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> without seeing just how effective it can be once you zoom in. The love/hate flame war continues because the LLM companies aren't selling you on this. The hyp

> without seeing just how effective it can be once you zoom in. The love/hate flame war continues because the LLM companies aren't selling you on this. The hype is all about "this tech will enable non-experts to do things they couldn't do before" not "this tech will help already existing experts with their specific niche," hence the disconnect between the sales hype and reality. If OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, etc. were all honest and tempered their own hype and misleading marketing, I doubt there would even be a flame war. The marketing hype is "this will replace employees" without the required fine print of "this tool still needs to be operated by an expert in the field and not your average non technical manager."

hombre_fatal 11mo ago
The amount of GUIs I've vibe-coded works against your claim. As we speak, my macOS menubar has an iStat Menus replacement, a Wispr Flow replacement (global hotkey for speech-to-text), and a logs visualizer for the `blocky` dns filtering program -- all of which I built without reading code aside from where I was curious. It was so vibe-coded that there was no reason to use SwiftUI nor set them up in Xcode -- just AppKit Swift files compiled into macOS apps when I nix rebuild. The only effort it required was the energy to QA the LLM's progress and tell it where to improve, maybe click and drag a screenshot into claude code chat if I'm feeling excessive. Where do my 20 years of software dev experience fit into this except beyond imparting my aesthetic preferences? In fact, insisting that you write code yourself is becoming a liability in an interesting way: you're going to make trade-offs for DX that the LLM doesn't have to make, like when you use Python or Electron when the LLM can bypass those abstractions that only exist for human brains.
- onethought 11mo ago
  Love that you are disagreeing with parent by saying you built software all on your own, and you only had 20 years software experience. Isn't that the point they are making?
  - hombre_fatal 11mo ago
    Maybe I didn't make it clear, but I didn't build the software in my comment. A clanker did. Vibe-coding is a claude code <-> QA loop on the end result that anyone can do (the non-experts in his claim). An example of a cycle looks like "now add an Options tab that let's me customize the global hotkey" where I'm only an end-user. Once again, where do my 20 years of software experience come up in a process where I don't even read code?
    - onethought 11mo ago
      But anyone didn't do it... you an expert in software development did it. I would hazard a guess that your knowledge lead to better prompts, better approach... heck even understanding how to build a status bar menu on Mac OS is slightly expert knowledge. You are illustrating the GP's point, not negating it.
      - hombre_fatal 11mo ago
        > I would hazard a guess that your knowledge lead to better prompts, better approach... heck even understanding how to build a status bar menu on Mac OS is slightly expert knowledge. You're imagining that I'm giving Claude technical advice, but that is the point I'm trying to make: I am not. This is what "vibe-coding" tries to specify. I am only giving Claude UX feedback from using the app it makes. "Add a dropdown that lets me change the girth". Now, I do have a natural taste for UX as a software user, and through that I can drive Claude to make a pretty good app. But my software engineering skills are not utilized... except for that one time I told Claude to use an AGDT because I fancy them.
        ModernMech 11mo ago
        My mother wouldn't be able to do what you did. She wouldn't even know where to start despite using LLMs all the time. Half of my CS students wouldn't know where to start either. None of my freshman would. My grad students can do this but not all of them. Your 20 years is assisting you in ways you don't know; you're so experienced you don't know what it means to be inexperienced anymore. Now, it's true you probably don't need 20 years to do what you did, but you need some experience. Its not that the task you posed to the LLM is trivial for everyone due to the LLM, its that its trivial for you because you have 20 years experience. For people with experience, the LLM makes moderate tasks trivial, hard tasks moderate, and impossible tasks technically doable. For example, my MS students can vibe code a UI, but they can't vibe code a complete bytecode compiler. They can use AI to assist them, but it's not a trivial task at all, they will have to spend a lot of time on it, and if they don't have the background knowledge they will end up mired.
- bopbopbop7 11mo ago
  You making a couple of small GUIs that could have been made with a drag and drop editor 10 years ago doesn't work against his claim as much as you think. You're just telling on your self and your "20 years" of supposed dev experience.
  - hombre_fatal 11mo ago
    Dragging UI components into a WYSIWYG editor is <1% of building an app. Else Visual Basic and Dreamweaver would have killed software engineering in the 90s. Also, I didn't make them. A clanker did. I can see this topic brings out the claws. Honestly I used to have the same reaction, and in a large way I still hate it.
    - bopbopbop7 11mo ago
      It's not bringing out claws, it's just causing certain developers to out themselves.
      - hombre_fatal 11mo ago
        Outs me as what, exactly? I'm not sure you're interacting with single claim I've made so far.

