4 ms·

Software is still eating the world, now even faster. I wonder how soon we will adapt to this new situation where software is vibe coded for anything and make us

Software is still eating the world, now even faster. I wonder how soon we will adapt to this new situation where software is vibe coded for anything and make use of this software without caution as expressed in the article. For most people the main difference will be: Will it run and solve my problem? Soon we will see malware being put into vibe coded software - who will wants to check every commit for write-only software?

tkiolp4 7mo ago
I think in the future (in 10 years?) we are going to see a lot of disposable/throwaway software. I don’t know, imagine this: I need to buy tickets for a concert. I ask my AI agent that I want tickets. The agent creates code on the fly and uses it to purchase my tickets. The code could be simple curl command, or a full app with nice ui/ux. As a user I don’t need to see the code. If I want to buy more tickets the same day, the ai agent will likely reuse the same code. But if i buy tickets again in one year, the agent will likely rebuild the code to adjust to the new API version the ticket company now offers. Seems wasteful but it’s more dynamic. Vendors only need to provide raw APIs and your agent can create the ui experience you want. In that regard nobody but the company that owns your agent can inject malware into the software you use. Some software will last more than others (e.g., the music player your agent provided won’t probably be rebuilt unless you want a new look and feel or extra functionality). I think we’ll adopt the “cattle, not pets” approach to software too.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 7mo ago
  This is also where I think we end up. If the behavior of the system is specified well enough, then the code itself is cheap and throwaway. Why have a static system that is brittle to external changes when you can just reconstruct the system on the fly? Might be quite awhile before you can do this with large systems but we already see this on smaller contextual scales such as Claude Code itself
  - candiddevmike 7mo ago
    The specification for most systems _is the code_. English cannot describe business rules as succinctly as code, and most business rules end up being implied from a spec rather than directly specified, at least in my experience. The thought of converting an app back into a spec document or list of feature requests seems crazy to me.
    - SOLAR_FIELDS 7mo ago
      Why would it be? If you can describe an approximation of a system and regenerate it to be, let’s say, 98% accurate in 1% of the time that it would take to generate it by hand (and that’s being generous, it’s probably more like 0.1% in today’s day and age and that decimal is only moving left) aren’t there a giant set of use cases where the approximation of the system is totally fine? People will always bring up “but what about planes and cars and medicine and critical life or death systems”. Yeah sure, but a vast majority of the systems an end user interacts with every day do not have that level of risk tolerance
      - kamaal 7mo ago
        You are just validating the point that code is spec. For your proposed system to work one must have a deterministic way of sending said spec to a system(Compiler?) and getting the same output everytime. Input/Output is just one thing, software does a lot of 'side effect' kind of work, and has security implications. You don't leave such things to luck. Things either work or don't.
        SOLAR_FIELDS 7mo ago
        Absolutely let’s not do away with the determinism entirely. But we can decouple generation of the code from its deterministic behavior. If you are adequately able to identify the boundaries of the system and run deterministic tests to validate those boundaries that should be sufficient enough. It’s not like human written code was often treated with even that much scrutiny in the before times. I would validate human written code in the exact same way.
- slopinthebag 7mo ago
  Or, and hear me out here, you go to the existing site or app which sells concert tickets, press the purchase button, and then you have your tickets. Like what are we even doing here...
  - mixdup 7mo ago
    I know people have done truly amazing things with AI lately, but I feel this in my bones. Almost every demo I see is like, uh, I don't need these extremely simple things in my life automated. I can just go to Delta and buy a plane ticket. I actually want to write my own email to my mom or wife. Of course a demo is just a demo, but also come on
    - ssl-3 7mo ago
