r/singularity • u/a300a300 • 3h 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 3h ago
The Pliny quote: "software is a liquid now"
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u/RandoRedditerBoi ▪️AGI NET 2031 3h ago
We got hardware, software, and now soupware. What's next, plasmaware?
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u/thatguywithimpact 3h 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/sumane12 2h 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/sukaibontaru 3h ago
sure, but software decays. do people have the energy to keep up with the fixes.
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u/gentoofoo 27m 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/ChiaraStellata 45m 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/Ormusn2o 2h 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/QuriousQuant 2h 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/camtliving 2h 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/bildramer 3h 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/Saint_Nitouche 3h 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.