8 ms·

It's very interesting to me how many people presume that if you don't learn how to vibecode now you'll never ever be able to catch up. If the models are constan

• deleted 8mo ago
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• koolba 8mo ago
  And if you can never catch up, how would someone new to the game ever be a meaningful player?
  • eddythompson80 8mo ago
    If you’ve never driven a model T, how would you ever drive a corolla? If you never did angular 1, how would you ever learn react? If you never used UNIX 4, you’ll be behind in Linux today. /s
• dns_snek 8mo ago
  I think so, that's why I think that the risk of pretty much ignoring the space is close to zero. If I happen to be catastrophically wrong about everything then any AI skills I would've learned today will be completely useless 5 years from now anyway, just like skills from early days of ChatGPT are completely useless today.
• wiseowise 8mo ago
  FOMO is hell of a drug.
• gerdesj 8mo ago
  Wait around five years and then prompt: "Vibe me Windows" and then install your smart new double glazed floor. There is definitely something useful happening in LLM land but it is not and will never be AGI. Oooh, let me dive in with an analogy: Screwdriver. Metal screws needed inventing first - they augment or replace dowels, nails, glue, "joints" (think tenon/dovetail etc), nuts and bolts and many more fixings. Early screws were simply slotted. PH (Philips cross head) and PZ (Pozidrive) came rather later. All of these require quite a lot of wrist effort. If you have ever screwed a few 100 screws in a session then you know it is quite an effort. Drill driver. I'm not talking about one of those electric screw driver thingies but say a De W or Maq or whatever jobbies. They will have a Li-ion battery and have a chuck capable of holding something like a 10mm shank, round or hex. It'll have around 15 torque settings, two or three speed settings, drill and hammer drill settings. Usually you have two - one to drill and one to drive. I have one that will seriously wrench your wrist if you allow it to. You need to know how to use your legs or whatever to block the handle from spinning when the torque gets a bit much. ... You can use a modern drill driver to deploy a small screw (PZ1, 2.5mm) to a PZ3 20+cm effort. It can also drill with a long auger bit or hammer drill up to around 20mm and 400mm deep. All jolly exciting. I still use an "old school" screwdriver or twenty. There are times when you need to feel the screw (without deploying an inadvertent double entendre). I do find the new search engines very useful. I will always put up with some mild hallucinations to avoid social.microsoft and nerd.linux.bollocks and the like.
• logicprog 8mo ago
  Yup, this is why even though I like ai coding a lot, and am pretty enthusiastic about it, and have fun tinkering with it, and think it will stick around and become part of everyday proper software development practice (with guardrails in place), I at least don't go telling people they need to learn it now or they'll be obsolete or whatever. Sitting back and seeing how this all works out — nobody really knows imo, I could be wrong too! — is a valid choice and if ai does stick around you can just hop in when the landscape is clearer!
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• holoduke 8mo ago
  Model improvement. But certainly also the cli tool itself. That's where all the planning takes place
• ares623 8mo ago
  That's my take. I know LLMs arent going away even if the bubble pops. I refuse to become a KPI in some PM's promotion to justify pushing this tech even further, so for now I don't use it (unless work mandates it). Until then, I keep up and add my voice to the growing number who oppose this clear threat on worker rights. And when the bubble pops or when work mandates it, I can catch up in a week or two easy peasy. This shit is not hard, it is literally designed to be easy. In fact, everything I learn the old way between now and then will only add to the things I can leverage when I find myself using these things in the future.
• raincole 8mo ago
  The image generation side of the story is the prophecy. I can confidently say that being able to prompt and train LoRAs for Stable Diffusion makes zero difference for your ability to prompt Nano Banana.
  • aeon_ai 8mo ago
    And most artists using the tools are still training LoRAs for Flux, Qwen, ZIT/ZIB, etc. Nano Banana is a useful tool, but not for the best work.
    • wokwokwok 8mo ago
      This is irrelevant to the point. Using nano banana does not require arcane prompt engineering. People who have not learnt image prompt engineering probably didn't miss anything. The irony of prompt engineering is that models are good at generating prompts. Future tools will almost certainly simply “improve” you naive prompt before passing it to the model. Claude already does this for code. Id be amazed if nano banana doesnt. People who invested in learning prompt engineering probably picked up useful skills for building ai tools but not for using next gen ai tools other people make. Its not wasted effort; its just increasingly irrelevant to people doing day-to-day BAU work. If the api prevents you from passing a raw prompt to the model, prompt engineering at that level isnt just unnecessary; its irrelevant. Your prompt will be transformed into an unknown internal prompt before hitting the model.
