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The vibe coder's career path is doomed
- molteanu 1y agoOf course this whole "it will make your more productive" marketing s** is absurd! How can we know? Living on the Moon will make you 27% happier! How do you know that? Has anyone done it in the past? Is there data to back that up? How would you measure happiness? How do we measure productivity, for that matter? That one is still a mystery. But it doesn't matter that we don't know how to, we'll just make it 2x better. That's absurd! I remember from the days when watching TV. There were these preposterous commercials saying "23% more efficient than other toothpastes" or "33% less dandruff than a regular shampoo" or shit like that. How do you know what products do I use? How do you measure that? What skin type? No. It is just better. Trust us. I mean, the financial backing in this sector is staggering. We know that already. It's a fact. There are also numbers. Billions if not trillions of them. What does Joe The Developer think all this kind of money goes to? Some of them, and not a small part, goes into marketing. Unless Joe still believes in the "build it and they will come" fake motto. Whomever has a stake in this will back it up, marketing it like crazy. Assume victory even in defeat as the old guy says. I was laughing hard one day when I saw Ilya Sutskever, laptop in hand, strolling the parks for a green meadow to work, develop ground-breaking ideas to save humanity! That's just marketing. Liked your post. I don't think it matters (that much) that your native language is not English. We don't want to sound all the same by using AI to fix our grammar (ok, maybe this one, yes) or the awkward twists of sentences. Sometimes AI fixes them too good, leaving little room for some poetry into it.
- florianherrengt 1y agoThanks for the feedback. I mostly used Grammarly. I had a lot of small mistakes like “remenber”. The LLM helped me figure out things like “used to been”. Sometimes things were a bit too disconnected and it pointed out the gaps. As I said, it’s a useful tool but anyone with a little bit of experience would probably not gain as much as I did from it.
- FrankWilhoit 1y agoWhy should it be? The ability to have the right vibes will not be universal -- or replicable.
- florianherrengt 1y agoI'm not sure I understand. Do you mean that overtime some people will develop intuition for the "right vibes" and it won't be replicable by others or computers?
- vonnik 1y agoAll LLMs hit a ceiling of complexity beyond which they cease to understand the code base. Greenfield projects show this particularly well, because the LLM works until it doesn’t. There are lots of greenfield projects that should exist! And lots of ways that someone can manage context and their own understanding of code to push the LLM further than its current limits, although not indefinitely far.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- drcode 1y ago> {In late July of 2025} all LLMs hit a ceiling of complexity beyond which they cease to understand the code base Fixed that for you
- yifanl 1y agoIf you're from the future, please let us know and we can alert the relevant authorities to ~~disect~~ help you.
- drcode 1y agobecause I predicted that AI will get better in future months?
- showerst 1y agoThe fundamental question is "will the LLM get better before your vibecoded codebase becomes unmaintainable, or you need a feature that is beyond the LLM's ceiling". It's an interesting race.
- 20k 1y agoEvery 6 months since chatgpt launched, everyone keeps telling me that LLMs are going to be amazing in a year from now and they'll replace programmers, just you wait They're getting better, but a lot of the improvement was driven by increases in the training data. These models have now consumed literally all available information on the planet - where do they go from here?
- superkuh 1y agoI understand the audience this person has written for: professional developers. In that context, sure. But for everyone except professional developers vibe coding is amazing. It gets the things they want to do done. No paying someone else, no asking for help on $chatprotocolchannel, no getting a friend to help. It's just there. It doesn't matter if it's ugly. It doesn't need to be monetized, doesn't need to be worked on by a team of people. It just needs to work... enough. Vibe coding may not be for you. But vibe coding is so that we don't need to bother you for trivial things (like porting a 12 .c file X11/cairo program to a single .pl file cariro/gtk program).
- trashtensor 1y agoEven for professional developers I am not buying this argument. I think there is an argument to be made that we actually don't know how to work with these tools effectively and repeatably yet. But as the tools improve and we figure out the processes more that may change. It might not too, but I am leaning more toward it working better when we figure out how to use it than not. e: Not a q for parent, but maybe for others. Are we supposed to be making a distinction between "vibe coding" and "coding with an AI agent"? What is the difference?
