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I was looking for this comment. A non-technical family member is working on a tech project, and giving them Lovable.dev with Supabase as a backend was like com

I was looking for this comment. A non-technical family member is working on a tech project, and giving them Lovable.dev with Supabase as a backend was like complete magic. No amount of fiddling with terminals or propping up postgres is too little. We technical people always underestimate how fast things change when non-technical users can finally get things done without opening the hood.

giantrobot 2y ago
> We technical people always underestimate how fast things change when non-technical users can finally get things done without opening the hood. This is good and bad. Non-technical users throwing up a prototype quickly is good. Non-technical users pushing that prototype into production with its security holes and non-obvious bugs is bad. It's easy for non-technical users to get a false sense of confidence if the thing they make looks good. This has been true since the RAD days of Delphi and VisualBasic.
- sally_glance 2y ago
  Knowing the industry I'm pretty sure they will all push those AI prototypes to production - because they did the same with non-AI prototypes before. Now the question is once they inevitably pull in experienced folk for maintenance, refactoring and debugging, will it be easier or harder than working with that retired solo devs spaghetti codebase?
  - giantrobot 2y ago
    From looking at "vibe coding" tools their output is about the quality of bad body shop contractors. It's entirely possible for experienced devs to come in and fix it. I think there's going to be the same problems as there are fixing bad body shop code. The companies that pushed their "vibe code" for a few dollars worth of AI tokens will expect people to work for pennies and/or have unreasonable time demands. There's also no ability to interview the original authors to figure out what they were thinking. Meanwhile their customers are getting screwed over with data leaks if not outright hacks (depending on the app). It's not a whole new issue, shitty contractors have existed for decades, but AI is pushing down the value of actual expertise.
    - namaria 2y ago
      I think this is just another correction. The software market is worth several trillion dollars now. Enterprise is pushing against the rise in labor costs. It will backfire as it did every single time and in a few years competent developers will be worth their weight in platinum. For nearly 50 years now, software causes disruption, demand drives labor costs, enterprise responds with some silver bullet, haircuts in expensive suits collect bonuses, their masters pocket capital gains, and the chicken come home to roost with a cycle of disruption and labor cost increases. LLMs are being sold as disruption but it's actually another generation of enterprise tech. Hence the confusion. Vibe coding is just PR. Karpathy knows what he's doing.
      - sally_glance 2y ago
        50 years might be overstating it a bit, lookup tables/hash maps were a novelty back then and available compute resources increased by many orders of magnitude... So maybe we actually had some real enablers in the meantime. My gut feeling is the current AI hype is at least as revolutionary as search engines, marketplaces or social networks (not like recommendation engines or block chain). Though not as revolutionary as the loom or electricity
    - nyarlathotep_ 2y ago
      > From looking at "vibe coding" tools their output is about the quality of bad body shop contractors. Genuinely, it's a lot better.
    - sally_glance 2y ago
      Yeah, the current trend has lots of parallels to the low code/no code trend we had a couple of years back and the workflow engine trend we had about 15 years back... I'm curious why you think it would push down the value of engineering hours though, that didn't even happen in the past.
- sebastiennight 2y ago
  > Non-technical users pushing that prototype into production with its security holes and non-obvious bugs is bad. I beg to differ. Non-technical users pushing anything into production is GREAT! For many, that's the only way they can get their internal tool done. For many others, that's the only way they might get enough buyers and capital to hire a "real" developer to get rid of the security holes and non-obvious bugs. I mean, it's not like every "senior developer" is immune from having obvious-in-retrospect security holes. Wasn't there a huge dating app recently with a glaring issue where you could list and access every photo and conversation ever shared, because nobody on their professional tech team secured the endpoints against enumeration of IDs?
