5 ms·

Yup. I worked very hard, and for many years to acquire a skill in designing and writing systems. It is an art. And it is very disheartening to see people withou

Yup. I worked very hard, and for many years to acquire a skill in designing and writing systems. It is an art. And it is very disheartening to see people without any skills to behave the way they do. For now, the work I do cannot be replicated by these people, but I do not such high hopes for the distant future. Though at the point it can truly be automated I think it will be automating a large majority of non physical jobs (and those too will be likely getting automated by then)

pydry 9mo ago
>It is an art. And it is very disheartening to see people without any skills to behave the way they do They've even got their own slogan: "you're probably just not prompting it properly"
- entrox 9mo ago
  > They've even got their own slogan: "you're probably just not prompting it properly" That's the same energy as telling other professions to "just learn to code, bro" once they are displaced by AI. But I guess it doesn't feel nice once the shoe is on the other foot, though. If nobody values the quality of human art, why should anybody value the quality of human code?
  - pydry 9mo ago
    >That's the same energy as telling other professions to "just learn to code, bro" once they are displaced by AI. But I guess it doesn't feel nice once the shoe is on the other foot, though. It's the exact same neoliberal elites who told everyone to code one year and told them they'd all be automated of a job the next year. I dunno who exactly you think you're being condescending towards.
viking123 9mo ago
I feel it's nice to use AI coding for side-projects, especially after work when I am kind of tired. Although the one issue is that if it gets stuck in a loop or just does not get the what is wrong and does the wrong thing no matter how you twist it, then you have to go into the weeds to fix it yourself and it feels so tiresome, at that point I think what if I had just done everything myself so my mental model would be better. Also we are still designing systems and have to be able to define the problem properly, at least in my company when we look at the velocity in delivering projects it is barely up since AI because the bottlenecks are elsewhere..
- margorczynski 9mo ago
  Why do people assume what currently available is the ceiling, especially after the last 2-3 years of explosive growth? Do you truly believe it won't get better, maybe even better at whole system design and implementation than people?
  - 7777332215 9mo ago
    I think what we currently have is pretty close to the ceiling for LLMs. But with the amount of money being spent there might be a new breakthrough (not llm)
    - cbdevidal 9mo ago
      It must depend on the person. I’ve been coding for all my life but have never been GOOD. I thoroughly enjoy coding, despite being frustrated many times. Literally yesterday I remarked to my tech friends how fun coding with CoPilot is. I actually make forward progress now, and I understand all that the agent is doing. For me, coding is an enjoyable means to an end. I do enjoy the process, but I enjoy the results more.
      - 7777332215 9mo ago
        You could read the syntax and see what it logically did. But you likely don't always know why it did something, and you definitely don't know why another way wasn't chosen (maybe that way would have better aligned with your long term goals)
        cbdevidal 9mo ago
        I do know why. I read the code and understand it. Reading code for me is easier than writing it. You're right though about it not choosing some different path, I might or I might not know that.
    - KptMarchewa 9mo ago
      At least, they can still be much faster and cheaper.
itsthecourier 9mo ago
feel the same, but I moved up. create full products and profit from them. you have a great taste if you know what's behind
abalashov 9mo ago
On the plus side, vibe coding disaster remediation looks to be a promising revenue stream in the near future, and I am rubbing my hands together eagerly as I ponder the filthy lucre.
- lelanthran 9mo ago
  > On the plus side, vibe coding disaster remediation looks to be a promising revenue stream in the near future, and I am rubbing my hands together eagerly as I ponder the filthy lucre. I don't think it will be; a vibe coder using Gas Town will easily spit out 300k LoC for a MVP TODO application. Can you imagine what it will spit out for anything non-trivial? How do you even begin to approach remedying that? The only recourse for humans is to offer to rebuild it all using the existing features as a functional spec.
  - abalashov 9mo ago