      It's easy to buy one plane ticket when a person has a specific plan -- to attend a meeting or a conference, or to match up with an airbnb timeslot or something. It's harder to buy one plane ticket for the lowest cost amongst all the different ways that plane tickets can be bought, and harder yet to do so with a lack of specificity. So, for instance: Maybe I don't have a firm plan. Maybe I'm very flexible. Maybe all I want to do is say "Hey, bot. I want to go visit my friend in Florida sometime in the next couple of weeks and spend a few days there as inexpensively as I can. He's in Orlando. I can fly out of Detroit or Cleveland; all the same to me. If I drive to the airport myself, I'll need a place to keep my car at or near the airport. I also want to explore renting a car in Orlando. I pack light; personal bag only. Cattle class is OK, but I prefer a window seat. Present to me a list of the cheapest options, with itinerary." That's all stuff that a human can sort out, but it takes time to manually fudge around dates and locations and deal with different systems and tabulate the results. And there's nuances that need covered, like parking at DTW is weird: It's all off-site, and it can be cheaper and better to rent a room for one night in a nearby hotel that includes long-term parking than to pay for parking by itself. So the hypothetical bot does a bunch of API hits, applies its general knowledge of how things flow, and comes back with a list of verified-good options for me to review. And then I get to pick around that list, and ask questions, and mold it to best fit my ideal vision of an inexpensive trip to go spend time with a friend. In English, and without ever dealing with any travel websites myself. "Right. So I go to Detroit on Tuesday and check in at the hotel any time after noon, and take the free shuttle to the airport the next morning at around 0400 to the Evans terminal. Also, thanks for pointing out that this airport is like a ghost town until 0600 and I might want to bring a snack. Anyway, I get on the flight, land at Orlando, and they'll have a cheap car waiting for me at Avis. This will all cost me a total of $343, which sounds great. If that's all I need to know right now, then make it so. Pay for it and put it on my calendar." (And yeah, this is a problem that I actually have from time to time. I'd love to have a bot that could just sort this stuff out with a few paragraphs.)
- whackernews 7mo ago
  Aren’t we kinda realising that disposable/throwaway stuff is, like, bad? Why do we have to go down this wasteful and hyper-consumptive route AGAIN. Can we try and see the patterns here and move forwards?
  - tkiolp4 7mo ago
    Agree in general. I don’t see how making an agent create software is more wasteful than making dozens of engineers create the same thing. The latter seems more wasteful. We have compilers creating binaries every single day. We don’t say thats wasteful.
    - whackernews 7mo ago
      Well ticketmaster (for example) is used by millions of people. It seems to me like spinning up millions of LLMs to produce a million different apps is way more wasteful than having a dozen developers produce one efficient app that everyone can use?
      - alwillis 7mo ago
        All of the major LLMs have re-useable prompts now, so once someone makes a skill [1] that does it, anyone can use it. Even now, with OpenClaw and all of the spinoffs, it's possible to have n agent do this today. [1]: https://claude.com/blog/equipping-agents-for-the-real-world-with-agent-skills https://claude.com/blog/equipping-agents-for-the-real-world-...
        skydhash 7mo ago
        What to use? A website where you can quickly buy the stuff you want? Or an LLM where you specify how to buy the the thing you want, wait a while, then actually do the buying, and praying in the meantime, it's not throwing your money away?
- falkensmaize 7mo ago
  I don't know if this is the future or not, but it seems to serve no real purpose other than to enrich LLM company profits. There is real value in well designed code that has been battle tested and hardened over years of bugfixes and iteration. It's reliable, it's reusable, it's efficient and it's secure. The opposite of hastily written and poorly understood vibe code that may or may not even do what you want it to do, even while you think it's doing what you want it to do.
  - democracy 7mo ago
    there is software and software. lots of enterprise software gets re-written every 2-5 years, some projects are in rubbish bin as soon as finished (if finished)
mixdup 7mo ago
eventually people will figure out what is safe to let AI build-and-run without supervision, and what level of problem do you need to actually understand what's under the hood, audit what it does, how to maintain it, etc I need a way to inventory my vintage video games and my wife's large board game collection. I have some strong opinions, and it's very low risk so I'll probably let Claude build the whole thing, and I'll just run it Would I do that with something that was keeping track of my finances, ensuring I paid things on time, or ensuring the safety of my house, or driving my car for me? Probably not. For those categories of software since I'm not an expert in those fields, but also it's important that they work and I trust them, I'll prefer software written and maintained by vendors with expertise and a track record in those fields