      • raincole 8mo ago
        > Claude already does this for code. Id be amazed if nano banana doesnt. Nano Banana is actually a reasoning model so yeah it kinda does, but not in the way one might assume. If you use the api you can dump the text part and it's usually huge (and therefore expensive, which is one drawback of it. It can even have "imagery thinking" process...!)
• Sateeshm 8mo ago
  It's hilarious. The whole point of "vibe coding" is that you don't need to learn or know anything. It's like saying if you don't learn to use a smartphone you'll be left behind. Even babies can use it now.
  • getnormality 8mo ago
    That's another dumb thing that unfortunately some people can be led to believe. There have been parents who genuinely thought that screen time would make their kids digitally savvy and prepared for the future.
    • rienbdj 8mo ago
      Leave them with an old Toshiba and an Ubuntu cd. Good luck kid.
      • oblio 8mo ago
        Nah, a pile of PC parts and DOS and Doom floppies.
    • fragmede 8mo ago
      It has worked out quite well for some of them, but there's a lot of devil in the details of the implementation of that screentime that led to eg Mark Zuckerberg vs Markiplier.
  • mettamage 8mo ago
    Even if that were true you'd still need to be good at UX
    • kolinko 8mo ago
      The new claude/opus, esp, with additional skills is actually pretty decent with UX.
  • generallyjosh 8mo ago
    I do think there's value in trying out fully vibe coding some toy projects today (probably nothing real or security sensitive haha). The AI will get better at compensating, but I think some of it's weaknesses are fundamental, and are going to be showing up in some form or another for a while yet Ex, the AI doesn't know about what you don't tell it. There's a LOT of context we take for granted while programming (especially in a corporate environment). Recognizing what sort of context is useful to give the AI without distracting it (and under what conditions it should load/forget context), I think is going to be a very valuable skill over the next few years. That's a skill you can start building now
• danny_codes 8mo ago
  Exactly. If it’s so easy (which is the point) then there’s no risk at all. Just pick it up if/when it’s definitely useful.
• retsibsi 8mo ago
  I think the AI-coding skill that is likely to remain useful is the ability (and discipline) to review and genuinely understand the code produced by the AI before committing it. I don't have that skill; I find that if I'm using AI, I'm strongly drawn toward the lazy approach. At the moment, the only way for me to actually understand the code I'm producing is to write it all myself. (That puts my brain into an active coding/puzzle solving state, rather than a passive energy-saving state.) If I could have the best of both worlds, that would be a genuine win, and I don't think it's impossible. It won't save as much time as pure vibe coding promises to, of course.
  • palmotea 8mo ago
    > I think the AI-coding skill that is likely to remain useful is the ability (and discipline) to review and genuinely understand the code produced by the AI before committing it. > I don't have that skill; I find that if I'm using AI, I'm strongly drawn toward the lazy approach. At the moment, the only way for me to actually understand the code I'm producing is to write it all myself. (That puts my brain into an active coding/puzzle solving state, rather than a passive energy-saving state.) When I review code, I try to genuinely understand it, but it's a huge mental drain. It's just a slog, and I'm tired at the end. Very little flow state. Writing code can get me into a flow state. That's why I pretty much only use LLMs to vibecode one-off scripts and do code reviews (after my own manual review, to see if it can catch something I missed). Anything more would be too exhausting.
    • gilleain 8mo ago
      I've had reasonable results from using AI to analyse code ("convert this code into a method call graph in graphml format" or similar). Apart from hallucinating one of the edges, this worked reasonably well to throw this into yED and give me a view on the code. An alternative that occurred to me the other day is, could a PR be broken down into separate changes? As in, break it into a) a commit renaming a variable b) another commit making the functional change c) ... Feel like there are PR analysis tools out there already for this :)
  • svantana 8mo ago
• rtpg 8mo ago
  I do think that there's some meta-skills involved here that are useful, in the same way that some people have good "Google-fu". Some of it is portable, some of it isn't. I think if you orient your experimentation right you can think of some good tactics that are helpful even when you're not using AI assistance. "Making this easier for the robot" can often align with "making this easier for the humans" as well. It's a decent forcing function Though I agree with the sentiment. People who have been doing this for less than a year convinced that they have some permanent lead over everyone. I think a lot about my years being self taught programming. Years spent spinning my wheels. I know people who after 3 months of a coding bootcamp were much further than me after like ... 6 years of me struggling through material.