    > How do you even begin to approach remedying that? The only recourse for humans is to offer to rebuild it all using the existing features as a functional spec. There are cases where that will be the appropriate decision. That may not be every case, but it'll be enough cases that there's money to be made. There will be other cases where just untangling the clusterfuck and coming up with any sense of direction at all, to be implemented however, will be the key deliverable. I have had several projects that look like this already in the VoIP world, and it's been very gainful. However, my industry probably does not compare fairly to the common denominator of CRUD apps in common tech stacks; some of it is specialised enough that the LLMs drop to GPT-2 type levels of utility (and hallucination! -- that's been particularly lucrative). Anyway, the problem to be solved in vibe coding remediation often has little to do with the code itself, which we can all agree can be generated in essentially infinite amounts at a pace that is, for all intents and purposes, almost instantaneous. If you are in need vibe coding disaster remediation consulting, it's not because you need to refactor 300,000 lines of slop real quick. That's not going to happen. The general business problem to be solved is how to make this consumable to the business as a whole, which still moves at the speed of human. I am fond of a metaphor I heard somewhere: you can't just plug a firehose into your house's plumbing and expect a fire hydrant's worth of water pressure out of your kitchen faucet. In the same way, removing the barriers to writing 300,000 lines isn't the same as removing the barriers to operationalising, adopting and owning 300,000 lines in a way that can be a realistic input into a real-world product or service. I'm not talking about the really airy-fairy appeals to maintainability or reliability one sometimes hears (although, those are very real concerns), but rather, how to get one's arms around the 300,000 lines from a product direction perspective, except by prompting one's way into even more slop. I think that's where the challenges will be, and if you understand that challenge, especially in industry- and domain-specific ways (always critical for moats), I think there's a brisk livelihood to be made here in the foreseeable future. I make a living from adding deep specialist knowledge to projects executed by people who have no idea what they're doing, and LLMs haven't materially altered that reality in any way. Giving people who have no idea what they're doing a way to express that cluelessness in tremendous amounts of code, quickly, doesn't really solve the problem, although it certainly alters the texture of the problem. Lastly, it's probably not a great time to be a very middling pure CRUD web app developer. However, has it ever been, outside of SV and certain very select, fortunate corners of the economy? The lack of moat around it was a problem long before LLMs. I, for example, can't imagine making a comfortable living in it outside of SV engineer inflation; it just doesn't pay remotely enough in most other places. Like everything else worth doing, deep specialisation is valuable and, to some extent, insulating. Underappreciated specialist personalities will certainly see a return in a flight-to-quality environment.
pawelduda 9mo ago
> And it is very disheartening to see people without any skills to behave the way they do. The way the do, which is? I've skimmed comments and a lot of them is hate, hostility towards OP's project and coders "without skill" in general, also denial because there's no way anything vibe-coded worked. At best, there is strong tribalism on both ends.
- 7777332215 9mo ago
  There is definitely tribalism. I think a lot of the negativity is people who recognize the long term goals of these companies, not just to tech workers. Right now, these models are a threat to people who worked hard and invested their time, while it lets inexperienced or lazy people appear more competent. I think that less experienced developers (or people who don't care anymore or maybe ever) see what an LLM can do and immediately believe it will solve all their problems. That if you are not embracing this with full force you are going to be left behind. You might see more opposing views in this thread, but if you browse this site often you'll see both sides. Those embracing it heavily do not see the nuances carefully creating maintainable solutions, planning and recognizing tech debt, and where it's acceptable short term. They are also missing the theory building behind what is being created. Sure AI models might get even better and could solve everything. But I think it's naive to think that will be generally good for 90% of the population including people not in tech. Using these models (text or image) devalues the work of everyone in more than one way. It is harmful for creative work and human expression. This tech, and a lot of tech, especially ones built by large corporations for profit extraction and human exploitation, is very unlikely to improve the lives at a population level long term. It can be said for a lot of tech (ie. social media = powerful propaganda). The goal of the people creating these models are to not need humans for their work. At which point I don't know what would happen, kill the peasants?
newsoftheday 9mo ago
> It is an art. I agree what we do requires a lot of creative thinking. When AI supporters attempt to use an argument comparing to factory workers being freed from dull laborious work by robots, the analogy falls flat on two fronts. First, there's nothing creative about that sort of work and second, because robots are highly accurate; while AI can often be just high.

