3 ms·

I have watched artists thoughtfully integrate digital lighting and the like at a scale I'd never seen before the LLMs rolled up and made it possible to get prog

I have watched artists thoughtfully integrate digital lighting and the like at a scale I'd never seen before the LLMs rolled up and made it possible to get programs to work without knowing how to program. The fundamental ceiling of what an LLM can do when connected to an IDE is incredible, and orders of magnitude higher than the limits of any no-code / low-code platform conceived thus far. "Democratizing" software - where now the only limits are your imagination, tenacity, and ability to keep the bots aligned with your vision, is allowing incredible things that wouldn't have happened otherwise because you now don't strictly need to learn to program for a programming-involved art project to work out. Should you learn how to code if you're doing stuff like that? Absolutely. But is it letting people who have no idea about computing dabble their feet in and do extremely impressive stuff for the low cost of $20/month? Also yes.

emporas 7mo ago
Emacs can be configured with no code written by the user and Linux can be controlled with minimal user knowledge of the command line. Still some knowledge is necessary in most cases, but nowhere near what was required a handful of years back.
mikestorrent 7mo ago
Now this is the right take. It's one thing for us to do navel-gazing into the recursive autononomous future; it's another to step back and see what Normal People can do, now that the walls are coming down around our profession. Creating new walls is probably not the answer! From the Cathedral and Bazaar, we now have an entire metaphorical city of development happening, by people who would not have thought it possible a few years ago. I don't know what the future of my job holds other than what it always had: helping people who have good ideas to get them done properly.
- Forgeties79 7mo ago
  The thing is though it all still feels so…rudderless/pointless sometimes? When digital cameras came out, it democratized filmmaking immensely. But it wasn’t just people screwing around - amazing new works of art, received positively by audiences and critics alike, exploded in number. They wound up winning film fests, garnering millions of views (and fans) online, and even on big screens world wide, almost immediately Where are the vibe coded apps that are actually good? Where are the new, innovative creations built by “normal” people? Because by now you’d think we’d see them. It’s all been parlor tricks, proofs of concept, and post mortems on how a bot ruined half a year’s work or whatever. The “good stuff” is still happening behind closed doors, led by experienced engineers on existing projects. It’s a productivity multiplier more than anything it seems, but it doesn’t seem useful as a tool for new people to make new things in any given space.
  - andyferris 7mo ago
    Vibe coding is actually "good" for small, bespoke things. The same way that Excel is "good" for small tasks, bad bad for larger things. Too easy to make mistakes, too hard to maintain. I could equally ask - where are all the Excel workbooks that are actually _good_? No-one needs to share their Excel workbooks. They don't need 10k github stars. They just achieve some small goal of the Excel user. These LLM agents just need to do what the user needs doing at any moment. (Sometimes, that can be a small part of a larger job in software, or a series of small parts perhaps - but again you are going to see this "show up" as a part of peoples workflow in maintaining enterprise software which is what most programmers are employed to do, in other words, you won't directly see it at all. And no, digital cameras didn't change the field 18 months after the first somewhat-usable one was released - it took quite a while for the technology to become good enough and cheap to democratize filmmaking).
    - Forgeties79 7mo ago
      I don’t care about GitHub stars. There are tons of excel workbooks and such that are useful, publicly available, and utilized.
    - perrygeo 7mo ago
      Wonderful analogy. I still use spreadsheets regularly. Relieved of the pressure of making something "good", I can get basic things done quickly. Is it sustainable or maintainable? Nope. Doesn't need to be. Not qualities I'm remotely concerned about when I'm writing a spreadsheet. Vibe coding is similar in that you can solve a specific problem without much concern for generalization or future reuse.
