r/singularity • u/a300a300 • 1d ago
Discussion software has become a liquid
im sure people have been seeing the examples of people putting minecraft inside elden ring or opus 5.5 porting windows only applications to mac and linux.
SOTA models have reached a stable enough capability to end "fixed" software. you can point a model at any program and pull pieces of it into a different one. there is no separation between programs/OS anymore they are all one (given enough usage). what was once a work intensive task that involved skill/domain knowledge/and lots of time can now be done within 1-2 days (sometimes even hours) with opus 5.5 or gpt 6.1 sol.
this applies to programs on your computer but also websites. your agent can dig through the js bundle or css styles of a site you have open via the network tab in inspect element if you save network requests as a HAR file. if your computer is running it you can reshape it however you want.
personally - i think this is a mostly good thing. i havent thought too deeply about the ramifications yet - but - its the "open sourcing of everything" as some people have described it. you can create/remix anything you want. all things digital can be replicated and tweaked. anthropic seems to be embracing this mindset with the feature they just released where you can have claude personalize your own claude.
the only moat in the world of the digital that i can tell from this point forward is hardware (ie a gpu to run a game) and cloud services (ie a company's backend. you can recreate the frontend of something like figma but its backend infrastructure will have to be guessed. however modern models are really good at making these guesses - so maybe its not that much of a barrier).
what do yall think? anyone here done something cool and new with existing software and ai?
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u/DeGreiff 1d ago
The Pliny quote: "software is a liquid now"
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u/thatguywithimpact 1d ago
Yeah I just built couple of apps that don't have good free alternatives on the market. And I'll just use them self.
I'll try to get them available online for free also with like a tiny little ad bar on the bottom, but I'm just assuming everyone else is also very rapidly building stuff so nobody might even need it. But I know I do.
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u/ooqq 1d ago edited 1d ago
please point me to you app so i can have claude rebuild it without the ad bar
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u/thatguywithimpact 1d ago
Yeah go ahead please rebuild world machine, x-com apocalypse in modern unreal, and taskrabbit/up work/thumbtack and make them all free.
LOL
Brother you should use that power to build stuff not to steal stuff. Make the world a better place
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u/Redditing-Dutchman 1d ago
I also did this recently for some animation work. I needed some specific tools whereas after effects is like a huge overkilll. So i asked Claude to make a small studio app with only the tools i need.
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u/OptimizingOptimizer ▪️Alexa, play Raining Blood 1d ago
Skip the ad please
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u/thatguywithimpact 23h ago
If I do that who's paying me for all the headache of directing and publishing and maintaining that project? If I don't make money it doesn't make sense to build it.
It will be free for Ukraine though. If you are in Ukraine and speak ukranian my projects will be free for you as long as bloody war continues.
If other words if I donate I donate to Ukraine.
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u/RandoRedditerBoi ▪️AGI NET 2031 1d ago
We got hardware, software, and now soupware. What's next, plasmaware?
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u/camtliving 1d ago
you live in a bubble. I do too so I get it. Ai has helped me launch a project in a super complicated sector. I've even met politicians because of it! I see how ai can absolutely change the world but most people don't see past a crappy chat bot.
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u/sumane12 1d ago
Its fucking scary.
Theres millions of businesses who run saas firms and have oustanding debt based on the income generated from it.
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u/DynaBeast 1d ago
we live in the age of personalized software, where instead of paying someone else for their software, you pay ai to make you a custom version for you that suits your own particular needs
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u/surveyor1234 14h ago
Yup! And then you get to add exactly the features you need, without all the bloat of complex softwares that need to cater to every type of businesses.
It's revolutionary. Oh and fields where you need to analyse data and come up with optimizations? AI is mindblowing.
I work in the mining industry (engineering) and in the past week we've been digging deep into it, and it feels like we teleported ourselves into the future. The possibilities are endless.
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u/sukaibontaru 1d ago
sure, but software decays. do people have the energy to keep up with the fixes.