- florianherrengt 1y agoAccording to Wikipedia, vibe coding is "fully giving in to the vibes, embracing exponentials, and forgetting that the code even exists" and "If an LLM wrote every line of your code, but you've reviewed, tested, and understood it all, that's not vibe coding in my book—that's using an LLM as a typing assistant"
- cryptozeus 1y agoYou missed the point, he is saying after a point vibe coddling simply doesn’t work because llms are hitting a ceiling
- techpineapple 1y ago> But for everyone except professional developers vibe coding is amazing. I think I might argue the opposite but sure.
- daft_pink 1y agoI think it’s terrible if you want to work at a company, but probably decent if you are building an app for yourself that has a good business case and good marketability.
- SoftTalker 1y agoIf the idea is simple enough that Claude or ChatGPT can build a marketable implementation, then anyone can. Why would anyone pay for yours when they can just prompt-build their own? The old saying was that ideas are cheap, value is in execution. With LLM coding, execution is cheap too, up to a point.
- techpineapple 1y agoIn defense of the OP, the limit was probably never code, but the willingness to find and build for an audience. Even with LLM Coding, Product Management is still a skill that has to be built, and the way almost every Startup Failed Retro starts with "I wish I had talked to my customers more" probably the more important one.
- daft_pink 1y agoI think it makes it much easier for someone with domain knowledge and limited coding knowledge to build an app. The moat isn’t the coding, but the knowledge of what you want to build.
- OldfieldFund 1y agobecause the most important part of execution is not coding but marketing the idea.
- ryandv 1y agoAs a STEM field, the software engineer's role is probably still secure against AI tool wielders waving around chainsaws without the necessary training and accidentally sawing production databases in half. What LLMs are poised to replace is basically the entirety of the liberal arts and academic disciplines, where output is largely measured on the production of language - irrespective of that language's correspondence to any actual underlying reality. Musicians and authors - fiction and non-fiction alike - are already witnessing their impending obsolescence in real time.
- Night_Thastus 1y agoNeither musicians or authors are going anywhere, and it's kind of bizarre to say so. People make music because they want to. They always have, since the dawn of civilization. Even if we end up somehow making music bots that can generate something OK, people won't magically stop wanting to make music. And for both cases, it's important to remember that ML/LLM/etc can only re-arrange what's already been created. They're not really capable of generating anything novel - which is important for both of those.
- ryandv 1y agoWhat happens when you see people make these arguments for software development? Why was this article even written?
- TheNewsIsHere 1y agoExactly. LLMs specifically and AI generally are not going to replace your Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran, Twenty One Pilots, Linkin Park, etc. Speaking to the parent comment specifically - it strikes me as uninformed that “liberal arts and academic” disciplines rely only on language production. That’s absurd. I have a hard science degree but I started my education in the humanities and spent time studying business and management in my education as well. That gave me an immense advantage that many technologists lack. More importantly it gave me insight into what people who only have a hard science education don’t understand about those fields. The take that they aren’t connected to reality is chiefly among those misunderstandings. LLMs can’t replace any field for which advancement or innovation relies upon new thinking. This is different from areas where we have worked out mathematically articulable frameworks, like in organic chemistry. Even in those areas, actual experts aren’t replaceable by these technologies.
- clvx 1y ago> “Soon, everyone will be a developer” This is the wrong view. It's more like "Soon, everyone will be able to go from idea to a prototype". IMO, there's a different value perception when people can use concrete things even if they are not perfect. This is what I like about end-to-end vibe coding tools. I don't see a non developer using Claude Code but I can totally see them using Github Spark or any similar tool. After that, the question is how can I ensure this person can keep moving forward with the idea.
- someothherguyy 1y agoYeah, like soon everyone will be a poet, or a multi-linguist, or a song writer, academic, copywriter, artist, counselor, etc. I think overzealous LLM hype is a sort of Gell-Man amnesia.
- 6510 1y agoReading that I thought everyone could be a series of APIs. We are all experts at something. Something like: when was building X at the end of Y street demolished?
- joshdavham 1y agoThat’s a good way to think about it. AI can help me translate languages, but I’m definitely not a translator.
- fragmede 1y agoDepends how critical computers are to one's life, I think. I wouldn't call myself a cook, but I need to eat, so I can make a mean bowl of pasta when it comes down to it. Given another five-ten years of development, I expect tooling to develop that lets everyone automate computers to a degree previously reserved for professional programmers, akin to what the microwave oven did for cooking. The ability to microwave a hot pocket doesn't remotely make me a cook, but I won't starve, either.
