32 ms·

We said the same thing when 3D printing came out. Any sort of cool tech, we think everybody’s going to do it. Most people are not capable of doing it. in colleg

We said the same thing when 3D printing came out. Any sort of cool tech, we think everybody’s going to do it. Most people are not capable of doing it. in college everybody was going to be an engineer and then they drop out after the first intro to physics or calculus class. A bunch of my non tech friends were vibe coding some tools with replit and lovable and I looked at their stuff and yeah it was neat but it wasn't gonna go anywhere and if it did go somewhere, they would need to find somebody who actually knows what they're doing. To actually execute on these things takes a different kind of thinking. Unless we get to the stage where it's just like magic genie, lol. Maybe then everybody’s going to vibe their own software.

gjk3 8mo ago
Thank you for posting this. Im really tired, and exhausted of reading simple takes. Grok is a very capable LLM that can produce decent videos. Why are most garbage? Because NOT EVERYONE HAS THE SKILL NOR THE WILL TO DO IT WELL!
- ghurtado 8mo ago
  The answer is taste. I don't know if they will ever get there, but LLMs are a long ways away from having decent creative taste. Which means they are just another tool in the artist's toolbox, not a tool that will replace the artist. Same as every other tool before it: amazing in capable hands, boring in the hands of the average person.
  - gjk3 8mo ago
    100% correct. Taste is the correct term - I avoid using it as Im not sure many people here actually get what it truly means. How can I proclaim what I said in the comment above? Because Ive spent the past week producing something very high quality with Grok. Has it been easy? Hell no. Could anyone just pick up and do what Ive done? Hell no. It requires things like patience, artistry, taste etc etc. The current tech is soul-less in most people hands and it should remain used in a narrow range in this context. The last thing I want to see is low quality slop infesting the web. But hey that is not what the model producers want - they want to maximize tokens.
    - trimethylpurine 8mo ago
      The job of a coder has far from become obsolete, as you're saying. It's definitely changed to almost entirely just code review though. With Opus 4.6 I'm seeing that it copies my code style, which makes code review incredibly easy, too. At this point, I've come around to seeing that writing code is really just for education so that you can learn the gotchas of architecture and support. And maybe just to set up the beginnings of an app, so that the LLM can mimic something that makes sense to you, for easy reading. And all that does mean fewer jobs, to me. Two guys instead of six or more. All that said, there's still plenty to do in infrastructure and distributed systems, optimizations, network engineering, etc. For now, anyway.
  - Wowfunhappy 8mo ago
    Also, if you are a human who does taste, it's very difficult to get an AI to create exactly what you want. You can nudge it, and little by little get closer to what you're imagining, but you're never really in control. This matters less for text (including code) because you can always directly edit what the AI outputs. I think it's a lot harder for video.
    - josephg 8mo ago
      > Also, if you are a human who does taste, it's very difficult to get an AI to create exactly what you want. I wonder if it would be possible to fine train an AI model on my own code. I've probably got about 100k lines of code on github. If I fed all that code into a model, it would probably get much better at programming like me. Including matching my commenting style and all of my little obsessions. Talking about a "taste gap" sounds good. But LLMs seem like they'd be spectacularly good at learning to mimic someone's "taste" in a fine train.
      - Wowfunhappy 8mo ago
        Maybe, but you do have to do the work to train it first. And at least so far, LLMs always seem to be inarguably worse than the “original”.
        josephg 8mo ago
        > LLMs always seem to be inarguably worse than the “original”. True. But quantity has a quality of its own. I'm personally delighted at the idea of outsourcing all the boring cookie cutter programming work to an AI. Things like writing CSS, plumbing between my database, backend server and web UI. Writing and maintaining tests. All the stuff that I've done 100 times before and I just hate doing by hand over and over again. There's lots of areas where it doesn't really matter that the code it produces isn't beautifully terse and performant. Sometimes you just need to get something working. AIs can do weeks of work in an afternoon. The quality isn't as good. But for some tasks, that's an excellent trade.
  - majormajor 8mo ago
