Every piece of software you have interacted with that's run by a company and has been updated within the last 6 months? You'd be hard pressed to find a company not using AI to develop software.
I am a software dev and use LLMs daily but that’s not what I’m talking about, I’m talking about vibe coded products built new. I find LLMs much less useful at things that are not already built. I’ve watched initiative after initiative fail because of too much dogmatic AI usage and leaning on it to do design which then falls over on its face.
Fast at first especially to a PoC but then you hit a time when the arch just gets so grimy it falls over, you ship the wrong thing and you end up in rework hell. This isn’t guaranteed but when it’s teams of people slinging slop it gets worse and worse, the best devs burn out from trying to manage the ones who believe AI will save them.
My optimistic take on this is that they are still in process. One or two man team might be able to code as fast as 6 or 10 man team in some cases, but the design process takes just as long. GTA6 has a crazy amount of resources and programmers on it, but still takes years to come out-- because they have to balance, develop content, playtest and find bugs, etc. even if bug fixing was instantaneous and thinking of something made it happen, it would still take a lot of time. So someone making something great as a solo developer is still going to take as long as a small team of people making something great before. Which is years.
My philosophical take is that there are different types of coders, the ones who did it because they wanted to see their design be implemented and those who love the technical puzzle (with obvious overlap). The technical puzzle is taking a hit currently, but I think it will still exist in some form; the designer trying to get something implemented still loves the design work primarily which is sorely lacking in current LLMs, but if they don't have enough technical knowledge they will still get slapped in the face by technical gaps and bugs that LLMs make.
For corporate stuff, I think bureaucracy and issues with churn reduce the effectiveness of using an LLM because the most effective way might be anathema to corporate fiefdoms and structure. The churn is a problem for everyone though...
I don't think they are here yet, but they will come.
People will get "starter" projects that they can tweak themselves, and that come with AI instructions for development.
Imagine wanting to create a high quality RPG game. You could spend days prompting and hundreds of dollars in tokens, or you can buy a "RPG starter kit" that contains all the systems already impmemented and tested and markdown files on how the AI can add features, test, deploy, etc.
Software will be more like a "proof of work", where people would still pay $100 for good software that took $10k tokens to build.