Github is on the chopping block as a tool (it's sticky as a social network). The other stuff not so much.
The things that are going away are tools that provide convenience on top of a workflow that's commoditized. Anything where the commercial offering provides convenience rather than capabilities over the open source offerings is gonna get toasted.
Even at recent levels of uptime I think it would be very difficult to build a competing product that could function at the scale of even a small company (10 engineers). How would you implement Actions? Code review comments/history? Pull requests? Issues? Permalinks? All of these things have serious operational requirements. If you just want some place to store a git repository any filesystem you like will do it but when you start talking about replacing github that's a different story altogether and TBH I don't think building something that appears to function the same is even the hard part, it's the scaling challenges you run into very quickly.
The future is narrow bespoke apps custom tailored for exactly that one single users use case.
An example would be if the user only ever works with .jpg files, then you don't need to support any of the dozens of other formats an image program would support.
I cannot stress enough how many software users out there are only using 1-10% of a program's capability, yet they have to pay for a team of devs who maintain 100% of it.
"The future" is fiction. It's a blank canvas where you can make a fingerpainting of any fantasy you like. Whenever people tell me about "the future" I know they're talking absolute rubbish. And I also like your fantasy! But it probably won't happen.
I call it "Psychics for Programmers." People will scoff at psychics and fortune telling and palm reading, but then the same people will listen to Elon or some founder or VC and be utterly convinced that that person is a visionary and can describe the future.
It's just reading the room. People hate having to use their computers through the lens of quasi-robot humans (saying that as one of those robots). They hate having to pay monthly just so dumb features and UI overhauls can be pushed on them.
They just want the software to do the few things they need it to do. AI labs are falling over themselves to remove the gate keeping regular people from using their computing device the way they want to use it. And the progress there in the last few years is nothing short of absolutely astounding.
> the progress there in the last few years is nothing short of absolutely astounding
Yet, all the astounding progress notwithstanding, I don't have a suite of bespoke tools replacing the ones I depend on. I cannot say "hey claude, make me a suite of bespoke software infrastructure monitoring and operational tooling tailored to my specific needs" and expect anything more than a giant headache and wasted time. So maybe we just need to wait? Or maybe it's just not actually real. My view is unless you show me a working demo it's vaporware. Show me that the problem is solved, don't tell me that it might be solved later sometime.
And what exactly is preventing you from building bespoke software for "infrastructure monitoring and operational tooling tailed to your specific needs"?
I could certainly imagine building myself some sort of dashboard. It would seem like a prime use case.
You want to hear about a problem solved? Recently I extended a tool that snaps high resolution images to a Pixel art grid, adding a GUI. I added features to remove the background, to slice individual assets out of it automatically, and to tile them in 9-slice mode.
Could I have realistically implemented the same bespoke tool before AI? No.
> And what exactly is preventing you from building bespoke software for "infrastructure monitoring and operational tooling tailed to your specific needs"?
Let's say I emit roughly 1TB of telemetry data per day--logs, metrics, etc. That's roughly what you might expect from medium sized tech company or a specific department (say, security) at a large company. There is going to be a significant infrastructure investment to replicate datadog's function in my organization, even if I only use a small subset of their product. It's not just "building a dashboard" it's building all the infrastructure to collect, normalize, store, and retrieve the data to even be able to draw that dashboard.
The dashboard is the trivial part. The hard part is building, operating, and maintaining all the infrastructure. Claude doesn't do a very good job helping with this, and in some sense it actually hinders.
EDIT: I'm not saying you shouldn't take ownership of your telemetry data. I think that's a strategically (and potentially from a user's perspective) better end result. But it is a mistake to trivialize the effort of that undertaking. Claude is not going to vibeslop it for you.
I agree, that does not seem like a smart undertaking. I was thinking more of a dashboard within the existing software, or above it.
For my use case I wanted bespoke software to work with Pixel art, but obviously I would not try to build Photoshop or Aseprite from scratch. I needed only specific functionality and I was able to build that in a way fitting my workflow better than any existing software could.
I was able to build it with Claude Code and Codex. Maybe the implementation is sloppy, I did not care to check. The program works, and it's like a side project to my side project. It would not have been possible in the past, I would have needed to work with what Aseprite offers out of the box.
This article is sort of right, though MCP itself is still a very meh standard, for secure enterprise use cases, SOME agent specific standard is really valuable. It gives you a single point of management. What matters is that it's _for agents_ and it has traction.
I follow a similar pattern. My autonomous agent Smith has a service mesh that I plug MCPs into, which gives me a single place to define policy (OPA for life) and monitoring. The service gateway own credentials. This pattern is secure, easy to manage and lets you can programmatically generate a CLI from the tool catalog. https://github.com/sibyllinesoft/smith-gateway if you want to understand the model and how to implement it yourself.