    Taste is both driven by tools and independent of it. It's driven by it in the sense that better tools and the democratization of them changes people's baseline expectations. It's independent of it in that doing the baseline will not stand out. Jurassic Park's VFX stood out in 1993. They wouldn't have in 2003. They largely would've looked amateurish and derivative in 2013 (though many aspects of shot framing/tracking and such held up, the effects themselves are noticeably primitive). Art will survive AI tools for that reason. But commerce and "productivity" could be quite different because those are rarely about taste.
jwpapi 8mo ago
This goes well along with all my non-tech and even tech co-workers. Honestly the value generation leverage I have now is 10x or more then it was before compared to other people. HN is a echo chamber of a very small sub group. The majority of people can’t utilize it and needs to have this further dumbed down and specialized. That’s why marketing and conversion rate optimization works, its not all about the technical stuff, its about knowing what people need. For funded VC companies often the game was not much different, it was just part of the expenses, sometimes a lot sometimes a smaller part. But eventually you could just buy the software you need, but that didn’t guarantee success. Their were dramatic failures and outstanding successes, and I wish it wouldn’t but most of the time the codebase was not the deciding factor. (Sometimes it was, airtable, twitch etc, bless the engineers, but I don’t believe AI would have solved these problems)
- toyg 8mo ago
  > The majority of people can’t utilize it Tbh, depending on the field, even this crowd will need further dumbing down. Just look at the blog illustration slops - 99% of them are just terrible, even when the text is actually valuable. That's because people's judgement of value, outside their field of expertise, is typically really bad. A trained cook can look at some chatgpt recipe and go "this is stupid and it will taste horrible", whereas the average HN techbro/nerd (like yours truly) will think it's great -- until they actually taste it, that is.
  - gjk3 8mo ago
    Agreed. This place amazes in regards to how overly confident some people feel stepping outside of their domains.. the mistakes I see here in relation to talking about subject areas associated with corporate finance, valuation etc is hilarious. Truly hilarious.
  - Maxion 8mo ago
    > whereas the average HN techbro/nerd (like yours truly) will think it's great -- until they actually taste it, that is. This is the schtick though, most people wouldn't even be able to tell when they taste it. This is typically how it works, the average person simply lacks the knowledge so they don't even know what is possible.
WarmWash 8mo ago
Its not our current location, but our trajectory that is scary. The walls and plateaus that have been consistently pulled out from "comments of reassurance" have not materialized. If this pace holds for another year and a half, things are going to be very different. And the pipeline is absolutely overflowing with specialized compute coming online by the gigawatt for the foreseeable future. So far the most accurate predictions in the AI space have been from the most optimistic forecasters.
- uplifter 8mo ago
  There is a distribution of optimism, some people in 2023 were predicting AGI by 2025. No such thing as trajectory when it comes to mass behavior because it can turn on a dime if people find reason to. Thats what makes civilization so fun.
- oblio 8mo ago
  https://xkcd.com/605/ https://xkcd.com/605/
nprz 8mo ago
You can basically hand it a design, one that might take a FE engineer anywhere from a day to a week to complete and Codex/Claude will basically have it coded up in 30 seconds. It might need some tweaks, but it's 80% complete with that first try. Like I remember stumbling over graphing and charting libraries, it could take weeks to become familiar with all the different components and APIs, but seemingly you can now just tell Codex to use this data and use this charting library and it'll make it. All you have to do is look at the code. Things have certainly changed.
- skydhash 8mo ago
  > You can basically hand it a design And, pray tell, how people are going to come up with such design?
  - nprz 8mo ago
    Honestly you could just come up with a basic wireframe in any design software (MS paint would work) and a screen shot of a website with a design you like and tell it "apply the aesthetic from the website in this screenshot to the wireframe" and it would probably get 80% (probably more) of the way there. Something that would have taken me more than a day in the past.
    - prawn 8mo ago
      I've been in web design since images were first introduced to browsers and modern designs for the majority of sites are more templated than ever. AI can already generate inspiration, prototypes and designs that go a long way to matching these, then juice them with transitions/animations or whatever else you might want. The other day I tested an AI by giving it a folder of images, each named to describe the content/use/proportions (e.g., drone-overview-hero-landscape.jpg), told it the site it was redesigning, and it did a very serviceable job that would match at least a cheap designer. On the first run, in a few seconds and with a very basic prompt. Obviously with a different AI, it could understand the image contents and skip that step easily enough.