- cjcenizal 1y agoAbsolutely! AI coding is a communication lubricant. It enables non-technical people to express complex software ideas without the friction of asking a developer for help or even working with a no-code tool. Software development doesn't occur in a vacuum -- it's part of a broader ecosystem consisting of tech writers, product managers, sales engineers, support engineers, evangelists, and others. AI coding enables each person in the org to participate more efficiently in the scoping, design, and planning phases of software development.
- lerp-io 1y agoThe ai was just not vibing with your idea bro.
- mronetwo 1y agoThere never was a career path for a vibe coder. Vibe coder won’t be a thing in a year. There’ll be a new, meaningless term though.
- phkahler 1y ago>> There was never career path for a vibe coder. Vibe coder won’t be a thing in a year. There’ll be a new, meaningless term though. Last year it was "prompt engineer", or was that 2 years ago already. Things move fast on the frontier...
- makestuff 1y agoI completely forgot about prompt engineers. I remember now startups offering insane salaries to them a few years ago. IMO the next iteration will be planning engineers since the new thing seems to be the plan/execution split of these vibe coding tools.
- __MatrixMan__ 1y agoIsn't a planning engineer just an engineer?
- AnotherGoodName 1y agoEven vibe coding was coined as term applying to extremely experienced engineers (the guy who coined the term) using llms to rapidly experiment with refactoring and prototyping as if doing pair programming. The negative connotations we now have are an interesting semantic shift. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibe_coding https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibe_coding
- rajaman0 1y agoi wish more folks would post P(how much I believe my own take) when they make takes. I don't think the author is fundamentally wrong; but its delivered with a sense of certainty thats similar in tone to the past 5 years of skepticism that has repeatedly been wrong. Instead of saying "vibe coded codebases are garbage", the author would be better served writing about "what does the perfect harness for vibe coded codebase look like so that it can actually scale to production"?
- JohnMakin 1y ago> 5 years of skepticism that has repeatedly been wrong. Can you point to any app with scale that has been vibe coded?
- fragmede 1y agoCloudflare's Oauth library probably handles some scale. https://github.com/cloudflare/workers-oauth-provider https://github.com/cloudflare/workers-oauth-provider
- kentonv 1y agoIt's not vibe coded, though. "Vibe coding" means taking the AI's code with no review at all. Whereas I carefully reviewed the AI's output for workers-oauth-provider.
- rajaman0 1y agoThat wasn't the take. The take is generally, "glorified next token predictor" quality LLM skepticism takes have been repeatedly proven wrong. See the original Cursor, Devin, etc announcement threads. More broadly, its unfortunate that vibe coding is so overloaded a term. - Yes, product managers with 0 coding expertise are contributing code in FAANG. - Yes, experienced engineers are "vibe coding" to great success. - Yes, folks with 0 years of experience were building simple calculators 2 years ago and are now building games, complex website, etc, just by prompting. Where will this go in another two years? One needs look no further than kiro - Amazons own code editor thats being used extensively internally. Folks bemoaning vibe coding are simply suffering from lack of imagination.
- supportengineer 1y agoIn today’s world, we have promo driven culture. The vibe coder will get promoted very quickly and then they won’t need to code anymore.
- Dwedit 1y agoWhen I see that distinct art style and orange tint of lazy ChatGPT art, I feel revulsion.
- florianherrengt 1y agoFair enough. I went back and forth on whether to include it. I kept it anyway because I thought it was a funny way to capture what I feel vibe coding is: just keep rerolling until I get what we want. Plus, I thought it would immediately shut down the strawman that I'm anti-AI. The generated image clearly shows I'm not. Sorry it put you off. I hope you still found the text interesting.
- msgodel 1y agoOf course you can't make a career out of vibe coding. At best you can launch a business with an MVP.
- neom 1y agoI know 2 MBA types who have been in tech a long time who are currently doing a combo of vibe coding v0 style coupled with a regular LLM spitting out code (o3 pro I believe), coupled with a coding agent in slack they talk to, connected to github, both of them seem to be making considerably progress on being able to launch to a few 100 users on their own. That said, both of them seem to realize they can't scale an app without devops, so they will hit a wall there I suspect. Largely agree with this blog, but we'll see where things go with agents.
- lubujackson 1y agoI think the author is a bit behind the "complexity prompting" state of things. He says learning vibe coding is easy and he did it in a couple of weeks, but he also hit a wall and now its bugs everywhere. So maybe... there is more to learn? I also hit the complexity wall and worked through it. LLMs are genius with arms that can reach anything but eyes two inches from the screen. As a metaphor, think of when a code base gets too big for one person to manage everything, people start to "own" different parts of the code. Treat LLMs the same and build a different context for each owner. The key is to not get to a point where you lose sight of the big picture. You are riding a bronco - try not to get thrown off! If you do, ask the LLM to describe the structure of things or restructure things to be more consistent, etc. Get to a place where YOU understand everything, at least in an architectural sense. Only then can you properly instruct the AI forward.
