4 ms·

The humbling thought should be all the blue collar workers on r/vibecoding demoing their apps and games. And then realizing they put together something that wo

by echelon 3mo ago

The humbling thought should be all the blue collar workers on r/vibecoding demoing their apps and games. And then realizing they put together something that would have taken you a few days to do. The supply of software is about to go way up, and that's going to massively impact demand unless every firm on earth is clamoring for more. We're going to see if Jevons paradox holds true, or if wages get impacted drastically.

satvikpendem 3mo ago
Only if you're working on a client consulting model perhaps, and not even then necessarily. There are lots of reports of vibe coded apps not holding up in production so they should be treated as prototypes. It's similar to the outsourcing trend where people reverted back to using in house talent once they realized how terrible most of the produced software was. The only difference is AI models get better but it remains to be seen if they can get to such an end to end stage that they can autonomously deploy to prod and diagnose any issues without human intervention. There have been some paths to that but I haven't seen it end to end yet.
reinitctxoffset 3mo ago
Every time I wrote software that I was personally motivated to have and kept at it until it reached a comfortable equilibrium of utility, scope, and quality and then stopped? No one paid me. Every time someone paid me to write software it was some combination of 1. not that interesting of a problem 2. no real utility i could see or touch, useful in some abstract way of making a number go up 3. involved a constant, painful maintenance burden 4. involved incident management of one kind or another 5. involved a long tail of details with no unifying principle other than a lot of implicit legacy constraints and stakeholders whose involvement waxed and waned with no seeming rhythm.. I'm a big fan of the new capability, it opens up new regimes of performance and correctness and capability for what I can achieve, that in turn grinds me up against math and theory that I had thus far been able to avoid, it's pushing me up the ambition ladder hard and that's a good thing. But the change is a change in degree not in kind at least in the vibecode regime: it was always relatively fun and relatively easy to do one small program with modest requirements around defect rigor that had a big legible "oh cool!" surface that I didn't have to maintain. Fable doesn't seem any better than Opus at grinding detail work in the bowels of a compiler, but it sure can make an iPhone-scoped platform game with a bunch of bugs in it in a single shot? If there's a job where you get paid for doing fun, high defect, "oh wow!" factor one-off software that you can immediately disavow any responsibility for? Fuck man, I should have had that job before Fable got that job.
slopinthebag 3mo ago
Most of the stuff demoed on r/vibecoding are trivial programs, and they’re often buggy and full of holes. If that’s the type of software you produce then yes, you’ll probably be impacted. Thankfully that isn’t the majority of software. It’s kind of like saying wedding photographers will be impacted because of the people posting on r/iPhoneography. Seems kind of silly doesn’t it.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
- weikju 3mo ago
  > It’s kind of like saying wedding photographers will be impacted because of the people posting on r/iPhoneography. Seems kind of silly doesn’t it. I don’t know how it is all around the world but where I live, the photography is part of the whole packaged wedding plan and there’s no choice/option BUT to use one, guaranteeing their (expensive) service and job, regardless of what people can produce on their own. OTOH, it’s probably better to have someone neutral there who can take pics rather than eat/drink/cry and whatever else people do at weddings ;)
  - skipkey 3mo ago
    So I've now shot 4 weddings. The first one happened because a friend of my wife had their photographer bail on them 4 days before the wedding, so they were in a bind. I didn't know what I was doing, but I had a prosumer canon Digital Rebel SLR that I mostly used to do wildlife photography, and some good quality lenses. It took me a good 40 hours to generate the final output in photoshop out of the couple of thousand photos I took. Based on what we produced on the first one I've been asked to shoot 3 additional weddings by friends, none of them large, involved productions, using better equipment. The last one I probably took a thousand photos and it took about 10-12 hours to process. Researching, I found out that I could have outsourced the processing for pennies a photo, which is what I'm assuming a lot of wedding photographers do now. But based on what I was doing (delete blurry/bad, color balance, pleasing crop, select the best photos for a book, put the rest on a drive), I suspect I could get that down to a few hours with an AI workflow after I worked out the kinks. I'm not a professional, but I suspect I'd be ahead of the average wedding photographer after I worked that out.
theturtletalks 3mo ago
Personal software is the future and a person building software for themselves tends to withstand enshittifcation. That's why I love when people open-source projects they love and are passionate about and I will always choose them over proprietary ones. People always argue "well, Slack and Notion have distribution and the product isn't everything." Ok and? The person making it for themselves doesn't necessarily need distribution for it to be valuable. In fact, it's even more attractive that way.
- piker 3mo ago
  Basic economics still holds. There will be firms investing loads of time and money into specific, winning approaches and folks using custom builds will be competed away by them.
  - theturtletalks 3mo ago
    Those firms investing time and money may make a good product at first, but it will slowly get worse as they try to recoup their costs and make a profit. The person making the open-source alternative may do the same, but I can fork it and go on my merry way if they do.
superb_dev 3mo ago
The supply of software has already gone up, and most of the new stuff is close to useless
- stronglikedan 3mo ago
  This may have been true six months ago, but I doubt it holds water today.
- qup 3mo ago
  In my very small business, the supply of software has gone up (I'm building things), and they're custom to my business--so highly useful. Moreso than any off the shelf product could hope to be.
  - echelon 3mo ago
    SaaS is dead. Everything is going to be brought in house.
    - toyg 3mo ago
      Until someone will figure out that, according to some spreadsheet, outsourcing it all would result in Big Savings That Would Help The Share Price, and the carousel will start again. Capitalism will capitalism.
    - qup 3mo ago
      Not everything, but a lot. I don't anticipate replacing my payroll company, for instance.
  - jbs789 3mo ago
    Same experience here. I’m able to grow the business faster for sure.
- apitman 3mo ago
  I've vibe coded multiple apps that I now use regularly throughout the day. I doubt I could sell them, but they are very useful to me.

