3 ms·

I think AI programming just has a bliss period for a lot of people where it feels like you can solve every problem with a prompt. And you can, for a time. Event

by josephg 5mo ago

I think AI programming just has a bliss period for a lot of people where it feels like you can solve every problem with a prompt. And you can, for a time. Eventually the chickens come home to roost and you realise what a mess you made. Give it some time. We’ll figure out what LLMs are good and bad at. I think vibe engineering will eventually go up on the wall next to static vs dynamic typing and vi vs eMacs. At least, that assumes AI models won’t keep improving by leaps and bounds. We’re in a transition period. It’s gonna be chaos.

t_mahmood 5mo ago
Hey, at least vi vs emacs is fun, no matter how crappy as an editor Emacs is, no one is getting paid by privacy invasive corporate, to sway people, to cash out more money
k8sToGo 5mo ago
Yesterday I needed a tool for a specific task. In 1 hour I created a working tool with antigravity. Is it something I'd publish or sell or offer to others? Probably not, but I found that quite impressive. It is an extension of the idea "now I can program and create everything." Besides I remember what kind of code we had when we first started coding with AI and now with all these coding agents etc. it has become quite impressive. However, at the end it is still a tool and needs to be used accordingly.
- kennywinker 5mo ago
  You can create anything you need as long as what you need is a disposable script, a scotch-taped together single page app, or a complex problem and you have thousands of dollars to throw at tokens.
  - toyg 5mo ago
    I've been playing with local models for some time, and I've been pleasantly surprised of late. A meager rtx 5080 with 16gb can give pretty good results now. The ecosystem is also improving pretty quickly. I have a feeling at some point we will have a "Windows 95" moment (when computing really became personal for the masses) in AI, and things will significantly change shape again.
    - josephg 5mo ago
      What local model do you recommend these days? I’ve got a 4090, mostly sitting idle.
      - toyg 5mo ago
        qwen 3.5 with 9b is being a pretty decent workhorse for me, even with context around 4k.
      - kennywinker 4mo ago
        The answer to which ai model, in mid 2026, is always qwen. Depending on your ram, it’s qwen3.5-9b, qwen3.6-35b-a3 in a 3 or 4 bit quant, or qwen3.6-27b. I’m told a bigger model quantized is better than a smaller model unquantized. In 16Gb vram on 10 year old hardware i can run a 3bit quant of qwen3.6-35b-a3 at ~30tokens/sec, and it can do a lot.
finghin 5mo ago
I think there’s a good chance low effort AI content and vibecoding effectively become an eternal September
JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
> eventually the chickens come home to roost and you realise what a mess you made But a lot of times they don't. Devs building websites for small businesses used to be a thing, and it was almost universally a crap product. Practically every restaurant in my small town has been able to take control of their own website with AI, and it's a better experience for everyone. Rapid digitisation meant a lot of low-value work wound up being done by high-value people. The economy is pivoting away from that configuration. The high-value folks getting displaced are pissed, partly rightly, partly out of spite. The folks who had to pay those bills are ecstatic, mostly overexuberantly, but in part correctly.
- camillomiller 5mo ago
  Until what they need is free or has a heavily subsidized cost. We keep forgetting that
  - hparadiz 5mo ago
    I can use a local model to build a restaurant website. The model generates code fast enough that even my 10 year old server can generate all the code needed in about an hour. It will use about 50 cents of electricity and be better than 90% of the restaurant websites out there.
    - dd8601fn 5mo ago
      I’m curious what you’re using for that (if you’re inclined to share).
      - hparadiz 5mo ago
        I saw that blog post about running local models on a Xeon based server so I benchmarked a bunch of local models on it. The server is dual Xeons with 256 GB of DDR4 and I found it capable of running some things locally. It's slow but still faster than coding things manually. Also that was just an example. Even my 6 year old 6900XT is faster.
    - 4mo ago
munksbeer 4mo ago
> I think vibe engineering will eventually go up on the wall next to static vs dynamic typing and vi vs eMacs. What do you mean by "vibe engineering"? It really depends on what you mean by this on how people can agree or disagree with you. My guess is that in any sense that you mean it, you're almost certainly wrong. AI coding and engineering will continue to improve until any developer who refuses to use it will be unemployable at corporate gigs, and outcompeted even in freelance stuff.