- lucaspauker 1y agoYeah this was my first thought as well... maybe there is skill and method in vibe building
- florianherrengt 1y agoI'll accept this criticism. I've only done it for a month or so. That said, I do feel confident that, after reading plenty of online articles, I have learnt 80% of AI coding skills. I configured Playwright and PostgreSQL MCP. Loads of unit and e2e tests for Claude to run after each change. Storybook for my components. I have multiple doc files in each folder. I'm happy to learn though and would welcome any suggestions.What am I missing? Right now, I have a bug with my message queue. I didn't spend enough time thinking about the proper way to implement and test it. I guess I also didn't pay enough attention to the PR. But then, if I did, is it really vibe coding or classic software engineering while getting Claude to write for me with the added burden of reviewing it thoroughly? The issue is that if a user sends a message to someone, quickly switches to someone else and sends a message, both messages get sent to the first person. I'll have to figure out why it happens. My guess is that it's somewhere in the React app. Claude can't figure it out. What can I do to help it?
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- strangescript 1y agoIf coding agents progress like the predictions, there is no world where many people are not out of jobs. Not just coders, but code related jobs. There is so much infra around humans not writing good code, or not being able to plan well. If agents get so good that they overcome these obstacles then most mid tier companies dev staff is going to be a couple of people making sure the agents are online and running. Vibe coding is just the canary in the coal mine.
- sarchertech 1y agoIf LLMs in general progress like the predictions (mostly predictions from people who are trying to sell LLMs) there will be no white collar jobs left at all and society will either collapse or reorganize.
- azinman2 1y agoI think this view is very myopic and needlessly ubiquitous. I do agree that worse but cheap will be used a lot right now. But we also have it already with outsourcing, and not everything is outsourced. Signaling theory provides a useful perspective here. If everyone has access to the same tools for thought, then everyone can arrive at the same output independent (mostly) of skill. That means the value of any one computer generated output will crash towards an average minimum. Society will notice and reward the output that is substantially better and different, because it shows that someone has something far better than the rest of access to or are capable of doing. This is even more heightened when the markets are flooded with AI slop. It’ll become obvious and distasteful. Those with skills and ability to differentiate will continue their existing ascent.
- sarchertech 1y agoThe OP was talking about if coding agents improve as much as they are predicted to, they will put programmers out of a job. My point is that the same people predicting those improvements are also predicting that LLMs will soon lead to super human AGIs.
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- oc1 1y agoThe term "You're absolutely right" has become a joke / meme for idiotic vibe coding sessions that i really hope Anthropic will ban this phrase with its next models.
- Kurtz79 1y agoI append this to basically every prompt as soon as Claude starts getting frustrated, to preserve my sanity: "Don't apologize. Don't say I'm right. Don't say it's a good idea. Don't say something is fixed unless I say so. Don't say that the issue is clear now. Don't use emojis. Keep a detached, professional tone and focus on the matter at hand.". Worth every token.
- bigcat12345678 1y agoHmm Viber coder is the consumer, not the worker.
- rob74 1y ago> There's no first-mover advantage when the entire playing field gets bulldozed. I feel like the AI companies are constantly getting ahead of themselves. The recent generation of LLMs is getting really good at writing or modifying code incrementally following a precise specification. But no, of course that's no longer good enough. Now we have agents who are as dodgy as LLMs were a few years ago. It's as if Boeing launched the 707 too early, got it to work after a few (plane) crashes, but then, instead of focusing on that, they launch the 747 also too early, and it also promptly crashes. Little wonder that people will be more preoccupied with the crashes than with what actually works...
- KingOfCoders 1y ago"In the end, I'm still limited by mental energy. " Interestingly, I wrote something similar recently "Too Fast to Think: The Hidden Fatigue of AI Vibe Coding", https://www.tabulamag.com/p/too-fast-to-think-the-hidden-fatigue https://www.tabulamag.com/p/too-fast-to-think-the-hidden-fat... There seems to be something overloading our capacity as coders.