If you don't have an audience don't bother to build anything for anyone else, it literally doesn't matter how good it is or how much people need it, they'll never see it unless you directly spam them.
If you're a 10x builder with 0 followers on socials, sorry to say but you can get cucked by a noob with claude code and a big audience.
Ads are trash unless you already have PMF, and even then they're often still trash if you don't do it right or you don't have the right kind of product.
I consistently launch small vibe codes products. Slap ads on them and after a few weeks decide what to do with them without launching them anywhere else and am seeing good results. I see little to no reason to even launch them any other way at this point.
Which ad network do you use? Google, Meta, TikTok? I imagine you had pre-existing experience especially if it's Google, it's rare to get good RoI out of it unless you really know what you're doing. If you go with the defaults you'll get a few thousand "clicks", zero actual users among them.
Google and Meta. I did work for a Marketing agency for years handling automations development for them. So I have been exposed to hundreds of campaigns across different industries and have seen what works well and what doesn't. Not saying that you need this experience, but once you see stable results from others; and how to protect them, its hard not to chase after them as well!
Do you mean the creatives? I do outsource the creatives. For ads, I largely automate setting up and maintaining them; like rebalancing and demand generation scripts. But here we are talking good old spreadsheet magic not AI.
I do use some AI but its minimal; most scripts are still just algorithmic, but its easy to build them with Claude; while they are super expensive (couple of hundreds to thousands) if you bought them from some established marketeers (like Mike Rhodes demand gen script).
My posts about these aspects of agent security get zero engagement (not even a salty "vibe slop" comment, lol), so ironically security is the thing everyone's talking about, but most people don't know enough to understand what they need.
Plot twist: anything original will look stupid, until some cultural event makes the original thing the new "way," then all the small minds will act like that was the only way the thing should have been done all along.
"The emperor has no clothes" is a much deeper story about society and human nature than people realize.
Clearly not true, lots of original things that instead looks like "Ah yeah, obviously, duh!" once they're public, rather than looking stupid. Browsers/WWW, the iPhone and putting wheels on suitcases are things that come into mind that the amount of people thought "looked stupid" was very low, and they became very popular relatively quickly.
Those things are all incremental improvements based on existing patterns that people were familiar with. Also, Apple is the king of "no clothes". People shill Apple products even when they suck.
Look at Vincent Van Gogh's art. He didn't sell shit except to his own brother in life, people hated it. Fast forward to now and his art is among the most valuable in the world, and people consider him one of the greatest geniuses of all time.
How is one person's art not just incremental improvement on other's art? I expected some actually insightful answer, not just "Person Bs media creation was better than Person's A media", does that really count as "truly original" in your mind here? Yet browsers/WWW was just an incremental improvement? I'm sorry but I'm really confused now, sounds like we're really talking past each other here.
Browsers are just better gopher. If the WWW hadn't existed, we'd have xGopher 8.0 NG and our user experience would be mostly the same. Evolutionary pressures drive convergent evolution to stable solutions. We're on a technological gradient, and these things are incremental jumps driven by common human need (otherwise they wouldn't gain traction).
Creativity at the deepest level is seeing the cultural slope you're doing gradient descent on, and taking a hard left through the trees to a hidden slope that's way better rather than the one you were on.
I like Van Gogh as an example because of how hard he failed and the cultural U-turn, but hostility towards things that challenge the entrenched paradigm is a common response. Maybe Einstein and relativity is a more relevant example for you. People didn't read it at first and nod their heads, thinking to themselves "yes, of course!"
I got a pair of airpod clones on a whim (they were only $20 in the impulse buy section). Sure, they have less cable, but keeping them charged is very annoying, especially if wearing them for a long stretch of time. The charging contacts also tend to oxidize and not make good contact, but that's probably because they're a cheap clone. I find wired earphones are more convenient for long stretches because they draw power from my phone. I also know the wired earphones don't broadcast a tracking signal.
most phones today do not have a headphone jack. You also can't EQ properly without such a thing, and you must be connected to your phone all the time and it pulls on the cable every time you do something
People are addressing that gap. I have a secure agent framework that uses a tool gateway hooked up to OPA (https://github.com/sibyllinesoft/smith-core), this solves the credential issue as the credentials live in the tools, and the authz issue, as OPA policy controls who does what.
The things that are going away are tools that provide convenience on top of a workflow that's commoditized. Anything where the commercial offering provides convenience rather than capabilities over the open source offerings is gonna get toasted.