4 ms·

One of other authors he links to[0] brags that he's released 10 projects in the past month, like "Super Xtreme Mapper, a high-end, professional MIDI mapping sof

by saulpw 9mo ago

One of other authors he links to[0] brags that he's released 10 projects in the past month, like "Super Xtreme Mapper, a high-end, professional MIDI mapping software for professional DJs", which has 4 stars on Github. Despite the "high-end, professional...for professional" description, literally no one is going to use it, because this guy can't [be trusted to] maintain this software. Even if Claude Code is doing all the work, adding all the features, and fixing all the bugs, someone has to issue the command to do that work, and to foot the bill. This guy is just spraying code around and snorting digital coke. There is plausibly something here with AI-generated code but as always, the value is not in the first release but in the years of maintenance and maturation that makes it something you can use and invest in. The problem with AI is that it's giving these people hyper-ADHD, they can't commit to anything, and no one will use vibe-coded tools--I'm betting not even themselves after a month. [0] https://nraford7.github.io/road-runner-economy/ https://nraford7.github.io/road-runner-economy/

bigfishrunning 9mo ago
> snorting digital coke What an apt description -- the website on the other side of that link is the most coked-out design I've ever seen.
Dr_Birdbrain 9mo ago
My feeling is that AI-generated code is disposable code. It’s great if you can quickly stand up a tool that scratches an itch for you, but there is minimal value in it for other people, and it probably doesn’t make sense to share it in a repo. Other people could just quickly vibe-code something of equal quality.
- thewebguyd 9mo ago
  That's how I've been using and treating it, though I'm not primarily a developer. I work in ops, and LLMs write all sorts of disposable code for me. Primarily one-off scripts or little personal utilities. These don't get shared with anyone else, or put on github, etc. but have been incredibly helpful. SQL queries, some python to clean up or dig through some data sets, log files, etc. to spit out a quick result when something more robust or permanent isn't needed. Plus, so far, LLMs seem better at writing code to do a thing over directly doing the thing, where it's more likely to hallucinate, especially when it comes to working with large CSV or Json files. "Re-order this CSV file to be in Alphabetical order by the Name field" will make up fake data, but "Write a python script to order the Name filed in this CSV to be alphabetical" will succeed.
  - QuercusMax 9mo ago
    That's exactly my experience as well. AI will read only the first 100 lines of a file, decide that's good enough, and spit out a garbage result. But ask it to write a bash one-liner and it will work perfectly.
  - knollimar 9mo ago
    I've had large successes in using it to draft electrical drawings faster (more a symptom of the tools I have now being mediocre)
    - dwd 9mo ago
      Did a lot of contract development work nearly 20 years ago on a product called Solutions Electrical (1) that looks to still be around. It crossed my mind recently whether a LLM would be able to meet all the various International standards and eat into that market. (1) https://solutionselectricalsoftware.com/ https://solutionselectricalsoftware.com/
- WorldMaker 9mo ago
  My growing (cynical) feeling is that AI-generated code is legacy-code-as-a-service. It is by nature trained on other people and company's legacy code. (There's the training set window which is always in the past. There's the economics question of which companies would ever volunteer to opt-in their best proprietary production code into training sets. Sure there are a few entirely open source companies, but those are still the exception and not the rule.) "Vibe code" is essentially delivered as Day Zero "Legacy Code" in the sense that the person who wrote that code is essentially no longer at the company (even if context windows get extended to incredibly huge sizes and you have great prompt preservation tools, eventually you no longer have the original context and not to mention that the Models themselves retrain and get upgraded every so many months are essentially "different people" each time. But most importantly the Models themselves can't tell you the motivating "how" or "why" of anything, at best maybe good specs documents and prompts do, but even that can be a gamble). The article starts with a lot of words about how the meaning and nature of "tech debt" are going to change a lot as AI adoption increases and more vibe coding happens, but I think I disagree on what that change means. I don't AI reduces "tech debt". I don't think it is "deflationary" in any way. I think AI are going to gift us a world of tech debt "hyperinflation". When every application in