- skippyboxedhero 1y agoBeing able to write code faster doesn't mean you are able to review it faster. I wouldn't say it is overload, it is just that some things are faster (writing code) and some things are the same. There is backpressure but overall, things are moving slightly faster. I also don't think it makes much of a difference at a large company when actual implementation is a relatively small part of the job anyway. Am I going to try and save 30 minutes writing a PR when it takes weeks for third-party review and the downtime is millions of dollars a minute...no.
- fragmede 1y agoWhere's the back pressure? The LLM can spit out code faster than I can review it, and it smoke tests fine. The only pressure is for me to actually read and understand and review the code before merging it to main. But that's self imposed. Meaning that under enough pressure to ship, it gets overwhelmed and stops standing in the way of progress in the name of hard to define attributes of code like security and not webscale.
- floatrock 1y agoThe article isn't saying "vibe coding goes nowhere" -- that's just the headline. The point being made is that vibe coding is changing so fast that any investments you make today into learning is quickly obsolete tomorrow as someone puts out a new tool/framework/VSCode-fork that automates/incorporates your home-brewed prompt workflow. It's like a deflationary spiral in economics -- if you know that prices will drop tomorrow, only the sucker buys something today (but because no one is buying today, that demand destruction causes prices to drop, creating a self-fulfilling doom loop). Similarly: with LLM coding, any investment you spend in figuring out how to prompt-engineer your planning phase will be made obsolete by tomorrow's tools. Really your blog post about "how I made Claude agents develop 5 feature branches in parallel" is free R&D for the next AI tool developer who will just incorporate your tips&tricks (and theoretically even monetize it for themselves) The argument here (get your pitchforks ready, all ye early adopters) is "we all just need to sit back for 6 months and see how these tools shake out, early adoption is just wasted effort."
- fragmede 1y agoBut during those six months, we all got bills to pay and mouths to feed. Some of us might be lucky enough that we can take six months off and bury our heads in the sand, but for those who can't, what do you suggest? The writing on the wall is that the AI revolution is coming for jobs. An estimated 800 million jobs are going to be disrupted in the next few years. I'd rather waste the effort and have a job after the dust settles, rather than sit back and get to say "see! I knew this was going to put us out of a job!" and then be smug about it while standing next to each other at the soup kitchen.
- floatrock 1y agoI don't disagree with you, and as with all things in life, answer is to find balance. On the one hand, hype cycles and bubbles are almost always driven by FOMO (and sometimes the best strategy is to not play). On the other hand, LLMs are legitimately changing how we do coding. There's always going to be people who need to have the latest iphone or be trying the latest framework. And they're needed -- that's how natural adoption should happen. If these tools tickle your fancy, go forth and scratch that itch. At the very least, everyone should be at least trying these things out -- history of technology is these things keep getting better over time, and eventually they'll become the norm. I think the main perspective to hold, though, is they're not quite the norm yet, and so don't feel like a schlub if you're not always all-in on the trending flavor of the week. We still don't know the final form these will take. Learn what's out there, but be okay that any path you take might be a dead end or obsolete in a month. Use a critical eye, and place your effort chips appropriately for your needs.
- oc1 1y agoI love vibe coding. Now i can present vibe-coded mvp to my boss and it just works. No more wireframes. It's all done in a single prompt.
- florianherrengt 1y agoYou're the perfect target audience for vibe coding.
- lordnacho 1y agoI feel like I won the lottery. Everyone is doing this sort of "better write some MCPs" thing, so that you can keep the LLM on the straight and narrow. Well, let me tell you something. I just went through my entire backlog of improvements to my trading system with Claude, and I didn't write any MCPs, I didn't write long paragraphs for every instruction. I just said things like: - We need a mock exchange that fits the same interface. Boom, here you go. - How about some tests for the mock exchange? Also done. - Let's make the mock exchange have a sawtooth pattern in the prices. Ok. - I want to write some smart order managers that can manage VWAPs, float-with-market, and so on. Boom, here you go. - But I don't understand how the smart orders are used in a strategy? Ok, here's a bunch of tests for you to study. - I think we could parse the incoming messages faster. Read the docs about this lib, I think we can use this thing here. Boom, done. - I have some benchmarks set up for one exchange, can you set up similar for others? Done. - You added a lock, I don't want that, let's not share data, let's pass a message. Claude goes through the code, changes all the patterns it made, problem solved. - This struct <here>, it has a member that is initialized in two steps. Let's do it in one. Boom, done. - I'm gonna show you an old repo, it uses this old market data connector. How do we use the new one instead? Claude suggests an upgrade plan starting with a shared module, continuing towards full integration. Does the first bit, I'm mulling over the second. Over the last four days, it has revolutionized my code. I had a bunch of things I knew I could do if given enough time. None of the above would stump me as an experienced dev these days. But it would take my attention. I'd be in a loop of edit/compile/test over every feature I've mentioned above, and I would be sure to have errors in either syntax or structure. At some point, I would use a pattern that was not ideal, and I'd have to backtrack and type/google/stackoverflow my way out of, and each step would take a while. Now, I can tell Claude what to do, and it does it. When it fails, it's productively failing. It's closer to the target, and a gentle nudge pushes it to where I want.
