLite people: get excited!) Dropbox for business apps. If anyone runs with this at least send me an email thanking you for the metaphor.

folkrav 27d ago
Having worked with Salesforce deployments over the last two years. I'd only call it malleable as long as you fit in its definition of what's malleable. I'm half-expecting it to have its own definition of a wheel at this point.
- rtpg 27d ago
  Don't you feel like it's still fairly far ahead of other systems, if you buy into the model? I think there are other systems that kinda get there but SFDC is the only one of these kinds of systems that give you a lot of options on the backend and frontend side of things to just ship your own things and have them be integrated.
  - folkrav 27d ago
    Maybe. Honestly, it's just been the number one source of deployment issues in our stack, by a large margin, so that may be the frustration talking. It basically requires us to treat our Salesforce environments very differently from the rest of our technological stack in ways that can be pretty alien to what's pretty standard development best practices in the rest of the industry. To give one specific example, the way some things cannot be expressed through metadata or updated through API makes it very hard to have any kind of repeatability between environments, making things like e2e testing and CD a lot trickier to deal with. As for your specific question, I'll be honest, I'm not familiar enough with what the competition has to offer, because I tend to avoid these behemoth monolithic locked-in platforms like the plague if I can help it, and my experience with Salesforce so far isn't really making it easy for me to change my mind on the subject.

tianaco_ny 27d ago

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Brenndalampe1 26d ago

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