tkiolp4 7mo ago

I think in the future (in 10 years?) we are going to see a lot of disposable/throwaway software. I don’t know, imagine this: I need to buy tickets for a concert. I ask my AI agent that I want tickets. The agent creates code on the fly and uses it to purchase my tickets. The code could be simple curl command, or a full app with nice ui/ux. As a user I don’t need to see the code. If I want to buy more tickets the same day, the ai agent will likely reuse the same code. But if i buy tickets again in one year, the agent will likely rebuild the code to adjust to the new API version the ticket company now offers. Seems wasteful but it’s more dynamic. Vendors only need to provide raw APIs and your agent can create the ui experience you want. In that regard nobody but the company that owns your agent can inject malware into the software you use. Some software will last more than others (e.g., the music player your agent provided won’t probably be rebuilt unless you want a new look and feel or extra functionality). I think we’ll adopt the “cattle, not pets” approach to software too.

SOLAR_FIELDS 7mo ago
This is also where I think we end up. If the behavior of the system is specified well enough, then the code itself is cheap and throwaway. Why have a static system that is brittle to external changes when you can just reconstruct the system on the fly? Might be quite awhile before you can do this with large systems but we already see this on smaller contextual scales such as Claude Code itself
- candiddevmike 7mo ago
  The specification for most systems _is the code_. English cannot describe business rules as succinctly as code, and most business rules end up being implied from a spec rather than directly specified, at least in my experience. The thought of converting an app back into a spec document or list of feature requests seems crazy to me.
  - SOLAR_FIELDS 7mo ago
    Why would it be? If you can describe an approximation of a system and regenerate it to be, let’s say, 98% accurate in 1% of the time that it would take to generate it by hand (and that’s being generous, it’s probably more like 0.1% in today’s day and age and that decimal is only moving left) aren’t there a giant set of use cases where the approximation of the system is totally fine? People will always bring up “but what about planes and cars and medicine and critical life or death systems”. Yeah sure, but a vast majority of the systems an end user interacts with every day do not have that level of risk tolerance
    - kamaal 7mo ago
      You are just validating the point that code is spec. For your proposed system to work one must have a deterministic way of sending said spec to a system(Compiler?) and getting the same output everytime. Input/Output is just one thing, software does a lot of 'side effect' kind of work, and has security implications. You don't leave such things to luck. Things either work or don't.
      - SOLAR_FIELDS 7mo ago
        Absolutely let’s not do away with the determinism entirely. But we can decouple generation of the code from its deterministic behavior. If you are adequately able to identify the boundaries of the system and run deterministic tests to validate those boundaries that should be sufficient enough. It’s not like human written code was often treated with even that much scrutiny in the before times. I would validate human written code in the exact same way.
slopinthebag 7mo ago
Or, and hear me out here, you go to the existing site or app which sells concert tickets, press the purchase button, and then you have your tickets. Like what are we even doing here...
- mixdup 7mo ago
  I know people have done truly amazing things with AI lately, but I feel this in my bones. Almost every demo I see is like, uh, I don't need these extremely simple things in my life automated. I can just go to Delta and buy a plane ticket. I actually want to write my own email to my mom or wife. Of course a demo is just a demo, but also come on
  - ssl-3 7mo ago