by echelon 3mo ago

satvikpendem 3mo ago

Only if you're working on a client consulting model perhaps, and not even then necessarily. There are lots of reports of vibe coded apps not holding up in production so they should be treated as prototypes. It's similar to the outsourcing trend where people reverted back to using in house talent once they realized how terrible most of the produced software was. The only difference is AI models get better but it remains to be seen if they can get to such an end to end stage that they can autonomously deploy to prod and diagnose any issues without human intervention. There have been some paths to that but I haven't seen it end to end yet.

reinitctxoffset 3mo ago

Every time I wrote software that I was personally motivated to have and kept at it until it reached a comfortable equilibrium of utility, scope, and quality and then stopped? No one paid me. Every time someone paid me to write software it was some combination of 1. not that interesting of a problem 2. no real utility i could see or touch, useful in some abstract way of making a number go up 3. involved a constant, painful maintenance burden 4. involved incident management of one kind or another 5. involved a long tail of details with no unifying principle other than a lot of implicit legacy constraints and stakeholders whose involvement waxed and waned with no seeming rhythm.. I'm a big fan of the new capability, it opens up new regimes of performance and correctness and capability for what I can achieve, that in turn grinds me up against math and theory that I had thus far been able to avoid, it's pushing me up the ambition ladder hard and that's a good thing. But the change is a change in degree not in kind at least in the vibecode regime: it was always relatively fun and relatively easy to do one small program with modest requirements around defect rigor that had a big legible "oh cool!" surface that I didn't have to maintain. Fable doesn't seem any better than Opus at grinding detail work in the bowels of a compiler, but it sure can make an iPhone-scoped platform game with a bunch of bugs in it in a single shot? If there's a job where you get paid for doing fun, high defect, "oh wow!" factor one-off software that you can immediately disavow any responsibility for? Fuck man, I should have had that job before Fable got that job.

slopinthebag 3mo ago

Most of the stuff demoed on r/vibecoding are trivial programs, and they’re often buggy and full of holes. If that’s the type of software you produce then yes, you’ll probably be impacted. Thankfully that isn’t the majority of software. It’s kind of like saying wedding photographers will be impacted because of the people posting on r/iPhoneography. Seems kind of silly doesn’t it.

deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
weikju 3mo ago
> It’s kind of like saying wedding photographers will be impacted because of the people posting on r/iPhoneography. Seems kind of silly doesn’t it. I don’t know how it is all around the world but where I live, the photography is part of the whole packaged wedding plan and there’s no choice/option BUT to use one, guaranteeing their (expensive) service and job, regardless of what people can produce on their own. OTOH, it’s probably better to have someone neutral there who can take pics rather than eat/drink/cry and whatever else people do at weddings ;)
- skipkey 3mo ago
  So I've now shot 4 weddings. The first one happened because a friend of my wife had their photographer bail on them 4 days before the wedding, so they were in a bind. I didn't know what I was doing, but I had a prosumer canon Digital Rebel SLR that I mostly used to do wildlife photography, and some good quality lenses. It took me a good 40 hours to generate the final output in photoshop out of the couple of thousand photos I took. Based on what we produced on the first one I've been asked to shoot 3 additional weddings by friends, none of them large, involved productions, using better equipment. The last one I probably took a thousand photos and it took about 10-12 hours to process. Researching, I found out that I could have outsourced the processing for pennies a photo, which is what I'm assuming a lot of wedding photographers do now. But based on what I was doing (delete blurry/bad, color balance, pleasing crop, select the best photos for a book, put the rest on a drive), I suspect I could get that down to a few hours with an AI workflow after I worked out the kinks. I'm not a professional, but I suspect I'd be ahead of the average wedding photographer after I worked that out.

theturtletalks 3mo ago

Personal software is the future and a person building software for themselves tends to withstand enshittifcation. That's why I love when people open-source projects they love and are passionate about and I will always choose them over proprietary ones. People always argue "well, Slack and Notion have distribution and the product isn't everything." Ok and? The person making it for themselves doesn't necessarily need distribution for it to be valuable. In fact, it's even more attractive that way.

piker 3mo ago
Basic economics still holds. There will be firms investing loads of time and money into specific, winning approaches and folks using custom builds will be competed away by them.
- theturtletalks 3mo ago
  Those firms investing time and money may make a good product at first, but it will slowly get worse as they try to recoup their costs and make a profit. The person making the open-source alternative may do the same, but I can fork it and go on my merry way if they do.

superb_dev 3mo ago

The supply of software has already gone up, and most of the new stuff is close to useless

stronglikedan 3mo ago
This may have been true six months ago, but I doubt it holds water today.
qup 3mo ago
In my very small business, the supply of software has gone up (I'm building things), and they're custom to my business--so highly useful. Moreso than any off the shelf product could hope to be.
- echelon 3mo ago
  SaaS is dead. Everything is going to be brought in house.
  - toyg 3mo ago
    Until someone will figure out that, according to some spreadsheet, outsourcing it all would result in Big Savings That Would Help The Share Price, and the carousel will start again. Capitalism will capitalism.
  - qup 3mo ago
    Not everything, but a lot. I don't anticipate replacing my payroll company, for instance.
- jbs789 3mo ago
  Same experience here. I’m able to grow the business faster for sure.
apitman 3mo ago
I've vibe coded multiple apps that I now use regularly throughout the day. I doubt I could sell them, but they are very useful to me.