pydry 9mo ago

>It is an art. And it is very disheartening to see people without any skills to behave the way they do They've even got their own slogan: "you're probably just not prompting it properly"

entrox 9mo ago
> They've even got their own slogan: "you're probably just not prompting it properly" That's the same energy as telling other professions to "just learn to code, bro" once they are displaced by AI. But I guess it doesn't feel nice once the shoe is on the other foot, though. If nobody values the quality of human art, why should anybody value the quality of human code?
- pydry 9mo ago
  >That's the same energy as telling other professions to "just learn to code, bro" once they are displaced by AI. But I guess it doesn't feel nice once the shoe is on the other foot, though. It's the exact same neoliberal elites who told everyone to code one year and told them they'd all be automated of a job the next year. I dunno who exactly you think you're being condescending towards.

viking123 9mo ago

I feel it's nice to use AI coding for side-projects, especially after work when I am kind of tired. Although the one issue is that if it gets stuck in a loop or just does not get the what is wrong and does the wrong thing no matter how you twist it, then you have to go into the weeds to fix it yourself and it feels so tiresome, at that point I think what if I had just done everything myself so my mental model would be better. Also we are still designing systems and have to be able to define the problem properly, at least in my company when we look at the velocity in delivering projects it is barely up since AI because the bottlenecks are elsewhere..

margorczynski 9mo ago
Why do people assume what currently available is the ceiling, especially after the last 2-3 years of explosive growth? Do you truly believe it won't get better, maybe even better at whole system design and implementation than people?
- 7777332215 9mo ago
  I think what we currently have is pretty close to the ceiling for LLMs. But with the amount of money being spent there might be a new breakthrough (not llm)
  - cbdevidal 9mo ago
    It must depend on the person. I’ve been coding for all my life but have never been GOOD. I thoroughly enjoy coding, despite being frustrated many times. Literally yesterday I remarked to my tech friends how fun coding with CoPilot is. I actually make forward progress now, and I understand all that the agent is doing. For me, coding is an enjoyable means to an end. I do enjoy the process, but I enjoy the results more.
    - 7777332215 9mo ago
      You could read the syntax and see what it logically did. But you likely don't always know why it did something, and you definitely don't know why another way wasn't chosen (maybe that way would have better aligned with your long term goals)
      - cbdevidal 9mo ago
        I do know why. I read the code and understand it. Reading code for me is easier than writing it. You're right though about it not choosing some different path, I might or I might not know that.
  - KptMarchewa 9mo ago
    At least, they can still be much faster and cheaper.

itsthecourier 9mo ago

feel the same, but I moved up. create full products and profit from them. you have a great taste if you know what's behind

abalashov 9mo ago

On the plus side, vibe coding disaster remediation looks to be a promising revenue stream in the near future, and I am rubbing my hands together eagerly as I ponder the filthy lucre.