    - aryehof 7mo ago
      > maintaining enterprise software which is what most programmers are employed to do … I hear little from those involved with enterprise or line-of-business applications discussing their findings. Forums like this are dominated by SAAS, tool makers, computer and data scientists, and infrastructure concerns. Anyone using AI with large, complex business systems?
foobarchu 7mo ago
> the low cost of $20/month? At what threshold does this stop being true? AI firms are famously hemorrhaging money and it will not last.
- weakened_malloc 7mo ago
  When the small local models catch up I would think
- deaux 7mo ago
  It will keep being true. A few months ago the bar was Sonnet 4.0 performance. Literally just a few months ago. Now we have open weights models that reach that level.
mingyeow 7mo ago
“ The fundamental ceiling of what an LLM can do when connected to an IDE is incredible, and orders of magnitude higher than the limits of any no-code / low-code platform conceived thus far.” Curious on this - why?
- HeWhoLurksLate 7mo ago
  AI Agents can write and modify base Python / C++ / Rust / whatever pretty well, and thus users aren't limited by "sorry the building blocks only go together in this one particular manner". It's like the difference between an EZ-Bake oven and a fully furnished kitchen. The EZ-Bake oven can get some stuff done but its limits are much more severely obvious than the kitchen's, and the kitchen's first limiting factor in what can be produced is usually the human cooking in it
  - d4lt4 7mo ago
    There is a paper [0] that shows that LLMs, in fact, cannot write and modify ‘whatever’ pretty well. [0] A Survey on Large Language Models for Code Generation: https://dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/3747588 https://dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/3747588
jimbokun 7mo ago
Sure but maybe we’re all better off spending more time going for walks, learning to cook, playing sports , talking to friends and family, participating in spiritual communities, and making love (to other people!)
- HeWhoLurksLate 7mo ago
  This line of reasoning applies to nearly any way to spend time - "why are you playing videogames? Learn X instead!" or "why are you bothering with X when Y exists?" or "what, you don't know how to make sourdough? Silly goose!" At the end of the day, we all have only finite time on this earth, and how one chooses to spend the meager time between eat, sleep, and fend for self is up to them. If a person is content to play sports in their free time, more power to them. If they want to play videogames, and find satisfaction in that, great! Broadly, I like to create. Most of my creations are engineering-adjacent much more than they art. That's fine, and I'm happy. I do everything you named on that list in addition to building stuff. While using AI, I have caused things to exist that I want much faster than I could have otherwise - I know how to program, but I'm not very fast and I have to have the docs open all the time because the things I want to do are so broad and varied that one week it's bash SLURM scripts and the next it's adding things to my k8s config and the one after that it's something in Python and I don't have enough brain cells to keep track of seven different languages well enough to not accidentally put semicolons at the end of my Python scripts or use the wrong syntax but boy at least I have a bunch of stuff that actually works in the time frame and attention span that I have left after the rest of my life for that day occurs. It's not like I wasn't programming before AI - I've been doing bash scripts and Arduino stuff since middle school - but I have a lot more to show for the little free time I have to work with in the last year or so. And, for the people who don't really know how to code, the incredible power of their computers is now much closer to their fingertips and usable for more than Electron apps. Want to have a thing happen? Ask, Wait, Iterate. All for cheaper than fiverr, and you might learn a few things before you finish.
  - jimbokun 7mo ago
    Sure but today many of us are spending huge amounts of time every day staring at screens and the evidence suggests it’s damaging our mental health. Creation on screens is better than mere consumption, but probably still not as good as having less screen time in our days.

