One guy I used to work with (long before LLMs) built a website for his company and listed a bunch of software there for sale. Except he hadn't built any software product yet. Once someone contacted him about buying one of the products, then he would build it.

until you get enough money and resources to actually hire people who know what they're doing and can build the thing.

Has this ever happened? I though the way to go was enshittification of an already inferior product

Turns out, in our modern society, the former is a far more valuable skill than the latter.

that was knows and loudly displayel by all the apple fanbois and Jobs

99% of people using office products daily will die not knowing how to formulate a regular expression.

Because corporate policies mandate it?

Because Calc has the UI and functionality of Excel 97...and an awful name to boot lol

Hate to say it but anyone adept in Excel (or even Sheets, probably) would agree. It gets the job done but there's major features missing for a lot of what I'd use it for.

In my experience, MS Office files tend to have fewer compatibility problems on LibreOffice than on MS Office after the next update.

The three you mentioned in the second paragraph are slop fests now.

On setup, they let you select the "tabbed" UI

On setup it asks you to select one of four UIs, some of them are missing features. Once I spent almost an hour trying to solve a problem, but it turned out it was unsolvable in my UI. I changed the UI and found a solution in a moment.

Don't get me wrong, I love the fact that OpenOffice exists, but their UI needs a lot of work

Collabora Office has an overly permissive policy towards AI, and a lot of their commits are vibe-coded.

Man that sentence was hard for me to parse -- browsing threadiverse too early in the tye morning

Eh let them be the alpha testers.... Maybe in 5 years and a bajillion tokens it will be a real office suite

Apparently it looks identical to MS Office, so it isn't "better" than MS Office or LibreOffice in a functional sense (arguably less so since it's probably very buggy code)

I wouldn't say it's people (normal people would be using MS Office or LibreOffice most likely) excited that it's LLM generated, though some AI Bros probably are, I imagine some outlets are promoting this to sell whatever the new model is these days. And when there is a lot of news around a topic, it's covered by more and more people (something about all press is good press here)

Nobody wants to use Microsoft specifically. But that's what they're used to. And that's what the industry standard is. LibreOffice does not prioritize compatibility with Microsoft Office formats. LibreOffice has tabbed mode which feels a bit more like "home", but for some reason is missing options on this Ui view.

That's why people are interested. If it looks exactly like Microsoft Office and is 100% compatible with Microsoft Office formats without having to use a Microsoft product, that is a win. Will it be possible to maintain since it was so heavily vibe coded? That remains to be seen. But let's not pretend that open source projects are just as good or better in every way. LibreOffice is a lot closer than most, but Gimp is no Photoshop, for example, and after 30 years of waiting, I think it's safe to say that it's not gonna be. As much as I respect both LibreOffice and Gimp.

Plenty of IDEs have non-LLM predictive text. Common code patterns pop up as a suggestion, and continue to refine as you type.

It’s not the same level of “write a comment and we will spit out something that might work” but it’s more than a few steps above notepad.

As to not be fired. I've been forced to use AI at work, I'm "slower" than the rest of my coworkers even with AI, but I also don't spend half my week fixing bugs for code that I didn't read from the week before.

I'll usually pick a project and tell the robot to figure it out, give it all the context it needs so it's not asking every 5 minutes for access to my whole disk, and let it run. While it's doing that I'll hand code and actually do the work. I'm convinced it's the fact that I still code that I'm able to read and understand what slop need to be ripped out of the robots output.

I might do 2-3 tickets a day while others are doing 5-6, but I also didn't introduce a bug that cost our clients $1,000/day for 2 weeks straight and then didn't know how to fix it so it continued costing them that for 3 extra days while struggling to read code that I didn't write.

tldr: code by hand while the robots running it's task. Don't lose the skill just because you're not as fast.

I always think of doing codng by hands but then I am so slow compared to others

easy newbie mistake to make. you should try using your fingers instead.

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Sadly if you need to make ppts regularly, OpenOffice and Libra Office don't come close to Powerpoint in terms of features...

And sadly I'm far too incompetent a coder (and already torn 4 ways between family, job, MtG:judging, and rest and hobbies as I'm hugely introverted) to be able to help change that.

Calc is also not an Excel replacement for a lot of use cases. It's good for basic number crunching but it lacks a lot of functions, conditional formatting, and if you set up data validation on any cells....good luck finding them again. There is no menu for it. You need a PLUGIN to scan the sheets for cells with data validation and manually remove them

They (multiple parties) are cloning any possible software and games they can.

So you can run the same functionality on 100x the computing power? Seems as reasonable as rebuild a motorway bridge out of burning toothpicks each time a car wants to pass. 👍