I've been coding for 25 years, and am not new to the "X is now dead; long live X" arguments. The latest fad seems to be the claim that "SaaS is dead" because anyone can "create their own software; so why rely on others?"
Let's dissect this.
1. Software is still not dead
There are two important points to note. Even with AI:
- Software has not disappeared (and we all agree with that easily).
- Code has not disappeared. It's just that AI helps write code for you. But the code is still there.
If software still exists, and it still exists in the form of code, then there will always be a need for people who maintain it, whom we can call software engineers.
It doesn't matter if non-programmers can create software too. For example, DIY has not rendered carpenters obsolete, right?
So software and its makers are both still in the game.
2. Solving yesterday's problem today is not necessarily an accomplishment
When I was a kid, I created my first crappy game using Game Maker, a free tool written in Delphi by a university professor. But just 10 years before that, games were incredibly hard to write because they not only required much more coding experience but also ran on limited hardware.
Just because I can easily do what took talent yesterday doesn't mean that talent isn't needed anymore. Those folks were creating even bigger games, ones that were not possible to do with Game Maker at the time.
It's like saying that since I can learn calculus in high school today, we don't need people like Newton anymore.
3. Creating some software doesn't mean one can create all software
LLMs can interpolate very well. So asking it to solve problems very similar to ones already solved for ages will be very easy.
But the true test is how one uses LLMs to solve NEW problems. To extrapolate from where we are. That's the kind of boundaries all the good computer scientists and software engineers are pushing.
However, most others focus on doing less to accomplish the same thing rather than setting bigger goals.
4. LLMs are good actuators that still need tools
Saying that we don't need SaaS anymore is like saying we don't need operating systems, too, because each person can write their own.
The fallacy is in thinking that LLMs "think" and can "do everything." If that were the case, LLMs would have improved on their own, rather than Anthropic or OpenAI employing large numbers of humans (many of them computer scientists and software engineers) to improve the model itself. In this case, instead of using LLMs as intelligent machines, they're using them as bootstrapped compilers.
LLMs require tools that they can call. And these tools need to be efficient. The entire universe of software, algorithms, and data structures is what LLMs would activate. But it still needs those machineries to be present in the first place. There will still be a need for better algorithms, data structures, designs, and even tacit knowledge that's digitized by humans.
For example, LLMs are pretty bad at design. Even if they are good, they still need good abstractions. An LLM that integrates deeply with Figma and uses all of its tools and design abstractions natively is a killer combination. But it's great only because Figma is a powerful toolbox for an LLM.
Conclusion
In short, software's here. Code is still here. Yes, the nature of a software engineer's job has changed. But when hasn't it really? How is it different from going from assembly to higher-level languages, thus leaving control of the low-level details?
And as long as there are software engineers and software to create, there will always be specialists providing specialized software products or services, which will invariably be better than hobbyist work.
What do you think?