emporas 7mo ago

Emacs can be configured with no code written by the user and Linux can be controlled with minimal user knowledge of the command line. Still some knowledge is necessary in most cases, but nowhere near what was required a handful of years back.

mikestorrent 7mo ago

Now this is the right take. It's one thing for us to do navel-gazing into the recursive autononomous future; it's another to step back and see what Normal People can do, now that the walls are coming down around our profession. Creating new walls is probably not the answer! From the Cathedral and Bazaar, we now have an entire metaphorical city of development happening, by people who would not have thought it possible a few years ago. I don't know what the future of my job holds other than what it always had: helping people who have good ideas to get them done properly.

Forgeties79 7mo ago
The thing is though it all still feels so…rudderless/pointless sometimes? When digital cameras came out, it democratized filmmaking immensely. But it wasn’t just people screwing around - amazing new works of art, received positively by audiences and critics alike, exploded in number. They wound up winning film fests, garnering millions of views (and fans) online, and even on big screens world wide, almost immediately Where are the vibe coded apps that are actually good? Where are the new, innovative creations built by “normal” people? Because by now you’d think we’d see them. It’s all been parlor tricks, proofs of concept, and post mortems on how a bot ruined half a year’s work or whatever. The “good stuff” is still happening behind closed doors, led by experienced engineers on existing projects. It’s a productivity multiplier more than anything it seems, but it doesn’t seem useful as a tool for new people to make new things in any given space.
- andyferris 7mo ago
  Vibe coding is actually "good" for small, bespoke things. The same way that Excel is "good" for small tasks, bad bad for larger things. Too easy to make mistakes, too hard to maintain. I could equally ask - where are all the Excel workbooks that are actually _good_? No-one needs to share their Excel workbooks. They don't need 10k github stars. They just achieve some small goal of the Excel user. These LLM agents just need to do what the user needs doing at any moment. (Sometimes, that can be a small part of a larger job in software, or a series of small parts perhaps - but again you are going to see this "show up" as a part of peoples workflow in maintaining enterprise software which is what most programmers are employed to do, in other words, you won't directly see it at all. And no, digital cameras didn't change the field 18 months after the first somewhat-usable one was released - it took quite a while for the technology to become good enough and cheap to democratize filmmaking).
  - Forgeties79 7mo ago
    I don’t care about GitHub stars. There are tons of excel workbooks and such that are useful, publicly available, and utilized.
  - perrygeo 7mo ago
    Wonderful analogy. I still use spreadsheets regularly. Relieved of the pressure of making something "good", I can get basic things done quickly. Is it sustainable or maintainable? Nope. Doesn't need to be. Not qualities I'm remotely concerned about when I'm writing a spreadsheet. Vibe coding is similar in that you can solve a specific problem without much concern for generalization or future reuse.
  - aryehof 7mo ago
    > maintaining enterprise software which is what most programmers are employed to do … I hear little from those involved with enterprise or line-of-business applications discussing their findings. Forums like this are dominated by SAAS, tool makers, computer and data scientists, and infrastructure concerns. Anyone using AI with large, complex business systems?

foobarchu 7mo ago

> the low cost of $20/month? At what threshold does this stop being true? AI firms are famously hemorrhaging money and it will not last.

weakened_malloc 7mo ago
When the small local models catch up I would think
deaux 7mo ago
It will keep being true. A few months ago the bar was Sonnet 4.0 performance. Literally just a few months ago. Now we have open weights models that reach that level.

mingyeow 7mo ago

“ The fundamental ceiling of what an LLM can do when connected to an IDE is incredible, and orders of magnitude higher than the limits of any no-code / low-code platform conceived thus far.” Curious on this - why?

HeWhoLurksLate 7mo ago
AI Agents can write and modify base Python / C++ / Rust / whatever pretty well, and thus users aren't limited by "sorry the building blocks only go together in this one particular manner". It's like the difference between an EZ-Bake oven and a fully furnished kitchen. The EZ-Bake oven can get some stuff done but its limits are much more severely obvious than the kitchen's, and the kitchen's first limiting factor in what can be produced is usually the human cooking in it
- d4lt4 7mo ago
  There is a paper [0] that shows that LLMs, in fact, cannot write and modify ‘whatever’ pretty well. [0] A Survey on Large Language Models for Code Generation: https://dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/3747588 https://dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/3747588

jimbokun 7mo ago

Sure but maybe we’re all better off spending more time going for walks, learning to cook, playing sports , talking to friends and family, participating in spiritual communities, and making love (to other people!)

HeWhoLurksLate 7mo ago
This line of reasoning applies to nearly any way to spend time - "why are you playing videogames? Learn X instead!" or "why are you bothering with X when Y exists?" or "what, you don't know how to make sourdough? Silly goose!" At the end of the day, we all have only finite time on this earth, and how one chooses to spend the meager time between eat, sleep, and fend for self is up to them. If a person is content to play sports in their free time, more power to them. If they want to play videogames, and find satisfaction in that, great! Broadly, I like to create. Most of my creations are engineering-adjacent much more than they art. That's fine, and I'm happy. I do everything you named on that list in addition to building stuff. While using AI, I have caused things to exist that I want much faster than I could have otherwise - I know how to program, but I'm not very fast and I have to have the docs open all the time because the things I want to do are so broad and varied that one week it's bash SLURM scripts and the next it's adding things to my k8s config and the one after that it's something in Python and I don't have enough brain cells to keep track of seven different languages well enough to not accidentally put semicolons at the end of my Python scripts or use the wrong syntax but boy at least I have a bunch of stuff that actually works in the time frame and attention span that I have left after the rest of my life for that day occurs. It's not like I wasn't programming before AI - I've been doing bash scripts and Arduino stuff since middle school - but I have a lot more to show for the little free time I have to work with in the last year or so. And, for the people who don't really know how to code, the incredible power of their computers is now much closer to their fingertips and usable for more than Electron apps. Want to have a thing happen? Ask, Wait, Iterate. All for cheaper than fiverr, and you might learn a few things before you finish.
- jimbokun 7mo ago
  Sure but today many of us are spending huge amounts of time every day staring at screens and the evidence suggests it’s damaging our mental health. Creation on screens is better than mere consumption, but probably still not as good as having less screen time in our days.