    It's easy to buy one plane ticket when a person has a specific plan -- to attend a meeting or a conference, or to match up with an airbnb timeslot or something. It's harder to buy one plane ticket for the lowest cost amongst all the different ways that plane tickets can be bought, and harder yet to do so with a lack of specificity. So, for instance: Maybe I don't have a firm plan. Maybe I'm very flexible. Maybe all I want to do is say "Hey, bot. I want to go visit my friend in Florida sometime in the next couple of weeks and spend a few days there as inexpensively as I can. He's in Orlando. I can fly out of Detroit or Cleveland; all the same to me. If I drive to the airport myself, I'll need a place to keep my car at or near the airport. I also want to explore renting a car in Orlando. I pack light; personal bag only. Cattle class is OK, but I prefer a window seat. Present to me a list of the cheapest options, with itinerary." That's all stuff that a human can sort out, but it takes time to manually fudge around dates and locations and deal with different systems and tabulate the results. And there's nuances that need covered, like parking at DTW is weird: It's all off-site, and it can be cheaper and better to rent a room for one night in a nearby hotel that includes long-term parking than to pay for parking by itself. So the hypothetical bot does a bunch of API hits, applies its general knowledge of how things flow, and comes back with a list of verified-good options for me to review. And then I get to pick around that list, and ask questions, and mold it to best fit my ideal vision of an inexpensive trip to go spend time with a friend. In English, and without ever dealing with any travel websites myself. "Right. So I go to Detroit on Tuesday and check in at the hotel any time after noon, and take the free shuttle to the airport the next morning at around 0400 to the Evans terminal. Also, thanks for pointing out that this airport is like a ghost town until 0600 and I might want to bring a snack. Anyway, I get on the flight, land at Orlando, and they'll have a cheap car waiting for me at Avis. This will all cost me a total of $343, which sounds great. If that's all I need to know right now, then make it so. Pay for it and put it on my calendar." (And yeah, this is a problem that I actually have from time to time. I'd love to have a bot that could just sort this stuff out with a few paragraphs.)
whackernews 7mo ago
Aren’t we kinda realising that disposable/throwaway stuff is, like, bad? Why do we have to go down this wasteful and hyper-consumptive route AGAIN. Can we try and see the patterns here and move forwards?
- tkiolp4 7mo ago
  Agree in general. I don’t see how making an agent create software is more wasteful than making dozens of engineers create the same thing. The latter seems more wasteful. We have compilers creating binaries every single day. We don’t say thats wasteful.
  - whackernews 7mo ago
    Well ticketmaster (for example) is used by millions of people. It seems to me like spinning up millions of LLMs to produce a million different apps is way more wasteful than having a dozen developers produce one efficient app that everyone can use?
    - alwillis 7mo ago
      All of the major LLMs have re-useable prompts now, so once someone makes a skill [1] that does it, anyone can use it. Even now, with OpenClaw and all of the spinoffs, it's possible to have n agent do this today. [1]: https://claude.com/blog/equipping-agents-for-the-real-world-with-agent-skills https://claude.com/blog/equipping-agents-for-the-real-world-...
      - skydhash 7mo ago
        What to use? A website where you can quickly buy the stuff you want? Or an LLM where you specify how to buy the the thing you want, wait a while, then actually do the buying, and praying in the meantime, it's not throwing your money away?
falkensmaize 7mo ago
I don't know if this is the future or not, but it seems to serve no real purpose other than to enrich LLM company profits. There is real value in well designed code that has been battle tested and hardened over years of bugfixes and iteration. It's reliable, it's reusable, it's efficient and it's secure. The opposite of hastily written and poorly understood vibe code that may or may not even do what you want it to do, even while you think it's doing what you want it to do.
- democracy 7mo ago
  there is software and software. lots of enterprise software gets re-written every 2-5 years, some projects are in rubbish bin as soon as finished (if finished)

mixdup 7mo ago

eventually people will figure out what is safe to let AI build-and-run without supervision, and what level of problem do you need to actually understand what's under the hood, audit what it does, how to maintain it, etc I need a way to inventory my vintage video games and my wife's large board game collection. I have some strong opinions, and it's very low risk so I'll probably let Claude build the whole thing, and I'll just run it Would I do that with something that was keeping track of my finances, ensuring I paid things on time, or ensuring the safety of my house, or driving my car for me? Probably not. For those categories of software since I'm not an expert in those fields, but also it's important that they work and I trust them, I'll prefer software written and maintained by vendors with expertise and a track record in those fields