  - somebehemoth 2y ago
    What about users who sign up for these insecure apps and have their data and possibly their identity stolen due to the misplaced trust? That this already happens is no excuse to encourage even less security by encouraging novices to believe they are experts. I agree it is great that more people can build software, but let's not pretend there are zero downsides.
    - _zoltan_ 2y ago
      [flagged]
    - sebastiennight 2y ago
      My feeling is that this is similar to saying, "non-professional AirBnB hosts are a terrible security nightmare, and the fact that people are not much safer in regulated hotels is no excuse to encourage even less security by encouraging novices to play in the hospitality business". I agree with you on the downsides.
      - namaria 2y ago
        AirBnB externality is not the safety risk for guests (although I personally ended up in some sketchy situations years ago, I don't use it anymore, mainly because:) the real externality is imposed on the inhabitants of popular tourist destinations. There was a reason the industry was regulated, and circumventing these reasons with an app has been a net negative to society.
- yieldcrv 2y ago
  I don't think its bad enough Even us entrepreneurially minded technical devs cut corners on our personal projects that we just want to through a Stripe integration or Solana Wallet connect on And large companies with FTC and DOJ involved data breaches just wind up offering credits to users as compensation so for non-technical creators to get into the mix, this just expands how many projects there are that get big enough to need dedicated UX and engineers
- kangaroozach 2y ago
  This suggests a strong need for AI powered code security review and patching as a compliment to Agentic coding platforms. Ideally, in parallel to your coding, it could scan your GitHub and output specific tasks for the Agentic AI to perform for you.
asnyder 2y ago
Back in the day we'd call this phase a design and workflow prototype as to not have to deal with all the technical components until the actual flow and concept is done. Feels we're skipping these steps and "generating" prototypes that may or may not satisfy the need and moving forward with that code into final. One of the huge benefits of things like Invision, Marvel, Avocode, Figma, etc. was to allow the idea and flow to truly get its legs and skip the days where devs would plop right into code and do 100s of iterations and updates in actual code. This was a huge gain in development and opened up roles for PMs and UI/UX, while keeping developer work more focused on the actual implementation. Feels these generate design & code tools are regressing back to direct-Code prototypes without all that workflow and understanding of what should actually be happening BEFORE the code, and instead will return to the distractions of the "How", and its millions of iterations and updates, rather than "What". Some of this was already unfortunately happening due to Figma's loss of focus on workflow and collaboration, but seems these AI generation tools have made many completely lose sight of what was nice about the improved workflow of planning, simply because we CAN now generate the things we think we want, doesn't mean we should, especially before we know what we actually want / need. Maybe I'm just getting old, but that's my .02 :).
- _zoltan_ 2y ago
  there is no need to this tedious, boring phase which you miss, especially since it still requires a significant of coding effort (eg to stitch a backend to figma). you can vibe code a fully working UI+backend that requires way less effort so why bother with planning and iterating on the UI separately at all? anybody who actually knows what they are doing gets 10x from these tools plus they enable non-coders to bring ideas to the market and do it fast.
  - asnyder 2y ago
    That's always been the justification to skip this phase :). Tools have just changed. One-person to small-team wonders that could code and build directly made the same arguments. My point isn't to stitch things to Figma, that's abhorrent to me as well. My point is to not get bogged down on the implementation details, in this case an actually working DB, those tables, etc, but rather less fidelity actual full flow concepts that can be generated and iterated. Then that can be fed into a magic genie GPT that generates the front-end, back-end, and all that good jazz.