a company is "legacy code" all you have is tech debt. Having worked in companies with lots of legacy code, the thing you learn is that those apps are never as disposable as you want to believe. The sunk cost fallacy kicks in. (Generative AI Tokens are currently cheap, but cheap isn't free. Budgets still exist.) Various status quo fallacies kick in: "that's how the system has always worked", "we have to ensure every new version is backwards compatible with the old version", "we can't break anyone's existing process/workflow", "we can't require retraining", "we need 1:1 all the same features", and so forth. You can't just "vibe code" something of equal quality if you can't even figure out what "equal quality" means. That's many the death of a legacy code "rewrite project". By the time you've figured out how every user uses it (including how many bugs are load-bearing features in someone's process) you have too many requirements to consider, not enough time or budget left, and eventually a mandate to quit and "not fix what isn't broken". (Except it was broken enough to start up a discovery process at least once, and may do so again when the next team thinks they can dream up a budget for it.) Tech debt isn't going away and tech debt isn't getting eliminated. Tech Debt is getting baked into Day Zero of production operations. (Projects may be starting already "in hock to creditors". The article says "Dark Software Factory" but I read "Dark Software Pawn Shop".) Tech debt is potentially increasing at a faster than human scale of understanding it. I feel like Legacy Code skills are going to be in higher demand than ever. It is maybe going to be "deflationary" in cost for those jobs but only because the supply of Legacy Code projects will be so high and software developers will have a buffet to choose from.
galaxyLogic 9mo ago
Software products are about unique competitive value that grows over time. Products have it or not. AI produced software is like open source in a sense, you get something for free. But whose gonna get rich if everybody can just duplicate your product by asking AI to do it, again? Think of investing in the stock market by asking AI to do all the trading, for you. Great maybe you make some money. But when everybody catches on that it is better to let the AI do the trading, then others's AI is gonna buy the same stocks as yours, and their price goes up. Less value for you.
- jacquesm 9mo ago
  Spot on. That's why so far all of the supposed solutions to 'the programmer problem' have failed. Whether this time it will be different I don't know. But originally compilers were supposed to kill off the programmers. Then it was 3G and 4G languages (70's, 80's). Then it was 'no code' which eventually became 'low code' because those pesky edge cases kept cropping up. Now it is AI, the 'dark factory' and other fearmongering. I'll believe it when I see it. Another HN'er has pointed me into an interesting direction that I think is more realistic: AI will become a tool in the toolbox that will allow experts to do what they did before but faster and hopefully better. It will also be the tool that will generate a ton of really, really bad code that people will indeed not look at because they can not afford to look at it: you can generate more work for a person in a few seconds of compute time than you can cover in a lifetime. So you end up with half baked buggy and insecure solutions that do sort of work on the happy path but that also include a ton of stuff that wasn't supposed to be there in the first place but that wasn't explicitly spelled out in the test set (which is a pretty good reflection of my typical interaction with AI). The whole thing hinges on whether or not that can be fixed. But I'm looking forward to reading someone's vibe coded solution that is in production at some presumably secure installation. I'm going to bet that 'I blame the AI' is a pattern what we will be seeing a lot of.
  - exmadscientist 9mo ago
    In the long run, it's going to become about specifications. Code is valuable because it tells computers what you want them to do. If that can be done at a higher level, by writing a great specification that lets some AI dark factory somewhere just write the app for you in an hour, then the code is now worthless but the spec is as valuable as the code ever was. You can just recode the entire app any time you want a change! And even if AI deletes itself from existence or whatever, a detailed specification is still worth a lot. Whoever figures out how to describe useful software in a way that can get AI agents to reliably rebuild it from human-authored specifications is going to get a lot of attention over the next ~decade.
observationist 9mo ago
