Most software today is UI CRUD wrappers around databases.

The UI constrains what actions you can and cannot do to maintain a semantically coherent state.

Databases "should" be much more commodity by now than they are.

But part of it is that the value is clearly created significantly above the database.

There aren't really any consumer frontends for databases.^[em]

Today's concept of a frontend presumes a certain kind of software.

The frontend is necessary because the bridging from database to a real consumer need requires lots of complex specialized stuff.

But LLMs might not need that.

It's kind of weird that the LLM model creators also have consumer frontends to them.