- stanleykm 1y agoTo be honest I suspect the things you are working on are either too small or too narrowly scoped to start running into the kinds of problems people are running into with llms. Give it more time and you’ll start to run into limitations.
- 6510 1y agoI one time had a hilarious chat with a 13 year old who started coding php/js when he was 9. He couldn't really code at all but every day for 4 years he examined/learned 3 things, libraries, api, frameworks. He knew how to query absolutely everything. His projects were pure glue code. One was some data sets + some data visualization with charts + some map api. A few hours of work, it looked rather remarkable. Our chat was specially hilarious since I take writing everything from scratch to the absurd level. His one trick was to know all the places online where you can ask your noob developer questions. He was working with a kind of imaginary token system where you get to ask a limited number of questions per month on each platform. His queries were truly fantastic. A reasonable dev could answer them with little effort, sometimes the next guy would write out the glue code. He didn't ask for much. 13 seems some kind of magical sweet spot where we take the person just serious enough. Sometimes people had questions about the API, he knew those inside out which was a hilarious contrast. I asked him: What do you do when it stops working? The answer was to start from scratch. He posted the old glue code, explained it didn't work anymore and someone would answer the easy question. The process was so completely alien to me that I'm not going to guess where the LLM's are taking us.
- hotpotat 1y agoThe author got too big for their britches and was drunk on perceived power. No need to have many parallel agents going on. Focus on one project and implementing features one at a time and dogfooding and testing. Shipping any code, vibed or not, then saying it blew up is not the LLMs fault. I can’t believe I’m saying that. It’s the shipper’s responsibility to make sure it works. Of course if you are a manager and let your junior ship code it will blow up… And yes I know AI is marketed as more. But it’s still people’s fault for swallowing the PR and shipping crappy code then complaining about the lies. Stop deflecting responsibility for your work
- florianherrengt 1y agoI do agree that I should take responsibility for my work. This is why I experimented on a small side project with a limited user base instead of my main app, which generates my income. What really sold vibe Coding to me was the idea that I could be significantly faster by working on multiple features in parallel. I'm an agent orchestrator. I send them off in the right direction, regularly check on them and correct if needed. They run all the tests and keep working until they all pass. Once they're done, I review their work and if I'm satisfied, merge it. The hard reality is that properly reviewing code at this scale is extremely difficult and I inevitably let errors slip through. Maybe I should spend more time reviewing it. But I'm almost certain it would take me more time and effort than writing the code myself and I'm not even sure I'd ever reach the same level of understanding. If I ask Claude to do one thing at a time and monitor it, I need to get the prompt right, wait for it to respond with some changes and then review them thoroughly before accepting them. I can imagine this being an alternative way to build software. But I doubt it's faster.
- hotpotat 1y agoIn my experience limiting myself to two projects in parallel is most productive, with a clear primary project whose agent’s completion take precedence over the other’s. It lets me still have concurrent work going on, but I’m very clearly still taking care to be precise and targeted with my prompting. Too many things going on, and I’m no longer optimizing for doing the task but for having as much parallel execution and progress as possible, and that’s a trap of perceived productivity.
- TrackerFF 1y agoAt my job, we’ve already stopped using a bunch of SaaS products/services, as we can just replicate them with our own solutions which we vibe-coded. I work in the data science and analysis space.
- guluarte 1y agowhat SaaS products/services?