    - IAmGraydon 8mo ago
satvikpendem 8mo ago
> To actually execute on these things takes a different kind of thinking Agreed. Honestly, and I hate to use the tired phrase, but some people are literally just built different. Those who'd be entrepreneurs would have been so in any time period with any technology.
intended 8mo ago
3 things 1) I don’t disagree with the spirit of your argument 2) 3D printing has higher startup costs than code (you need to buy the damn printer) 3) YOU are making a distinction when it comes to vibe coding from non-tech people. The way these tools are being sold, the way investments are being made, is based on non-domain people developing domain specific taste. This last part “reasonable” argument ends up serving as a bait and switch, shielding these investments. I might be wrong, but your comment doesn’t indicate that you believe the hype.
josephg 8mo ago
I don't think claude code is like 3d printing. The difference is that 3D printing still requires someone, somewhere to do the mechanical design work. It democratises printing but it doesn't democratise invention. I can't use words to ask a 3d printer to make something. You can't really do that with claude code yet either. But every few months it gets better at this. The question is: How good will claude get at turning open-ended problem statements into useful software? Right now a skilled human + computer combo is the most efficient way to write a lot of software. Left on its own, claude will make mistakes and suffer from a slow accumulation of bad architectural decisions. But, will that remain the case indefinitely? I'm not convinced. This pattern has already played out in chess and go. For a few years, a skilled Go player working in collaboration with a go AI could outcompete both computers and humans at go. But that era didn't last. Now computers can play Go at superhuman levels. Our skills are no longer required. I predict programming will follow the same trajectory. There are already some companies using fine tuned AI models for "red team" infosec audits. Apparently they're already pretty good at finding a lot of creative bugs that humans miss. (And apparently they find an extraordinary number of security bugs in code written by AI models). It seems like a pretty obvious leap to imagine claude code implementing something similar before long. Then claude will be able to do security audits on its own output. Throw that in a reinforcement learning loop, and claude will probably become better at producing secure code than I am.
- prpl 8mo ago
  There is verification and validation. The first part is making sure you built to your specification, the second thing is making sure you built specification was correct. The second part is going to be the hard part for complex software and systems.
  - josephg 8mo ago
    I think validation is already much easier using LLMs. Arguably this is one of the best use cases for coding LLMs right now: you can get claude to throw together a working demo of whatever wild idea you have without needing to write any code or write a spec. You don't even need to be a developer. I don't know about you, but I'd much rather be shown a demo made by our end users (with claude) than get sent a 100 page spec. Especially since most specs - if you build to them - don't solve anyone's real problems. Demo, don't memo.
democracy 8mo ago
100%, it's like with "Suno" - everyone can create a good quality music/song basically in 2-3 minutes (and vibe programming can only do.... nothing in a few minutes) - how many new great bands and musicions we got )))))
- Otterly99 8mo ago
  You might not get great musicians from using Suno, but an ad company might decide to just generate a jingle rather than hire a musician to do it. Same with images/videos. The result might not be great, but the companies does it in 3 minutes and close-to-zero cost. Similarly, you can vibe-code a website for a restaurant (that does a very basic thing like display a menu, opening hours, maybe a google map location). It might not be the best, but you would be surprised at the amount of people that are willing to sacrifice quality for cheap prices.
  - democracy 8mo ago
    Sure, but it's nothing new - CMSes, website builders, no-code platforms, code generators - AI on top of a website builder can really help and it does help. But not building operating systems or Word from scratch for every person or company - this is just nuts.
- josephg 8mo ago
  I heard a stat on the economist podcast the other day talking about AI music production. They said spotify estimates 40% of songs on their platform are now AI generated. The AI generated songs make up 0.5% of total listening time. Low quality music made in bulk seems much less useful than low quality code made in bulk.