hombre_fatal 11mo ago

The amount of GUIs I've vibe-coded works against your claim. As we speak, my macOS menubar has an iStat Menus replacement, a Wispr Flow replacement (global hotkey for speech-to-text), and a logs visualizer for the `blocky` dns filtering program -- all of which I built without reading code aside from where I was curious. It was so vibe-coded that there was no reason to use SwiftUI nor set them up in Xcode -- just AppKit Swift files compiled into macOS apps when I nix rebuild. The only effort it required was the energy to QA the LLM's progress and tell it where to improve, maybe click and drag a screenshot into claude code chat if I'm feeling excessive. Where do my 20 years of software dev experience fit into this except beyond imparting my aesthetic preferences? In fact, insisting that you write code yourself is becoming a liability in an interesting way: you're going to make trade-offs for DX that the LLM doesn't have to make, like when you use Python or Electron when the LLM can bypass those abstractions that only exist for human brains.

onethought 11mo ago
Love that you are disagreeing with parent by saying you built software all on your own, and you only had 20 years software experience. Isn't that the point they are making?
- hombre_fatal 11mo ago
  Maybe I didn't make it clear, but I didn't build the software in my comment. A clanker did. Vibe-coding is a claude code <-> QA loop on the end result that anyone can do (the non-experts in his claim). An example of a cycle looks like "now add an Options tab that let's me customize the global hotkey" where I'm only an end-user. Once again, where do my 20 years of software experience come up in a process where I don't even read code?
  - onethought 11mo ago
    But anyone didn't do it... you an expert in software development did it. I would hazard a guess that your knowledge lead to better prompts, better approach... heck even understanding how to build a status bar menu on Mac OS is slightly expert knowledge. You are illustrating the GP's point, not negating it.
    - hombre_fatal 11mo ago
      > I would hazard a guess that your knowledge lead to better prompts, better approach... heck even understanding how to build a status bar menu on Mac OS is slightly expert knowledge. You're imagining that I'm giving Claude technical advice, but that is the point I'm trying to make: I am not. This is what "vibe-coding" tries to specify. I am only giving Claude UX feedback from using the app it makes. "Add a dropdown that lets me change the girth". Now, I do have a natural taste for UX as a software user, and through that I can drive Claude to make a pretty good app. But my software engineering skills are not utilized... except for that one time I told Claude to use an AGDT because I fancy them.
      - ModernMech 11mo ago
        My mother wouldn't be able to do what you did. She wouldn't even know where to start despite using LLMs all the time. Half of my CS students wouldn't know where to start either. None of my freshman would. My grad students can do this but not all of them. Your 20 years is assisting you in ways you don't know; you're so experienced you don't know what it means to be inexperienced anymore. Now, it's true you probably don't need 20 years to do what you did, but you need some experience. Its not that the task you posed to the LLM is trivial for everyone due to the LLM, its that its trivial for you because you have 20 years experience. For people with experience, the LLM makes moderate tasks trivial, hard tasks moderate, and impossible tasks technically doable. For example, my MS students can vibe code a UI, but they can't vibe code a complete bytecode compiler. They can use AI to assist them, but it's not a trivial task at all, they will have to spend a lot of time on it, and if they don't have the background knowledge they will end up mired.
bopbopbop7 11mo ago
You making a couple of small GUIs that could have been made with a drag and drop editor 10 years ago doesn't work against his claim as much as you think. You're just telling on your self and your "20 years" of supposed dev experience.
- hombre_fatal 11mo ago
  Dragging UI components into a WYSIWYG editor is <1% of building an app. Else Visual Basic and Dreamweaver would have killed software engineering in the 90s. Also, I didn't make them. A clanker did. I can see this topic brings out the claws. Honestly I used to have the same reaction, and in a large way I still hate it.
  - bopbopbop7 11mo ago
    It's not bringing out claws, it's just causing certain developers to out themselves.
    - hombre_fatal 11mo ago
      Outs me as what, exactly? I'm not sure you're interacting with single claim I've made so far.