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wccrawford | on: We should be more ambitious with the software we build
I think we should focus on writing the existing software better before being more ambitious. The absolute wave of "ai slop" is from people who are "more ambitious" now. Why do we want more of that?

I'm being more ambitious in that I'm working on projects that I had sidelined for literal decades because I didn't have time for them. But I'm writing the same things, just faster. And probably better, rather than just what I'd have done before.

And I'm being slightly more ambitious in that I'm using languages I haven't used before, like Rust.

But when I hear that a non-programmer wrote a new ai-assisted (vibe or not) thing, I walk away and wait for the it to mature, be surpassed, or find out it's an absolute shitshow. An unsurprising number of them were shitshows and it came out fairly quickly after I decided to wait and see.

__MatrixMan__ | parent
Do we particularly like the existing software though? So much of it is just about making money, because until recently custom software cost too much money to make without investors, and what do investors want? returns.

Now that custom software is cheap (if you can tolerate a bit of slop here and there), it seems like there's an opportunity to do some important things that weren't being done before because they're not profitable--and you can't get at those things by incrementally improving the old stuff, you need ambition.

hobo123 | root | parent
I think a lot of problems with current software is indeed bad performance, lots of UI paper cuts, missing features.

AI could help making life a lot better in all these cases.

But yes, we should also aim higher in general.