- TrackerFF 1y agoWe work with data from a bunch of different sensors (radar/optical/etc. from satellites/drones/planes, acoustic, text, and a bunch more) - some of the tools in our tooling pipeline has previously been paid services by companies that specialize in those things. For example, say you have a SAR image, and want to classify if there are some vessels on that image, and if so - identifying what vessels? A company will do that for you. For approximately $100 pr. image. Or maybe some tool to analyze the radar parameters of some object (like what sort of radar a vessel or airplane has), also something niche companies will do for you, at a price. People would be surprised to hear now many thousands a license to some analysis package costs annually. The people that use these services, tend to be analysts and domain experts. Personally I have SWE experience prior to moving to analysis, but I've always been too bogged down with analysis-work to actually develop the tools I've wanted. And budget constraints have made it hard to hire a team of devs to only work on building tools. Luckily the advancements in LLMs have made that part much, much easier. So now we are able to get together, plan out the tools we want, and actually get things done. I was maybe a bit loose with the "vibe-coding" part. We are mainly domain experts, but the software engineering experience varies from very little - to quite experienced, so we're not completely fumbling in the dark.
- __MatrixMan__ 1y agoI hope that's a trend that catches on generally. However hard a job is to do, it often gets harder when refracted through the SaaS kaleidoscope. The job of a SaaS product owner is to ensure that you're as screwed-as-possible without their product. That's not the same as ensuring that you've met your own goals. Having five or six such people all fighting over your workflow with no coordination between them (since they don't know what other SaaS products you're consuming) is 3 parts helpful, 4 parts confusing.
- demirbey05 1y ago>If AI soon becomes good enough at building software on its own, software engineering as we know it is dead. I have no interest in becoming a glorified project manager, orchestrating AI agents all day long. If it does happen, I am now competing with anyone who can type a prompt. I’m not betting my career on being slightly better at prompting than millions of others. The view I most agree with this discourse. That's why I am not enthusiastic about AI
- mandevil 1y agoThe thing I keep worrying about is the fate of the store clerk. Retail store clerk was a medium skill/medium prestige job up through the 1970's and 1980's. You needed someone who knew all of the prices for their part of the store (to prevent tag switching), who could recognize what was the expensive dress versus the cheap dress, and remembered all of the prices so they could work quickly without having to look things up (1). There would be stories of retail clerks rising up to CEO, and even if you weren't that ambitious it was a career path that could provide a comfortable middle-class lifestyle. Then the laser/upc system came in and hallowed out the career path. UPC codes could be printed in a more permanent way (don't need to put 10c stickers on every orange) and then it was just a DB lookup to get the current price. And there was a natural language description that the register printed so you could do a quick confirmation. This quickly hallowed out and destroyed the career path: once the laser/UPC/database system meant that almost anyone could be an okay retail clerk with very little training, companies quickly stopped caring about getting anyone above that level, experience no longer mattered- or was rewarded with pay increases, and it created the so-called "McJob" of the 1990s. Karl Marx had actually written about this all the way back in the 19th Century, this was the alienation of labor, the use of capital investment to replace skilled labor with interchangeable repetition that kept people from feeling satisfaction or success at their jobs- and the pay and career satisfaction of retail clerks in 1990s America followed almost exactly the path of skilled weavers being replaced by machines in 19th Century Birmingham. Will that happen with SWE? I don't know. But it is a thing that preys on my mind late at night when I'm trying to sleep.
- esafak 1y agoOR will it mean software engineers will go back to also being product designers, as they once were, before increasing complexity caused them to focus only on engineering? Maybe it's the product managers who should be fearful?
- procflora 1y agoGreat example! Another historical example I find myself thinking about is the huge number of objects that moved into a disposable category in the last century or so. What used to be built entirely by skilled hands is now the prerogative of the machine and thus a certain base level of maintainability is no longer guaranteed in even the worst-designed widget. Yes, AI will mean more software is "written" than before, but more will be thrown away too. The allure of the re-write is nothing new, but now we'll do it not because we think we can do it better the second time, but because the original is too broken to keep using and starting over is just so much cheaper. Soon at CRUD App HQ (if not already): "Last year's pg_dump is this year's prompt."
- spense 1y agoone-shotting entire products is a dead end. once we figure out the right building blocks of applications, it will simply be inefficient to write code yourself. perhaps a controversial take, but writing code is going away (99% of it).
- Ancalagon 1y agoso many attempts at no-code solutions have come and gone.
- spense 1y agoagree, but no-code is complexity-limited bc they can't: 1. write custom components on the fly (ai can) 2. compose arbitrary components (composition isn't solved)
- Spartan-S63 1y agoI'm extremely skeptical of this take. LLMs today aren't good at keeping significant context (even with large context windows) in such a way that doesn't lead to a spaghetti mess of code. We're in a precarious spot where code is cheap to generate thanks to LLMs, but it's hard to build Good Software™ with only generated code. It's a pit of despair, of sorts. If we can get LLMs to a place where that's no longer true, then writing code going away may be the new base case, but there's no guarantee we can extend LLMs that far.