There's this notion of software maintenance - that software which serves a purpose must be perennially updated and changed - which is a huge, rancid fallacy. If the software tool performs the task it's designed to perform, and the user gets utility out of it, it doesn't matter if the software is a decade old and hasn't been updated. Sometimes it might, if there are security implications. You might need to fix bugs in networking code, or update crypto handling, or whatever, and those types of things are fine. The idea that you can't have legitimately useful one-off software, used by millions, despite not being updated, is a silly artifact of the MBA takeover of big tech. Continuous development is not intrinsic to the "goodness" of software. Sometimes it's a big disappointment if software hasn't been updated consistently, but other times, it just doesnt matter. I've got scripts, little apps, tools, things that I've used, sometimes daily, for over a decade, that never ever ever get updated, and I'd be annoyed if I had to. They have simple tasks to perform that they do well; you dont need all the rest of the "and now we have liquid glass icons! oh, and mandatory telemetry, and if you want ads to go away, you must pay for a premium subscription" The value is in the utility - the work done by the software. How much effort and maintenance goes into creating it often has nothing to do with how useful it is. Look at windows 11 - hundreds of billions of dollars and years of development and maintenance and it's a steaming pile of horseshit. They're driving people to Linux in record numbers. Blender is a counter example. They're constructive and deliberate. What's likely to happen is everyone will have AI access to built-on-the-fly apps and tools that they retain for future use, and platforms will consolidate and optimize the available tools, and nobody will need to vibe-code or engage in extensive software development when their AI butler can do all the software work they might need done.
- jacquesm 9mo ago
  Sure, but the reason why this is the case is simple: writing software is easy. Writing good software is stupendously hard. So all those manyears that went into maintaining software were effectively just hardening, polishing bug fixes and slow adjustment to changing requirements and new situations. If you throw it all out whenever the requirements change you never and up with something that is secure or as bug free as you can make it.
- anyonecancode 9mo ago
lifetimerubyist 9mo ago
[dead]
vunderba 9mo ago
> The problem with AI is that it's giving these people hyper-ADHD Shouldn't be a problem - I've seen AT LEAST half a dozen almost-assuredly vibe coded projects related to dealing with ADHD in the last month... Show HN: I gamified a productivity app to help my ADHD friends get things done https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46797212 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46797212 Show HN: built a 24h-clock based radial planner to help with ADHD time blindness https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46668890 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46668890 Show HN: DayZen: Visual day planner for ADHD brains https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46742799 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46742799 Show HN: ADHD Focus Light https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46537708 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46537708 Show HN: I built Focusmo – a focus app for ADHD time-blindness https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46695618 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46695618 Show HN: Local-First ADHD Planner for Windows and Android https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46646188 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46646188
ben_w 9mo ago
> One of other authors he links to[0] brags that he's released 10 projects in the past month, like "Super Xtreme Mapper, a high-end, professional MIDI mapping software for professional DJs", which has 4 stars on Github. Despite the "high-end, professional...for professional" description, literally no one is going to use it, because this guy can't [be trusted to] maintain this software. Even if Claude Code is doing all the work, adding all the features, and fixing all the bugs, someone has to issue the command to do that work, and to foot the bill. This guy is just spraying code around and snorting digital coke. While I'd expect almost nobody to use apps meeting this description, I disagree about why: It's not that other people have to foot the bill, it's that the bill is so low that it's a question of this particular app being discovered amongst all the others. $15/month is a rounding error on most budgets. If every musician buys a Claude subscription and prompts for their own variations on this idea, there's a few million other apps that also do all that this app does, which vary from completely identical (because the prompts themselves were also) to utterly personalised for the particular preferences of exactly one artist.