lelanthran 9mo ago
> On the plus side, vibe coding disaster remediation looks to be a promising revenue stream in the near future, and I am rubbing my hands together eagerly as I ponder the filthy lucre. I don't think it will be; a vibe coder using Gas Town will easily spit out 300k LoC for a MVP TODO application. Can you imagine what it will spit out for anything non-trivial? How do you even begin to approach remedying that? The only recourse for humans is to offer to rebuild it all using the existing features as a functional spec.
- abalashov 9mo ago
  > How do you even begin to approach remedying that? The only recourse for humans is to offer to rebuild it all using the existing features as a functional spec. There are cases where that will be the appropriate decision. That may not be every case, but it'll be enough cases that there's money to be made. There will be other cases where just untangling the clusterfuck and coming up with any sense of direction at all, to be implemented however, will be the key deliverable. I have had several projects that look like this already in the VoIP world, and it's been very gainful. However, my industry probably does not compare fairly to the common denominator of CRUD apps in common tech stacks; some of it is specialised enough that the LLMs drop to GPT-2 type levels of utility (and hallucination! -- that's been particularly lucrative). Anyway, the problem to be solved in vibe coding remediation often has little to do with the code itself, which we can all agree can be generated in essentially infinite amounts at a pace that is, for all intents and purposes, almost instantaneous. If you are in need vibe coding disaster remediation consulting, it's not because you need to refactor 300,000 lines of slop real quick. That's not going to happen. The general business problem to be solved is how to make this consumable to the business as a whole, which still moves at the speed of human. I am fond of a metaphor I heard somewhere: you can't just plug a firehose into your house's plumbing and expect a fire hydrant's worth of water pressure out of your kitchen faucet. In the same way, removing the barriers to writing 300,000 lines isn't the same as removing the barriers to operationalising, adopting and owning 300,000 lines in a way that can be a realistic input into a real-world product or service. I'm not talking about the really airy-fairy appeals to maintainability or reliability one sometimes hears (although, those are very real concerns), but rather, how to get one's arms around the 300,000 lines from a product direction perspective, except by prompting one's way into even more slop. I think that's where the challenges will be, and if you understand that challenge, especially in industry- and domain-specific ways (always critical for moats), I think there's a brisk livelihood to be made here in the foreseeable future. I make a living from adding deep specialist knowledge to projects executed by people who have no idea what they're doing, and LLMs haven't materially altered that reality in any way. Giving people who have no idea what they're doing a way to express that cluelessness in tremendous amounts of code, quickly, doesn't really solve the problem, although it certainly alters the texture of the problem. Lastly, it's probably not a great time to be a very middling pure CRUD web app developer. However, has it ever been, outside of SV and certain very select, fortunate corners of the economy? The lack of moat around it was a problem long before LLMs. I, for example, can't imagine making a comfortable living in it outside of SV engineer inflation; it just doesn't pay remotely enough in most other places. Like everything else worth doing, deep specialisation is valuable and, to some extent, insulating. Underappreciated specialist personalities will certainly see a return in a flight-to-quality environment.

pawelduda 9mo ago

> And it is very disheartening to see people without any skills to behave the way they do. The way the do, which is? I've skimmed comments and a lot of them is hate, hostility towards OP's project and coders "without skill" in general, also denial because there's no way anything vibe-coded worked. At best, there is strong tribalism on both ends.

7777332215 9mo ago
There is definitely tribalism. I think a lot of the negativity is people who recognize the long term goals of these companies, not just to tech workers. Right now, these models are a threat to people who worked hard and invested their time, while it lets inexperienced or lazy people appear more competent. I think that less experienced developers (or people who don't care anymore or maybe ever) see what an LLM can do and immediately believe it will solve all their problems. That if you are not embracing this with full force you are going to be left behind. You might see more opposing views in this thread, but if you browse this site often you'll see both sides. Those embracing it heavily do not see the nuances carefully creating maintainable solutions, planning and recognizing tech debt, and where it's acceptable short term. They are also missing the theory building behind what is being created. Sure AI models might get even better and could solve everything. But I think it's naive to think that will be generally good for 90% of the population including people not in tech. Using these models (text or image) devalues the work of everyone in more than one way. It is harmful for creative work and human expression. This tech, and a lot of tech, especially ones built by large corporations for profit extraction and human exploitation, is very unlikely to improve the lives at a population level long term. It can be said for a lot of tech (ie. social media = powerful propaganda). The goal of the people creating these models are to not need humans for their work. At which point I don't know what would happen, kill the peasants?

newsoftheday 9mo ago

> It is an art. I agree what we do requires a lot of creative thinking. When AI supporters attempt to use an argument comparing to factory workers being freed from dull laborious work by robots, the analogy falls flat on two fronts. First, there's nothing creative about that sort of work and second, because robots are highly accurate; while AI can often be just high.