gjk3 8mo ago

Thank you for posting this. Im really tired, and exhausted of reading simple takes. Grok is a very capable LLM that can produce decent videos. Why are most garbage? Because NOT EVERYONE HAS THE SKILL NOR THE WILL TO DO IT WELL!

ghurtado 8mo ago
The answer is taste. I don't know if they will ever get there, but LLMs are a long ways away from having decent creative taste. Which means they are just another tool in the artist's toolbox, not a tool that will replace the artist. Same as every other tool before it: amazing in capable hands, boring in the hands of the average person.
- gjk3 8mo ago
  100% correct. Taste is the correct term - I avoid using it as Im not sure many people here actually get what it truly means. How can I proclaim what I said in the comment above? Because Ive spent the past week producing something very high quality with Grok. Has it been easy? Hell no. Could anyone just pick up and do what Ive done? Hell no. It requires things like patience, artistry, taste etc etc. The current tech is soul-less in most people hands and it should remain used in a narrow range in this context. The last thing I want to see is low quality slop infesting the web. But hey that is not what the model producers want - they want to maximize tokens.
  - trimethylpurine 8mo ago
    The job of a coder has far from become obsolete, as you're saying. It's definitely changed to almost entirely just code review though. With Opus 4.6 I'm seeing that it copies my code style, which makes code review incredibly easy, too. At this point, I've come around to seeing that writing code is really just for education so that you can learn the gotchas of architecture and support. And maybe just to set up the beginnings of an app, so that the LLM can mimic something that makes sense to you, for easy reading. And all that does mean fewer jobs, to me. Two guys instead of six or more. All that said, there's still plenty to do in infrastructure and distributed systems, optimizations, network engineering, etc. For now, anyway.
- Wowfunhappy 8mo ago
  Also, if you are a human who does taste, it's very difficult to get an AI to create exactly what you want. You can nudge it, and little by little get closer to what you're imagining, but you're never really in control. This matters less for text (including code) because you can always directly edit what the AI outputs. I think it's a lot harder for video.
  - josephg 8mo ago
    > Also, if you are a human who does taste, it's very difficult to get an AI to create exactly what you want. I wonder if it would be possible to fine train an AI model on my own code. I've probably got about 100k lines of code on github. If I fed all that code into a model, it would probably get much better at programming like me. Including matching my commenting style and all of my little obsessions. Talking about a "taste gap" sounds good. But LLMs seem like they'd be spectacularly good at learning to mimic someone's "taste" in a fine train.
    - Wowfunhappy 8mo ago
      Maybe, but you do have to do the work to train it first. And at least so far, LLMs always seem to be inarguably worse than the “original”.
      - josephg 8mo ago
        > LLMs always seem to be inarguably worse than the “original”. True. But quantity has a quality of its own. I'm personally delighted at the idea of outsourcing all the boring cookie cutter programming work to an AI. Things like writing CSS, plumbing between my database, backend server and web UI. Writing and maintaining tests. All the stuff that I've done 100 times before and I just hate doing by hand over and over again. There's lots of areas where it doesn't really matter that the code it produces isn't beautifully terse and performant. Sometimes you just need to get something working. AIs can do weeks of work in an afternoon. The quality isn't as good. But for some tasks, that's an excellent trade.
- majormajor 8mo ago
  Taste is both driven by tools and independent of it. It's driven by it in the sense that better tools and the democratization of them changes people's baseline expectations. It's independent of it in that doing the baseline will not stand out. Jurassic Park's VFX stood out in 1993. They wouldn't have in 2003. They largely would've looked amateurish and derivative in 2013 (though many aspects of shot framing/tracking and such held up, the effects themselves are noticeably primitive). Art will survive AI tools for that reason. But commerce and "productivity" could be quite different because those are rarely about taste.