by saulpw 9mo ago

bigfishrunning 9mo ago

> snorting digital coke What an apt description -- the website on the other side of that link is the most coked-out design I've ever seen.

Dr_Birdbrain 9mo ago

My feeling is that AI-generated code is disposable code. It’s great if you can quickly stand up a tool that scratches an itch for you, but there is minimal value in it for other people, and it probably doesn’t make sense to share it in a repo. Other people could just quickly vibe-code something of equal quality.

thewebguyd 9mo ago
That's how I've been using and treating it, though I'm not primarily a developer. I work in ops, and LLMs write all sorts of disposable code for me. Primarily one-off scripts or little personal utilities. These don't get shared with anyone else, or put on github, etc. but have been incredibly helpful. SQL queries, some python to clean up or dig through some data sets, log files, etc. to spit out a quick result when something more robust or permanent isn't needed. Plus, so far, LLMs seem better at writing code to do a thing over directly doing the thing, where it's more likely to hallucinate, especially when it comes to working with large CSV or Json files. "Re-order this CSV file to be in Alphabetical order by the Name field" will make up fake data, but "Write a python script to order the Name filed in this CSV to be alphabetical" will succeed.
- QuercusMax 9mo ago
  That's exactly my experience as well. AI will read only the first 100 lines of a file, decide that's good enough, and spit out a garbage result. But ask it to write a bash one-liner and it will work perfectly.
- knollimar 9mo ago
  I've had large successes in using it to draft electrical drawings faster (more a symptom of the tools I have now being mediocre)
  - dwd 9mo ago
    Did a lot of contract development work nearly 20 years ago on a product called Solutions Electrical (1) that looks to still be around. It crossed my mind recently whether a LLM would be able to meet all the various International standards and eat into that market. (1) https://solutionselectricalsoftware.com/ https://solutionselectricalsoftware.com/
WorldMaker 9mo ago
My growing (cynical) feeling is that AI-generated code is legacy-code-as-a-service. It is by nature trained on other people and company's legacy code. (There's the training set window which is always in the past. There's the economics question of which companies would ever volunteer to opt-in their best proprietary production code into training sets. Sure there are a few entirely open source companies, but those are still the exception and not the rule.) "Vibe code" is essentially delivered as Day Zero "Legacy Code" in the sense that the person who wrote that code is essentially no longer at the company (even if context windows get extended to incredibly huge sizes and you have great prompt preservation tools, eventually you no longer have the original context and not to mention that the Models themselves retrain and get upgraded every so many months are essentially "different people" each time. But most importantly the Models themselves can't tell you the motivating "how" or "why" of anything, at best maybe good specs documents and prompts do, but even that can be a gamble). The article starts with a lot of words about how the meaning and nature of "tech debt" are going to change a lot as AI adoption increases and more vibe coding happens, but I think I disagree on what that change means. I don't AI reduces "tech debt". I don't think it is "deflationary" in any way. I think AI are going to gift us a world of tech debt "hyperinflation". When every application in a company is "legacy code" all you have is tech debt. Having worked in companies with lots of legacy code, the thing you learn is that those apps are never as disposable as you want to believe. The sunk cost fallacy kicks in. (Generative AI Tokens are currently cheap, but cheap isn't free. Budgets still exist.) Various status quo fallacies kick in: "that's how the system has always worked", "we have to ensure every new version is backwards compatible with the old version", "we can't break anyone's existing process/workflow", "we can't require retraining", "we need 1:1 all the same features", and so forth. You can't just "vibe code" something of equal quality if you can't even figure out what "equal quality" means. That's many the death of a legacy code "rewrite project". By the time you've figured out how every user uses it (including how many bugs are load-bearing features in someone's process) you have too many requirements to consider, not enough time or budget left, and eventually a mandate to quit and "not fix what isn't broken". (Except it was broken enough to start up a discovery process at least once, and may do so again when the next team thinks they can dream up a budget for it.) Tech debt isn't going away and tech debt isn't getting eliminated. Tech Debt is getting baked into Day Zero of production operations. (Projects may be starting already "in hock to creditors". The article says "Dark Software Factory" but I read "Dark Software Pawn Shop".) Tech debt is potentially increasing at a faster than human scale of understanding it. I feel like Legacy Code skills are going to be in higher demand than ever. It is maybe going to be "deflationary" in cost for those jobs but only because the supply of Legacy Code projects will be so high and software developers will have a buffet to choose from.

galaxyLogic 9mo ago

Software products are about unique competitive value that grows over time. Products have it or not. AI produced software is like open source in a sense, you get something for free. But whose gonna get rich if everybody can just duplicate your product by asking AI to do it, again? Think of investing in the stock market by asking AI to do all the trading, for you. Great maybe you make some money. But when everybody catches on that it is better to let the AI do the trading, then others's AI is gonna buy the same stocks as yours, and their price goes up. Less value for you.

jacquesm 9mo ago
Spot on. That's why so far all of the supposed solutions to 'the programmer problem' have failed. Whether this time it will be different I don't know. But originally compilers were supposed to kill off the programmers. Then it was 3G and 4G languages (70's, 80's). Then it was 'no code' which eventually became 'low code' because those pesky edge cases kept cropping up. Now it is AI, the 'dark factory' and other fearmongering. I'll believe it when I see it. Another HN'er has pointed me into an interesting direction that I think is more realistic: AI will become a tool in the toolbox that will allow experts to do what they did before but faster and hopefully better. It will also be the tool that will generate a ton of really, really bad code that people will indeed not look at because they can not afford to look at it: you can generate more work for a person in a few seconds of compute time than you can cover in a lifetime. So you end up with half baked buggy and insecure solutions that do sort of work on the happy path but that also include a ton of stuff that wasn't supposed to be there in the first place but that wasn't explicitly spelled out in the test set (which is a pretty good reflection of my typical interaction with AI). The whole thing hinges on whether or not that can be fixed. But I'm looking forward to reading someone's vibe coded solution that is in production at some presumably secure installation. I'm going to bet that 'I blame the AI' is a pattern what we will be seeing a lot of.
- exmadscientist 9mo ago
  In the long run, it's going to become about specifications. Code is valuable because it tells computers what you want them to do. If that can be done at a higher level, by writing a great specification that lets some AI dark factory somewhere just write the app for you in an hour, then the code is now worthless but the spec is as valuable as the code ever was. You can just recode the entire app any time you want a change! And even if AI deletes itself from existence or whatever, a detailed specification is still worth a lot. Whoever figures out how to describe useful software in a way that can get AI agents to reliably rebuild it from human-authored specifications is going to get a lot of attention over the next ~decade.