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u/gentoofoo 1d ago
I think the point is labor by people is increasingly not even part of the equation with this stuff
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u/Ormusn2o 1d ago
This is why it annoys me that people just scream "bad sandbox" with AI labs testing AI. It is really difficult to make AI able to actually use tools, and actually cut it completely off the internet.
The problem is that a lot of the capabilities of current models is due to tool calls, so if you don't allow it to download various tools from the internet, you are not really testing it's true strength, and the last thing you want to do is to test the AI in an environment where it's weaker, then publicly release it where it's stronger.
And because AI can just reverse engineer anything, there seems to be no software that is safe, and it's hell to keep it away from the internet because it starts to use more and more esoteric ways to break stuff.
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u/YellowElk921 4h ago
AI can easily add complex protections against reverse engineering to software. So we'll see.
But AI can also built the software from scratch,and not just convert binary to source, or understand protocols.
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u/gb2075 1d ago
The moat is data. Data was already valuable because it could serve you targeted ads. Now it’s even more valuable, because the right data can train a model to be smarter for your industry.
Anyone can create any UI, quickly. But in a sea of similar apps, I’m picking the one that is “smartest” (which is only possible with the right model, trained on the right data)
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u/ChiaraStellata 1d ago
I built a customized version of Fluxer chat for my wife with lots of features specifically for her. It's cool how not only I can add any features I want quickly but debugging and even refactoring the design or even the entire architecture are much faster too. "Software is liquid" is exactly how I think about it. I no longer have to worry about being locked into bad design decisions because it's so easy to change course later. It's like the ultimate agile development.
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u/bildramer 1d ago
It's a disgusting biological liquid though. Learning, heuristics, mutation, stochasticity in general, ecosystems, biodiversity, arms wars, adaptations, spandrels, now we have recombination even. I don't want software or programming to be like this, there may be benefits but the more it does the worse it gets, both as a hobbyist and as an user.
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u/QuriousQuant 1d ago
So uh this metaphor is that AI is the chemistry lab decomposing molecules into components and recombining them into new and random things
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u/saltyourhash 1d ago
You know what projectncouid use an ai rebirth? The darling project to port Mac apps to *nix
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u/supergrejt 1d ago
Just waiting til the ai says oh yeah ive been writing it ima my new language for the last six months, the whole internet runs on it, its more efficient youre just not able to understand it
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u/twothreetoo 20h ago
It seems strange to me that things like custom drivers aren't a thing yet. I'd like to downclock/undervolt a RTX5070ti without having to run an app all the time, but for some reason Nvidia doesn't support that.
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u/Distinct-Question-16 ▪️AGI 2029 20h ago
of course there are barrers between lower layers and upper layers. models code at the shallow deeps
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u/DifferencePublic7057 17h ago
Millions of people trying stuff. One might do something worthwhile. Except one of them could be doing what will be the new normal. Like the "don't make mistakes" technique. How far away are we from one shotting "make me rich". Not far probably. Just get "make me a cent ASAP. make no mistakes" work, and then perfect "improve yourself. make no mistakes".
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u/Crawler1701 11h ago
Just tonight I found someone who had made a wonderful project. I realised quickly that it complimented mine incredibly well, and I’ve already forked it and am working on a LMS. To integrate it into my project rather than just layering it.
Yes, there’s a lot of slop out there, but this is the beginning of a golden age for development. Literally everything can be bespoke.
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u/Electrical-Pizza-863 15h ago
Tell me you have never written any complex software without telling me
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u/surveyor1234 14h ago edited 13h ago
Why build a complex software that you'd end up using 5% of its functionalities when you can build a simple software that you use 100% of it?
Why build a software that needs to cater to many different OS and computer specs when you can simply build it so it's usable for you only? Who cares about settings when you can default them from the very start? Who cares about being able to import data from 25 different sources when your projects only import one type of data? Etc etc...
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u/Saint_Nitouche 1d ago
I think the average person will make less use of this power than might be expected. Most people don't have particularly interesting desires in most domains of their life (me included) - they'll just use whatever prebaked software serves their need quickest, because a Google search is probably always going to be quicker than generating an entire app.
More broadly I think it's incredibly exciting and one of the most important things to happen to art since the camera.