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What I can’t get over is that there have been exactly zero software breakthroughs since vibe coding started, other than vibe coding itself. Claude is amazing,
by pizlonator 5mo ago
What I can’t get over is that there have been exactly zero software breakthroughs since vibe coding started, other than vibe coding itself.
Claude is amazing, that’s true.
But if it was as amazing as this article implies, I’d expect some breakthrough outside of AI itself.
Rewriting a Zig program in unsafe Rust? Not a breakthrough. Finding a bunch of security vulns? Maybe that’s sort of a breakthrough though it’s underwhelming and possibly just a net negative. But like if I rolled back to using software from 2023 then life would be ok.
Maybe we just need to give it time, and sometime real soon, we will all be amazed by such a breakthrough? Who knows
- wild_egg 5mo agoWhat does a breakthrough look like?
- pizlonator 5mo agoSome examples: - The first web browser - the first web browser with images - typescript - react - rust - Fil-C - doom - quake - the anamorphic VM, and its follow-ups like HotSpot, and even competitors/copycats like J9, V8, JSC, etc - Fortnite battle royale - Roblox - thefacebook - ChatGPT - Claude code I know that’s quite a range and that’s intentional. Anyway, I think we’ll know it when we see it.
- HardCodedBias 5mo agoThe LLM+Harness mostly helps with execution. These are new products (generally) and that's a different class of problem. It is possible that since LLM+harness helps with execution then we should see more experiments.
- luke5441 5mo agoEven then we should be able to see things that previously were not possible because they took too much effort. For example NPCs in games that have complexity that previously was not possible. Good games often push the boundaries a bit, so should be a good example. Of course now we can start arguing that there isn't a lot of investment into gaming currently, because it all goes into AI. Too bad.
- adgjlsfhk1 5mo agowe're still at least 3 years too early for that. games usually are in a 5+ year dev cycle, so even if AI made gamedev 2x faster, we're still not at the point where the first opus 4.5 games are out
- hahn-kev 5mo agoReading through that list. None of those were breakthroughs when they first came out. It took time, in some cases a long time for them to become good.
- sonupundir 5mo ago- Completing the full CL implementation of Emacs or better still finish Lem. - Complete GuileMacs, the Guile implementation of Emacs. As AI is supposedly much more capable than Humans, it would be great if the above mentioned implementations are even more efficient and feature rich than Emacs! - Something like Android (maybe even a clone?) with the Java Layer removed and replaced with CL and with Linux kernel still intact. Basically CL over Linux as opposed to the Java over Linux in Android. - For fun, an implementation of the Lisp machines' OS with Lisp all the way down though Assembly is allowed for critical pieces. It should be a full blown modern Desktop with equivalents of what users expect from a modern OS ...
- joshuamcginnis 5mo agoMassive productivity gains.
- pizlonator 5mo agoYeah. To play devils advocate, computers didn’t translate to massive productivity gains until long after businesses adopted them. There was that quote from ’87: "you can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics" Maybe we’re seeing something like that right now with AI? Who knows man
- bdamm 5mo agoThis is absolutely the right vision imo. Personally, I'm seeing massive improvements to my workflow and the quality of the product I'm shipping. I'm using AI to crank out far more tests than I used to be able to write, and I am using AI to analyze results with far more fidelity and speed than I could ever have done myself. That means I have more quality time. But this will change, because the meaning of software development will change to expect, nay to require AI use. I've heard this is already happening at e.g. Google. The expectation of what can be achieved by tinkerers and by professionals will change. The expectation of what it means to interact with software via your own agents will change and will become commonplace. Apple still hasn't figured out the local agent on the iPhone, but they will. 2027 is not going to feel at all like 2025. But is any of that a fundamental change? It sure feels fundamental to me, but maybe that's because my everyday has totally changed, but the product I am responsible for has not. Yet. The product I am responsible for operates in critical infrastructure where I personally hope AI never has deep roots, but maybe that's just me. I don't think using AI to build a system that is offline from any AI is the same as depending on an AI to make realtime decisions for critical infrastructure.
- 4ffss 5mo ago"That means I have more quality time." For now... the shareholders demand managers get the max out of every employee. Throw the force of competition etc into the mix and yeah labour isn't going to benefit all that much.
- yoyohello13 5mo agoHow about a Windows file browser that opens in less than 5 seconds.
- wild_egg 5mo agoFilePilot has been a thing for a while now
- yoyohello13 5mo agoThat started pre-llm
- jachee 5mo agoThat sounds like a your-system issue. I hit Win+E (admittedly on an old Win10 box) and it instantly pops up an explorer window.