jwpapi 8mo ago

This goes well along with all my non-tech and even tech co-workers. Honestly the value generation leverage I have now is 10x or more then it was before compared to other people. HN is a echo chamber of a very small sub group. The majority of people can’t utilize it and needs to have this further dumbed down and specialized. That’s why marketing and conversion rate optimization works, its not all about the technical stuff, its about knowing what people need. For funded VC companies often the game was not much different, it was just part of the expenses, sometimes a lot sometimes a smaller part. But eventually you could just buy the software you need, but that didn’t guarantee success. Their were dramatic failures and outstanding successes, and I wish it wouldn’t but most of the time the codebase was not the deciding factor. (Sometimes it was, airtable, twitch etc, bless the engineers, but I don’t believe AI would have solved these problems)

toyg 8mo ago
> The majority of people can’t utilize it Tbh, depending on the field, even this crowd will need further dumbing down. Just look at the blog illustration slops - 99% of them are just terrible, even when the text is actually valuable. That's because people's judgement of value, outside their field of expertise, is typically really bad. A trained cook can look at some chatgpt recipe and go "this is stupid and it will taste horrible", whereas the average HN techbro/nerd (like yours truly) will think it's great -- until they actually taste it, that is.
- gjk3 8mo ago
  Agreed. This place amazes in regards to how overly confident some people feel stepping outside of their domains.. the mistakes I see here in relation to talking about subject areas associated with corporate finance, valuation etc is hilarious. Truly hilarious.
- Maxion 8mo ago
  > whereas the average HN techbro/nerd (like yours truly) will think it's great -- until they actually taste it, that is. This is the schtick though, most people wouldn't even be able to tell when they taste it. This is typically how it works, the average person simply lacks the knowledge so they don't even know what is possible.

WarmWash 8mo ago

Its not our current location, but our trajectory that is scary. The walls and plateaus that have been consistently pulled out from "comments of reassurance" have not materialized. If this pace holds for another year and a half, things are going to be very different. And the pipeline is absolutely overflowing with specialized compute coming online by the gigawatt for the foreseeable future. So far the most accurate predictions in the AI space have been from the most optimistic forecasters.

uplifter 8mo ago
There is a distribution of optimism, some people in 2023 were predicting AGI by 2025. No such thing as trajectory when it comes to mass behavior because it can turn on a dime if people find reason to. Thats what makes civilization so fun.
oblio 8mo ago
https://xkcd.com/605/ https://xkcd.com/605/

nprz 8mo ago

You can basically hand it a design, one that might take a FE engineer anywhere from a day to a week to complete and Codex/Claude will basically have it coded up in 30 seconds. It might need some tweaks, but it's 80% complete with that first try. Like I remember stumbling over graphing and charting libraries, it could take weeks to become familiar with all the different components and APIs, but seemingly you can now just tell Codex to use this data and use this charting library and it'll make it. All you have to do is look at the code. Things have certainly changed.

skydhash 8mo ago
> You can basically hand it a design And, pray tell, how people are going to come up with such design?
- nprz 8mo ago
  Honestly you could just come up with a basic wireframe in any design software (MS paint would work) and a screen shot of a website with a design you like and tell it "apply the aesthetic from the website in this screenshot to the wireframe" and it would probably get 80% (probably more) of the way there. Something that would have taken me more than a day in the past.
  - prawn 8mo ago
    I've been in web design since images were first introduced to browsers and modern designs for the majority of sites are more templated than ever. AI can already generate inspiration, prototypes and designs that go a long way to matching these, then juice them with transitions/animations or whatever else you might want. The other day I tested an AI by giving it a folder of images, each named to describe the content/use/proportions (e.g., drone-overview-hero-landscape.jpg), told it the site it was redesigning, and it did a very serviceable job that would match at least a cheap designer. On the first run, in a few seconds and with a very basic prompt. Obviously with a different AI, it could understand the image contents and skip that step easily enough.
  - IAmGraydon 8mo ago

satvikpendem 8mo ago

> To actually execute on these things takes a different kind of thinking Agreed. Honestly, and I hate to use the tired phrase, but some people are literally just built different. Those who'd be entrepreneurs would have been so in any time period with any technology.