giantrobot 2y ago

> We technical people always underestimate how fast things change when non-technical users can finally get things done without opening the hood. This is good and bad. Non-technical users throwing up a prototype quickly is good. Non-technical users pushing that prototype into production with its security holes and non-obvious bugs is bad. It's easy for non-technical users to get a false sense of confidence if the thing they make looks good. This has been true since the RAD days of Delphi and VisualBasic.

sally_glance 2y ago
Knowing the industry I'm pretty sure they will all push those AI prototypes to production - because they did the same with non-AI prototypes before. Now the question is once they inevitably pull in experienced folk for maintenance, refactoring and debugging, will it be easier or harder than working with that retired solo devs spaghetti codebase?
- giantrobot 2y ago
  From looking at "vibe coding" tools their output is about the quality of bad body shop contractors. It's entirely possible for experienced devs to come in and fix it. I think there's going to be the same problems as there are fixing bad body shop code. The companies that pushed their "vibe code" for a few dollars worth of AI tokens will expect people to work for pennies and/or have unreasonable time demands. There's also no ability to interview the original authors to figure out what they were thinking. Meanwhile their customers are getting screwed over with data leaks if not outright hacks (depending on the app). It's not a whole new issue, shitty contractors have existed for decades, but AI is pushing down the value of actual expertise.
  - namaria 2y ago
    I think this is just another correction. The software market is worth several trillion dollars now. Enterprise is pushing against the rise in labor costs. It will backfire as it did every single time and in a few years competent developers will be worth their weight in platinum. For nearly 50 years now, software causes disruption, demand drives labor costs, enterprise responds with some silver bullet, haircuts in expensive suits collect bonuses, their masters pocket capital gains, and the chicken come home to roost with a cycle of disruption and labor cost increases. LLMs are being sold as disruption but it's actually another generation of enterprise tech. Hence the confusion. Vibe coding is just PR. Karpathy knows what he's doing.
    - sally_glance 2y ago
      50 years might be overstating it a bit, lookup tables/hash maps were a novelty back then and available compute resources increased by many orders of magnitude... So maybe we actually had some real enablers in the meantime. My gut feeling is the current AI hype is at least as revolutionary as search engines, marketplaces or social networks (not like recommendation engines or block chain). Though not as revolutionary as the loom or electricity
  - nyarlathotep_ 2y ago
    > From looking at "vibe coding" tools their output is about the quality of bad body shop contractors. Genuinely, it's a lot better.
  - sally_glance 2y ago
    Yeah, the current trend has lots of parallels to the low code/no code trend we had a couple of years back and the workflow engine trend we had about 15 years back... I'm curious why you think it would push down the value of engineering hours though, that didn't even happen in the past.
sebastiennight 2y ago
> Non-technical users pushing that prototype into production with its security holes and non-obvious bugs is bad. I beg to differ. Non-technical users pushing anything into production is GREAT! For many, that's the only way they can get their internal tool done. For many others, that's the only way they might get enough buyers and capital to hire a "real" developer to get rid of the security holes and non-obvious bugs. I mean, it's not like every "senior developer" is immune from having obvious-in-retrospect security holes. Wasn't there a huge dating app recently with a glaring issue where you could list and access every photo and conversation ever shared, because nobody on their professional tech team secured the endpoints against enumeration of IDs?
- somebehemoth 2y ago
  What about users who sign up for these insecure apps and have their data and possibly their identity stolen due to the misplaced trust? That this already happens is no excuse to encourage even less security by encouraging novices to believe they are experts. I agree it is great that more people can build software, but let's not pretend there are zero downsides.
  - _zoltan_ 2y ago
    [flagged]
  - sebastiennight 2y ago
    My feeling is that this is similar to saying, "non-professional AirBnB hosts are a terrible security nightmare, and the fact that people are not much safer in regulated hotels is no excuse to encourage even less security by encouraging novices to play in the hospitality business". I agree with you on the downsides.
    - namaria 2y ago
      AirBnB externality is not the safety risk for guests (although I personally ended up in some sketchy situations years ago, I don't use it anymore, mainly because:) the real externality is imposed on the inhabitants of popular tourist destinations. There was a reason the industry was regulated, and circumventing these reasons with an app has been a net negative to society.
yieldcrv 2y ago
I don't think its bad enough Even us entrepreneurially minded technical devs cut corners on our personal projects that we just want to through a Stripe integration or Solana Wallet connect on And large companies with FTC and DOJ involved data breaches just wind up offering credits to users as compensation so for non-technical creators to get into the mix, this just expands how many projects there are that get big enough to need dedicated UX and engineers
kangaroozach 2y ago
This suggests a strong need for AI powered code security review and patching as a compliment to Agentic coding platforms. Ideally, in parallel to your coding, it could scan your GitHub and output specific tasks for the Agentic AI to perform for you.

asnyder 2y ago

Back in the day we'd call this phase a design and workflow prototype as to not have to deal with all the technical components until the actual flow and concept is done. Feels we're skipping these steps and "generating" prototypes that may or may not satisfy the need and moving forward with that code into final. One of the huge benefits of things like Invision, Marvel, Avocode, Figma, etc. was to allow the idea and flow to truly get its legs and skip the days where devs would plop right into code and do 100s of iterations and updates in actual code. This was a huge gain in development and opened up roles for PMs and UI/UX, while keeping developer work more focused on the actual implementation. Feels these generate design & code tools are regressing back to direct-Code prototypes without all that workflow and understanding of what should actually be happening BEFORE the code, and instead will return to the distractions of the "How", and its millions of iterations and updates, rather than "What". Some of this was already unfortunately happening due to Figma's loss of focus on workflow and collaboration, but seems these AI generation tools have made many completely lose sight of what was nice about the improved workflow of planning, simply because we CAN now generate the things we think we want, doesn't mean we should, especially before we know what we actually want / need. Maybe I'm just getting old, but that's my .02 :).

_zoltan_ 2y ago
there is no need to this tedious, boring phase which you miss, especially since it still requires a significant of coding effort (eg to stitch a backend to figma). you can vibe code a fully working UI+backend that requires way less effort so why bother with planning and iterating on the UI separately at all? anybody who actually knows what they are doing gets 10x from these tools plus they enable non-coders to bring ideas to the market and do it fast.
- asnyder 2y ago
  That's always been the justification to skip this phase :). Tools have just changed. One-person to small-team wonders that could code and build directly made the same arguments. My point isn't to stitch things to Figma, that's abhorrent to me as well. My point is to not get bogged down on the implementation details, in this case an actually working DB, those tables, etc, but rather less fidelity actual full flow concepts that can be generated and iterated. Then that can be fed into a magic genie GPT that generates the front-end, back-end, and all that good jazz.