- yoyohello13 5mo agoTry win11
- jachee 5mo agoNah… they killed WMR in it, which I need for the only reason I’m running Windows in the first place: iRacing in VR.
- drtz 5mo agoMaybe I'm looking through rose colored glasses, but software that writes itself seems like a pretty big breakthrough to me.
- pizlonator 5mo agoThat goes straight to my point: then why hasn’t the miracle of automated coding led to breakthroughs outside of automated coding? If the only breakthrough is automated coding with no outside consequence then it’s just masturbation
- brokencode 5mo agoProbably because AI coding has only worked at all for a couple years and has only gotten good in like the last year? The rate of improvement has been fast. Maybe it’ll plateau soon, or maybe we’ll have LLMs improving themselves rapidly. At this point it’s too early to say. I don’t remember where I heard it, but there’s a saying that people overestimate how much can be accomplished in a year and underestimate how much can be accomplished in 10 years. If we get to 2030 and still people are wondering where the breakthrough is, then I think I’d be agreeing with your skepticism. But I just think it’s too early to judge that yet.
- pizlonator 5mo agoYeah, this is a good point. But the clock is ticking.
- Quarrelsome 5mo agoon what? Who the fuck would go full transparency of what's in their black box in this hostile culture of AI hatred? None of us can put a number on what code we've used in our services that was written by humans and long may it last.
- jachee 5mo agoThey literally can’t go full-transparency. I know a high-level insider, and the fact is that even the folks implementing things don’t actually know how it works, only that it does, and how to get it to generally behave.
- signatoremo 5mo agoThe arguments against AI assisted coding used to be "only for toy projects", then at some point it became "no dignity", "joyless". Now it's "no new breakthrough" apparently. All in the span of maybe a year. I say it's made tremendous progress.
- pizlonator 5mo agoThen where is the big new non toy project created since vibe coding became a thing, that couldn’t have been created without ai?
- conception 5mo agoI make one (small) almost every day. Admittedly the reason that couldn’t be done is because it would take time that I don’t have but 1000% every day something is written by AI that I use that would not exist if AI didn’t exist. I don’t publish them - but they’re put into use in production and they provide a tangible benefit that would not exist otherwise.
- pizlonator 5mo agoI do this too. I especially love how making a nicely styled website these days is a matter of describing what it looks like and waiting 10-15 minutes. There are other examples But the OP is claiming 10x productivity improvements along some metrics. If that was even slightly true under even a generous interpretation of what it might mean, I’d expect an actual breakthrough, not the ability to churn out little things
- fatata123 5mo ago[dead]
- flavio87 5mo agodon’t know if this qualifies as big in your book, but there are some well marketed advances here: https://deepmind.google/blog/alphaevolve-impact/ https://deepmind.google/blog/alphaevolve-impact/
- revlsas 5mo agoopenAI has how many employees and the chatGPT app has 1 billion MAU
- sutterd 5mo agoI am doing a solo project that is pretty big, meaning it is not something I could vibe code. I can do alot with AI that I could never do on my own, but I am not seeing several mulitples improvement in my productivity. I spend so much time doing what I call "AI wrangling", trying to get it to do what I want. Claude is writing all the javscript and python code, but ultimately I am programming in English. What is good is that it is effectively a very high level computer language, where the agent can implement a lot of underlying code with a short English description, often. But many other times it takes a lot of work to get what you want.
- onlyrealcuzzo 5mo agoI'm building a memory safe programming language with a declarative concurrency model that's close to release. There is ZERO chance I would ever be able to complete it on my own. I doubt it'll get traction, but if it doesn't, I am pretty confident a future language will take the ideas for polymorphic synchronization and profile-guided optimization. It has an easy version/mode of compilation that makes Rust's affine ownership accessible like a high-level scripting language, and it can progressively become more strict, where the compiler does ~99% of the work for you, and you just pick options as it finds issues (that it explains to you like you're 5) along the way. Along the way, I also built a suite of tools that helps identify complexity better than anything I've seen (which was necessary to get the LLMs to be able to unslop themselves and write something that actually works). I doubt the Ruby community shrugs it off, but time will tell.
- pizlonator 5mo agoHow do you know it’s actually memory safe?
- onlyrealcuzzo 5mo agoI have ~5500 memory safety fuzz tests, four different test suites with between ~80%-99% line/branch coverage each, and the same design as Rust, and haven't found a memory safety issue in 4 weeks, and I'm still planning another ~4 weeks of testing before release, more if need be. Rust had memory safety bugs well after release - IIUC all the way until after the 1.0 release. So, it's highly unlikely to be perfect, but I think it'll be in better shape than Go or Rust were when they initially launched.