- spense 1y agowe're in agreement. context rot is real. i'm suggesting the solution is abstraction + composition. 1/ use ai to solve a subset of the problem 2/ abstract away its complexity to just its interface 3/ build with known interfaces. this is how we solve problems. it should work the same for ai.
- andy_ng 1y agoThat's what I've saying forever. All of a sudden, everyone's thinking being a software engineer is just all about writing code. In fact, coding is easiest thing for devs. And to be honest, I think everyone's misunderstanding the term "vibe coding" so much that if you use any AI tools in your workflow, you're labeled a vibe coder. That's not Andrej karpathy meant when he coined this term.
- florianherrengt 1y agoJust to be clear, I don't think there's anything fundamentaly wrong with using AI to write code. But just to make sure I got this right, I looked it up on Wikipedia: > "Karpathy described it as "fully giving in to the vibes, embracing exponentials, and forgetting that the code even exists." > "A key part of the definition of vibe coding is that the user accepts code without full understanding" > "If an LLM wrote every line of your code, but you've reviewed, tested, and understood it all, that's not vibe coding in my book—that's using an LLM as a typing assistant." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibe_coding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibe_coding
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- cadamsdotcom 1y agoThe trick to keeping the agents effective is complexity management. You know you’ve hit a complexity barrier when your agent claims to have implemented something but it’s just.. missing. That’s your sign it’s time to clean things up - maybe simplify it to a pattern that funnels many things through one place. Then the models can work again. This complexity reduction is a key step in engineering anything really. It makes for a healthier codebase. And of course, incremental improvements in models will let them go further before hitting their own specific complexity barriers. I truly believe there IS a durable role for “AI whisperers” of this kind. Folks who can tamp down the complexity as something is built, to keep it under the complexity ceiling of present-day models - and as the crazy pace of the industry lifts that ceiling again and again, folks who know where the limits are so they can work as fast as possible within them. It’s a very different type of engineering driven by a very different set of constraints. It’s unfamiliar and it’s fascinating watching engineers grapple with it. But it’s here and we have no terminology for what it’s doing to our work, so some people are frightened while others get on with it. Best you be among the latter.
- florianherrengt 1y agoMaybe my analogy is off, but I've been thinking of it like high-end restaurants not being threatened by fast food chains. I'm trying to understand what I'm missing here. You describe these "AI whisperers" who can tamp down complexity, but doesn't that still require strong fundamental skills and deep knowledge of how to build software? Or am I thinking about this wrong? If it eventually lifts this ceiling high enough that everyone can build with AI, how does this not simply become minimun wage work? In which case, what's the unique value proposition? The way I see it, either: 1. AI gets so good that everyone can build anything (in which case, why pay premium for whisperers?) 2. Or it stays limited enough that you need real engineering skills (in which case, we're back to valuing traditional expertise)
- strangescript 1y ago“It’s only going to get better” "For LLMs to keep improving, we need one of three things: more data, more power or a breakthrough." "Breakthroughs are rare." This is very short sighted. The amount of research and papers coming out on AI is staggering. Maybe raw power gaining breakthroughs are rare, but you literally only need one to have exponential impact. If you look back at the history of LLMs, its a never ending timeline of "well, they will never be able to do this" that have been proven wrong, going all the way back to the early 20-teens. Seems like a very strange bet to make at this point in time.
- florianherrengt 1y agoMy bet isn't against progress. It is against magical timelines peddled by those with VC incentives. I don't want to build a career on hype, sprinkled with "maybe", "could" or "soon" and ignores the very real diminishing returns and bottlenecks we face today. E.g: They kept predicting widespread fully autonomous vehicles. Significant progress has been made but a vehicle taking you from A to B without human oversight remain elusive. Demand for great software developers isn't fading. Let's lean in and master our craft, not limit our growth by over-relying on AI. Admittedly, I could be wrong. Maybe next year AI will be able to fully build software on its own and software engineering is dead. If you think that's true, why aren't you planning your career change right now? If we land somewhere in the middle, what skills can I develop to become a better vibe coder which aren't just becoming a better software engineer generally? When I know exactly what to do, AI is just a faster typist. But when I'm stuck, if I outsource the solution entirely to AI, how do I actually learn and grow?