by josephg 5mo ago

t_mahmood 5mo ago

Hey, at least vi vs emacs is fun, no matter how crappy as an editor Emacs is, no one is getting paid by privacy invasive corporate, to sway people, to cash out more money

k8sToGo 5mo ago

Yesterday I needed a tool for a specific task. In 1 hour I created a working tool with antigravity. Is it something I'd publish or sell or offer to others? Probably not, but I found that quite impressive. It is an extension of the idea "now I can program and create everything." Besides I remember what kind of code we had when we first started coding with AI and now with all these coding agents etc. it has become quite impressive. However, at the end it is still a tool and needs to be used accordingly.

kennywinker 5mo ago
You can create anything you need as long as what you need is a disposable script, a scotch-taped together single page app, or a complex problem and you have thousands of dollars to throw at tokens.
- toyg 5mo ago
  I've been playing with local models for some time, and I've been pleasantly surprised of late. A meager rtx 5080 with 16gb can give pretty good results now. The ecosystem is also improving pretty quickly. I have a feeling at some point we will have a "Windows 95" moment (when computing really became personal for the masses) in AI, and things will significantly change shape again.
  - josephg 5mo ago
    What local model do you recommend these days? I’ve got a 4090, mostly sitting idle.
    - toyg 5mo ago
      qwen 3.5 with 9b is being a pretty decent workhorse for me, even with context around 4k.
    - kennywinker 4mo ago
      The answer to which ai model, in mid 2026, is always qwen. Depending on your ram, it’s qwen3.5-9b, qwen3.6-35b-a3 in a 3 or 4 bit quant, or qwen3.6-27b. I’m told a bigger model quantized is better than a smaller model unquantized. In 16Gb vram on 10 year old hardware i can run a 3bit quant of qwen3.6-35b-a3 at ~30tokens/sec, and it can do a lot.

finghin 5mo ago

I think there’s a good chance low effort AI content and vibecoding effectively become an eternal September

JumpCrisscross 5mo ago

> eventually the chickens come home to roost and you realise what a mess you made But a lot of times they don't. Devs building websites for small businesses used to be a thing, and it was almost universally a crap product. Practically every restaurant in my small town has been able to take control of their own website with AI, and it's a better experience for everyone. Rapid digitisation meant a lot of low-value work wound up being done by high-value people. The economy is pivoting away from that configuration. The high-value folks getting displaced are pissed, partly rightly, partly out of spite. The folks who had to pay those bills are ecstatic, mostly overexuberantly, but in part correctly.

camillomiller 5mo ago
Until what they need is free or has a heavily subsidized cost. We keep forgetting that
- hparadiz 5mo ago
  I can use a local model to build a restaurant website. The model generates code fast enough that even my 10 year old server can generate all the code needed in about an hour. It will use about 50 cents of electricity and be better than 90% of the restaurant websites out there.
  - dd8601fn 5mo ago
    I’m curious what you’re using for that (if you’re inclined to share).
    - hparadiz 5mo ago
      I saw that blog post about running local models on a Xeon based server so I benchmarked a bunch of local models on it. The server is dual Xeons with 256 GB of DDR4 and I found it capable of running some things locally. It's slow but still faster than coding things manually. Also that was just an example. Even my 6 year old 6900XT is faster.
  - 4mo ago

munksbeer 4mo ago

> I think vibe engineering will eventually go up on the wall next to static vs dynamic typing and vi vs eMacs. What do you mean by "vibe engineering"? It really depends on what you mean by this on how people can agree or disagree with you. My guess is that in any sense that you mean it, you're almost certainly wrong. AI coding and engineering will continue to improve until any developer who refuses to use it will be unemployable at corporate gigs, and outcompeted even in freelance stuff.