- fooker 5mo agoWhat does a software breakthrough look like in your opinion? If you get yourself to define it, maybe you'll find it achievable :)
- sothatsit 5mo agoMaybe my bar for what constitutes a breakthrough is lower than other people's, but all of these seem like breakthroughs to me: NLP as a field saw huge shifts. NLP tasks that used to be complex and inaccurate can now be setup very easily and quickly using structured outputs from LLMs, often with greater accuracy. A small charity I help with has now been able to build their own website to manage their day-to-day operations. It saves them a lot of time, and it was vibe-coded using Manus. I don't think people appreciate how much room there is left for bespoke software to have big impacts on small organisations that can't afford to hire developers. The cost for software like the one they made has gone from 10s of thousands of dollars to $10/month and volunteer hours. My brother has recently been setting up Cowork to do an automatic review of contracts before human review, and he said it is far more diligent than people when it comes to routine things to check. This is another huge breakthrough for not just efficiency, but the quality of work. I really don't think we can discount AI finding bugs and vulnerabilities. If you care about code quality and keep up review standard, LLMs can help you write more robust software. AI has found a huge number of bugs for me before they hit production, including potential out-of-bounds memory accesses and segfaults. ChatGPT has 1 billion MAU. People are now getting life advice, financial advice, and mental health help from chatbots at a scale and cost that no human support network could match.
- c-hendricks 5mo ago> ChatGPT has 1 billion MAU. People are now getting life advice, financial advice, and mental health help from chatbots Personally not the kind of breakthrough I'm psyched about
- spprashant 5mo agoIts in a weird space right now. These models are actually extremely good but they are far from an intelligence unto themselves. Truth is if someone told you they could build these things 5 years ago, you d write them a check for a trillion dollars. Problem is once we got them, we realized they are not all that. Its like a mecha suit in a universe, where mecha suits are abundant and cheap. Someone has to climb into them everyday and put in the work for it to be effective. So now the skeptics are saying this technology is overrated. And the optimists are accusing the skeptics of moving goal posts.
- 4ffss 5mo agoI think we are learning in real-time what intelligence re. humans is as we go along. Humans only what they know, until they acquire more information about what's possible. The goal post narrative is stupid to begin with.
- batshit_beaver 5mo agoHumans have goal seeking behavior. LLMs don’t. You could maybe call the combination of LLMs and the RL-based harnesses somewhat “intelligent” in aggregate, but the problem is that it’s not “general” intelligence like these labs want to argue, since it’s by definition only good for the set of problems the RL part has been trained to solve, which is a subset of programming problems.
- cautiouscat 5mo ago> Problem is once we got them, we realized they are not all that. Isn't this just the hype cycle? [1] Fake edit: I know its not a perfect model. 1: https://www.gartner.com/en/research/methodologies/gartner-hype-cycle https://www.gartner.com/en/research/methodologies/gartner-hy...
- human305893 5mo agoMost of the skeptics exist because of the grandiose claims made by the AI companies saying pure hype marketing bs. If this was just a tool, discussed at the scope of what the tools can actually produce and do, there would be sensible discourse about it.
- squidsoup 5mo agoThe breakthroughs in mass state surveillance are coming, never fear.
- defen 5mo agoVibe coding is the breakthrough. There's always been "no-code" solutions to problems in various business domains, but they were invariably janky, underpowered, and/or overpriced. Now we have a way for domain experts to go directly from ACTUAL natural language directly to implementation in a real programming language, fully automated, in minutes or hours. How is that not a science-fiction level breakthrough? In 2011 if anyone had said that would be possible "in 15 years", I think most professionals at the time would not have replied with "yeah it's coming but your timeline is off". It would have been "you have no fucking idea what you're talking about".
- rcpt 5mo agoSolved a bunch of Erdos problems.
- marcus_holmes 5mo agoI spent years in the early 2000s trying to get a computer to read unstructured PDFs and TIFF images (mainly invoices, either scanned or electronic). Limited success, we always had to get a human to look at them in the end. We implemented that in about three days earlier this year, just by feeding the files to LLMs. And it's good enough to not need a human to check. I get that this isn't a "Computer Science breakthrough" in the sense you mean, but it used to involve a lot of hard CS to try and solve, and now it doesn't.
- jimbokun 5mo agoWhat would qualify as a breakthrough for you?
- est 5mo ago> exactly zero software breakthroughs since vibe coding started, other than vibe coding itself Generative AI is meant to be a mimic - Richard Sutton https://x.com/RichardSSutton/status/2061216087744946656 https://x.com/RichardSSutton/status/2061216087744946656