intended 8mo ago

3 things 1) I don’t disagree with the spirit of your argument 2) 3D printing has higher startup costs than code (you need to buy the damn printer) 3) YOU are making a distinction when it comes to vibe coding from non-tech people. The way these tools are being sold, the way investments are being made, is based on non-domain people developing domain specific taste. This last part “reasonable” argument ends up serving as a bait and switch, shielding these investments. I might be wrong, but your comment doesn’t indicate that you believe the hype.

josephg 8mo ago

I don't think claude code is like 3d printing. The difference is that 3D printing still requires someone, somewhere to do the mechanical design work. It democratises printing but it doesn't democratise invention. I can't use words to ask a 3d printer to make something. You can't really do that with claude code yet either. But every few months it gets better at this. The question is: How good will claude get at turning open-ended problem statements into useful software? Right now a skilled human + computer combo is the most efficient way to write a lot of software. Left on its own, claude will make mistakes and suffer from a slow accumulation of bad architectural decisions. But, will that remain the case indefinitely? I'm not convinced. This pattern has already played out in chess and go. For a few years, a skilled Go player working in collaboration with a go AI could outcompete both computers and humans at go. But that era didn't last. Now computers can play Go at superhuman levels. Our skills are no longer required. I predict programming will follow the same trajectory. There are already some companies using fine tuned AI models for "red team" infosec audits. Apparently they're already pretty good at finding a lot of creative bugs that humans miss. (And apparently they find an extraordinary number of security bugs in code written by AI models). It seems like a pretty obvious leap to imagine claude code implementing something similar before long. Then claude will be able to do security audits on its own output. Throw that in a reinforcement learning loop, and claude will probably become better at producing secure code than I am.

prpl 8mo ago
There is verification and validation. The first part is making sure you built to your specification, the second thing is making sure you built specification was correct. The second part is going to be the hard part for complex software and systems.
- josephg 8mo ago
  I think validation is already much easier using LLMs. Arguably this is one of the best use cases for coding LLMs right now: you can get claude to throw together a working demo of whatever wild idea you have without needing to write any code or write a spec. You don't even need to be a developer. I don't know about you, but I'd much rather be shown a demo made by our end users (with claude) than get sent a 100 page spec. Especially since most specs - if you build to them - don't solve anyone's real problems. Demo, don't memo.

democracy 8mo ago

100%, it's like with "Suno" - everyone can create a good quality music/song basically in 2-3 minutes (and vibe programming can only do.... nothing in a few minutes) - how many new great bands and musicions we got )))))

Otterly99 8mo ago
You might not get great musicians from using Suno, but an ad company might decide to just generate a jingle rather than hire a musician to do it. Same with images/videos. The result might not be great, but the companies does it in 3 minutes and close-to-zero cost. Similarly, you can vibe-code a website for a restaurant (that does a very basic thing like display a menu, opening hours, maybe a google map location). It might not be the best, but you would be surprised at the amount of people that are willing to sacrifice quality for cheap prices.
- democracy 8mo ago
  Sure, but it's nothing new - CMSes, website builders, no-code platforms, code generators - AI on top of a website builder can really help and it does help. But not building operating systems or Word from scratch for every person or company - this is just nuts.
josephg 8mo ago
I heard a stat on the economist podcast the other day talking about AI music production. They said spotify estimates 40% of songs on their platform are now AI generated. The AI generated songs make up 0.5% of total listening time. Low quality music made in bulk seems much less useful than low quality code made in bulk.