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Posted by petethomas 18 hours ago

Why software stocks are getting pummelled(www.economist.com)
89 points | 126 commentspage 2
flerchin 3 hours ago|
Is the pummeling in the room with us right now? YoY looks phenomenal in my portfolio.
dmoy 2 hours ago||
This article I think is about a very specific subset of software stocks.

If you're holding say a total market index fund, or s&p500, or even qqq or many tech index funds, this would get hidden by the so-far very good growth on other tech stocks.

TSiege 1 hour ago||
I'd look at things beyond the magnificent seven. Economists and traders have noticed that the SP 500 now has a K shape similar to our class wealth distribution. https://fortune.com/2025/11/10/markets-k-shaped-economy-apol...
dzonga 1 hour ago||
investors are panicking.

however those system of record apps - will outlast most "A.I" companies - since the effective data is within their systems

bnchrch 3 hours ago||
QQQ is up 20% over the last year.

GOOG is up 70% over the last year.

"Pummelled" seems extremely sensational...

airstrike 3 hours ago||
GOOG is now also an AI company, so not exactly a fair comp as it doesn't fit neatly into the "software" bucket

MSFT is only up 3% over the last year

cess11 3 hours ago|||
Some 7-15% down in a trading day is a lot for an established corporation. I consider Salesforce dropping 7% without some obvious trigger to be at least somewhat newsworthy, and from the first sentences in the article I get the impression that The Economist is sitting on more examples like that.

A lot of people are tense about the AI venture ouroboros and what it might mean for future software, especially people with money and little to no experience actually deploying software.

Edit: At the time I saw some memes claiming that roughly 1.5 trillion dollars in market value had evaporated, which if true is not a small sum.

jen729w 3 hours ago||
You didn't read the article. The first graph plots Workday, Salesforce, SAP, and ServiceNow. Google isn't mentioned.
bnchrch 2 hours ago||
Maybe they shouldve said ERP stocks are getting "pummelled"
nateglims 5 minutes ago||
It basically does

> The value of listed American enterprise-software companies is down by 10% over the past year.

raincole 2 hours ago||
take a look at 5-year trend

It's just correction.

Noaidi 2 hours ago|
But it is not THE correction.
grwbx 3 hours ago||
What an odd article that is just designed to hype the software creation aspect, which doesn't really affect MAGAF.

MSFT went down because of overexposure in AI and because it is clear that people do not want it.

AI weariness is a thing, and if people go off the Internet or advertisers question whether humans or AI swarms are "watching" their ads it is over for the big players.

Trying to salvage the situation by hyping the relatively small code generation (theft) aspect is quite a poor analysis.

nonethewiser 2 hours ago||
Yeah the article doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Guess whose writing software with AI? Software companies.

They mention sites like Base44 and Lovable. Sure, if tons of business was rotating out of software into no code AI solutions the article would have a point. But has a large portion of market cap moved out of AI into a few little no-code startups? Is Salesforce, Service Now, and SAP being replaced with no code applications? No. Absolutely not. These are small, niche companies. It does not explain a large downward movement in an entire industry.

pixelpoet 1 hour ago|||
What an odd account that is just created to try sway opinions on hot button topics.

Where have I seen this before? Oh right, the entire site, for months now. Nothing suspicious about that at all, I'm sure a swarm of other brand new accounts will reassure me 0.1 microseconds after being created. You guys sure do type fast!

cal_dent 42 minutes ago||
yes, its continue to grow at as problem. Doesn't detract from the site as a whole, but there is more very very low value noise infiltrating in a way there hasnt been in the past - even in the relatively short time I've been here.
likium 3 hours ago||
HN crowd did not like AI coding until it got better. How much of the AI hate is because of poor implementation?
falloutx 2 hours ago||
I guess you can classify over-implementation as poor implementation.
trgn 2 hours ago||
the crash is indiscriminate, which is really disheartening. even infra software is getting demolished, no llm is going to replace something like mongodb, but it's all traded under the same umbrella.
iamleppert 3 hours ago||
Meanwhile, in the real world, as a software developer who uses every possible AI coding agent I can get my hands on, I still have to watch it like a hawk. The problem is one of trust. There are some things it does well, but its often times impossible to tell when it will make some mistake. So you have to treat every piece of code produced as suspect and with skepticism. If I could have automated my job by now and been on a beach, I would have done it. Instead of writing code by hand, I now largely converse with LLMs, but I still have to be present and watching them and verifying their outputs.
eknkc 3 hours ago||
Yeah but just look at what happened within the last 2 years. I was not convinced about the AI revolution but I bet in another 2 years, we won't be looking at the output..
polotics 3 hours ago|||
Not so sure, there are indiosyncracies now within the various models, I suspect all this is the result of RLHF, and they cause side.effects. I'm not sure that more attention-is-all-you-need is necessarily going to give us another step change, maybe more general intelligence, but not more focus. Possibly also we soon end up with grokked AI's on all side: pushing their agenda whatever you asked... Gemini: "no this won't work with Cloudflare, I created your GCP account, there you go" OpenAI: "I am certain you really wanted me to do all these other tasks and I have done them, you should upgrade your tokens plan" etc (you know how to fill in for DeepSeek and Grok already, right)
falloutx 2 hours ago|||
Tech can always hit a plateau, here's to hoping anthropic & openAI run out of money.
headcanon 2 hours ago||
I've been coming around to the view that the time spent code-reviewing LLM output is better spent creating evaluation/testing rigs for the product you are building. If you're able to highlight errors in tests (unit, e2e, etc.) and send the detailed error back to the LLM, it will generally do a pretty good job of correcting itself. Its a hill-climbing system, you just have to build the hill.
mempko 3 hours ago||
This article crystallizes something I witnessed firsthand last week.

Overheard a guy at a restaurant explaining how he builds phone apps with AI and no coding experience. When asked how he verifies the code works, he said he pastes it into a different AI to explain it.

That's the "slopware" problem in action. The code compiles. It might even work. But there's no understanding of what it's actually doing, no ability to debug when it breaks in production, no awareness of the technical cruft accumulating with every prompt. That's a problem for people creating software for others and is a huge opportunity for software developers to take prototypes and build real stuff.

Does anyone remember the RAD days of the 90s?

On the flip side, for people making software to solve THEIR problems, they don't need to make anything production quality. Its for a single user, themselves! Maybe the LLMs are good enough now that people don't need to buy or subscribe to software that solves trivial problems as they can build their own solutions. Maybe the dream of smalltalk, hypercard, and even early web where anyone can use the computer of what it was meant for is finally here?

christkv 2 hours ago|
Thats fine Ill charge him 500 bucks an hour to fix it if it has success and he runs into not being able to maintain it
christkv 2 hours ago|
The cleanup needed after this by senior developers will be epic.
falloutx 2 hours ago|
Most of the these companies wont survive because of thier stupidity anyway.
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