  • bryanrasmussen 8mo ago
    > in the same way that some people have good "Google-fu" or, perhaps, in the same way that google-fu over time became devalued as a skill as Google became less useful for power users in order to cater to the needs of the unskilled, it will not really be a portable skill at all, because it is in the end a transitory or perhaps easily attainable skill once the technology is evenly distributed.
    • rtpg 8mo ago
      Perhaps, but in Google's case that's, what, 10 years of value I got out of knowing how to write good searches? Probably more honestly. Everything is temporary to some extent.
  • croes 8mo ago
    Are the early tricks for LLMs still useful today?
    • rtpg 8mo ago
      I mean the high level stuff is still there right? Be straightforward, leave the right kind of pointers into the thing, say the right kind of things. But... I guess nowadays you can be vague and it'll get the gist of it.
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• ChrisMarshallNY 8mo ago
  A good analogy might be synthesized music. In the early days, the interfaces were so complex and technical, that only engineers could use them. Some of these early musicians were truly amazing individuals; real renaissance people. They understood the theory, and had true artistic vision. The knew how to ride the tiger, and could develop great music, fairly efficiently. A lot of others, not so much. They twiddled knobs at random, and spent a lot of effort, panning for gold dust. Sometimes, they would have a hit, but they wasted a lot of energy on dead ends. Once the UI improved (like the release of the Korg M1 sampler), then real artists could enter the fray, and that’s when the hockey stick bent. Not exactly sure what AI’s Korg M1 will be, but I don’t think we’re there, yet.
  • fragmede 8mo ago
    I think we are. I'm helping somebody who has a non-technical background and taught himself how to vibe code and built a thing. The code is split into two GitHub repos when it should have been one, and one of the repos is named hetzner-something because that's what he's using and he "doesn't really understand tech shit"
    • ChrisMarshallNY 8mo ago
      That sounds a lot like “twiddling knobs at random,” to me.
      • fragmede 8mo ago
        > Sometimes, they would have a hit, but they wasted a lot of energy on dead ends. We'll see which one it is in a few months.
        • ChrisMarshallNY 8mo ago
          Common sense. If you can use an imperfect tool, perfectly, you’ll beat people using them imperfectly. As long as the tool is imperfect, you won’t have much competition. That’s where we are, right now. Good engineers are learning how to use klunky LLMs. They will beat out the Dunning-Kruger crew. Once the tool becomes perfect, then that allows less-technical users into the tent, which means a much larger pool of creativity.
• NiloCK 8mo ago
  I think there's something to this, but I also there there's something to the notion that it'll get easier and easier to do mass-market work with them, but at the same time they'll become greater and greater force multipliers for more and more nuanced power users. It is strange because the tech now moves much faster than the development of human expertise. Nobody on earth achieved Sonnet 3.5 mastery, in the 10k hours sense, because the model didn't exist long enough. Prior intuitions about skill development, and indeed prior scientifically based best practices, do not cleanly apply.
• linsomniac 8mo ago
  >if you don't learn how to vibecode now you'll never ever be able to catch up There's a dissonance I see where people talk about using AI tools leading to an atrophy of their abilities to work with code, but then expecting that they need no mastery to be able to use the AI tooling. Will the AI tooling become so much better that you need little to no mastery to use it? Maybe. Will those who have a lot of fundamentals developed over years of using the tooling still be better with that tooling than the "newbs"? Maybe.
• anthonypasq96 8mo ago
  knowing how to properly use AI is a skill, there are new tools, new patterns, new primitives etc. you will be unpracticed.
• xnx 8mo ago
  There is a huge amount of superstition around prompting. I've copied and pasted elaborate paragraph long results and then gotten. Same or better results with only a few words. People write long prompts primarily to convince themselves that they're casting some advanced spell. As long as the system prompt is good you should start very simply and only expand if results are unsatisfactory.
• shaky-carrousel 8mo ago
  It's like some companies with huge interests are spreading FOMO, isn't it?