observationist 9mo ago

There's this notion of software maintenance - that software which serves a purpose must be perennially updated and changed - which is a huge, rancid fallacy. If the software tool performs the task it's designed to perform, and the user gets utility out of it, it doesn't matter if the software is a decade old and hasn't been updated. Sometimes it might, if there are security implications. You might need to fix bugs in networking code, or update crypto handling, or whatever, and those types of things are fine. The idea that you can't have legitimately useful one-off software, used by millions, despite not being updated, is a silly artifact of the MBA takeover of big tech. Continuous development is not intrinsic to the "goodness" of software. Sometimes it's a big disappointment if software hasn't been updated consistently, but other times, it just doesnt matter. I've got scripts, little apps, tools, things that I've used, sometimes daily, for over a decade, that never ever ever get updated, and I'd be annoyed if I had to. They have simple tasks to perform that they do well; you dont need all the rest of the "and now we have liquid glass icons! oh, and mandatory telemetry, and if you want ads to go away, you must pay for a premium subscription" The value is in the utility - the work done by the software. How much effort and maintenance goes into creating it often has nothing to do with how useful it is. Look at windows 11 - hundreds of billions of dollars and years of development and maintenance and it's a steaming pile of horseshit. They're driving people to Linux in record numbers. Blender is a counter example. They're constructive and deliberate. What's likely to happen is everyone will have AI access to built-on-the-fly apps and tools that they retain for future use, and platforms will consolidate and optimize the available tools, and nobody will need to vibe-code or engage in extensive software development when their AI butler can do all the software work they might need done.

jacquesm 9mo ago
Sure, but the reason why this is the case is simple: writing software is easy. Writing good software is stupendously hard. So all those manyears that went into maintaining software were effectively just hardening, polishing bug fixes and slow adjustment to changing requirements and new situations. If you throw it all out whenever the requirements change you never and up with something that is secure or as bug free as you can make it.
anyonecancode 9mo ago

lifetimerubyist 9mo ago

[dead]

vunderba 9mo ago

> The problem with AI is that it's giving these people hyper-ADHD Shouldn't be a problem - I've seen AT LEAST half a dozen almost-assuredly vibe coded projects related to dealing with ADHD in the last month... Show HN: I gamified a productivity app to help my ADHD friends get things done https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46797212 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46797212 Show HN: built a 24h-clock based radial planner to help with ADHD time blindness https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46668890 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46668890 Show HN: DayZen: Visual day planner for ADHD brains https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46742799 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46742799 Show HN: ADHD Focus Light https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46537708 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46537708 Show HN: I built Focusmo – a focus app for ADHD time-blindness https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46695618 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46695618 Show HN: Local-First ADHD Planner for Windows and Android https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46646188 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46646188

ben_w 9mo ago

> One of other authors he links to[0] brags that he's released 10 projects in the past month, like "Super Xtreme Mapper, a high-end, professional MIDI mapping software for professional DJs", which has 4 stars on Github. Despite the "high-end, professional...for professional" description, literally no one is going to use it, because this guy can't [be trusted to] maintain this software. Even if Claude Code is doing all the work, adding all the features, and fixing all the bugs, someone has to issue the command to do that work, and to foot the bill. This guy is just spraying code around and snorting digital coke. While I'd expect almost nobody to use apps meeting this description, I disagree about why: It's not that other people have to foot the bill, it's that the bill is so low that it's a question of this particular app being discovered amongst all the others. $15/month is a rounding error on most budgets. If every musician buys a Claude subscription and prompts for their own variations on this idea, there's a few million other apps that also do all that this app does, which vary from completely identical (because the prompts themselves were also) to utterly personalised for the particular preferences of exactly one artist.