If AI works, there’s going to be a real die-off amongst developers. And the commercial software business will be slaughtered. Unfortunately, if management THINKS AI works, they’ll kill off their staff. Going to be a sucky time to be a hacker and user. Reduced opportunity and bloated crappy software that has consistency problems.

And we’re living in a consumer economy. Kill off mid to high salaries and you kill off demand. Unless AI buys the toys.

> I think that’s broadly true when you look at purely client-side applications. I would hate to be in Adobe’s shoes right now. I think Photoshop, Lightroom, Illustrator, Premiere, all of these applications are going to have a million very good open source alternatives that have been vibe coded. So that end of the business, I think, is already gone. We’re just living on borrowed time.

Maybe, but I'm skeptical so far. DHH's core businesses are some of the most at-risk applications in the market IMO. They're really not much more than fairly standard Rails apps, there's very little deep problem-solving in them. And that's what I find so fascinating about his position: he's happy to talk about how at-risk Adobe is, but AI is going to one-shot Basecamp loooooong before it can one-shot Adobe.

Adobe's applications have years of deep expertise in all kinds of technical problems that nothing in Basecamp's arsenal comes close to touching. Just look at the quality of SVGs that LLMs generate today. It's impressive compared to a couple of years ago, but they're nowhere polished enough for something like you'd see a professional generate. And sure, it'll get there one day, but it's still not close today.

We still platforming this racist and fascist millionaire? He really wants you to love him, huh? https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64

undefined