All Software is Worthless
What do we think about when we think about computers? Hardware, on the one hand.
But also software.
What does software fundamentally do?
Software is there for administration. Even just the kernel starts with that: it manages registers of processes, keeps logs, organizes sharing just one or a handful of processors between different processes, and so much more.
But it doesn’t stop there. Computer systems nowadays also manage official registers, such as birth registers, company registers, banks, insurances, social states, as well as many other kinds of bureaucracy.
Fundamentally, software does nothing else but to streamline bureaucracy. The concept of “digital transformation”, which is often considered more of a 2010s era term, is more up to date than ever before.
The purpose of software is to take as little input from the user as possible (in order to save time), to create maximally useful output.
What should software look like in the coming age?
I think, with coding AIs, we see a very clear trend: People just want to express their ideas in human language, and then the software should build them.
Right now, it’s still quite buggy, especially for more complex use cases. Additionally, AI coding tools typically don’t handle the deployment at all, at least not out of the box. Once you can choose between any hosting provider in the world to host the software you built, all existing commercial software will become worthless.
If I have a company or an association and want to manage my members, my emails, my accounting, payments, etc., why should I ever pay a software vendor for that again?
It will be either just one spoken or written sentence, or just one click to choose the perfect template for me from a global library – and I have my fully autonomous, fully sovereign environment to manage all my sensitive data, independent from any software vendor and even independent from any big cloud.
The clou is: What future software engineering will look like will not need any human engineers anymore. That is on purpose and by design.
When software manages anything, there’s always a human language document underlying:
a law (for national obligations),
a contract (for bi-/tri-/…lateral obligations, which concern a countable number of independent parties), or
a policy document (for internal obligations).
What now needs to be built is an AI-based input layer which can transform any such document into a more abstract, internationalized description of the intended administrative system, from employee salaries, to a simple revenue sharing agreement, to eventually all the world’s tax laws becoming harmonized, to everything else that can be administered in written form.
For this, LLMs in their current form are not necessary, as they are way too “general purpose”.
After all, the laws, contracts and policies simply need to be translated by the LLM into a hyper-condensed “administration system description language”, and then an interpreter will run this language. Using an LLM to generate code in a general-purpose language like Rust, TypeScript, C++ or anything else here would not be suitable, because generating them would be a waste of tokens and code should not be treated in the same way like unstructured human language. The goal should be to encode legal concepts a bit like Huffman does it: very common terms (e.g. “party”) get short code words, less common terms get long code words.
No “reasoning” (in the way how the AI industry currently understands it) will need to be used, because internally, the system must first try to find any ambiguities in the input text, and when those are all resolved, it is going to act fully deterministically. LLMs can already run on end user devices already, so all the big data centers are not necessary anymore, because why centralize when you can decentralize?
Therefore every law, contract or policy document needs to be translated into this “international meta language of administration” only once. It’ll become like the Wikipedia of machine-readable laws.
When that is done, all software vendors will be kaput, because why should anyone pay for software or use a public cloud ever again, if any imaginable and useful type of software is at your fingertips, hosted wherever you want?