> “If I’m not the man who can [...] build working programs… WHO AM I?” Oh, that's a very easy one: Anyone who cannot by themselves build working programs through coding is by defintion a non-coder, i. e. coding illiterate. That means you. So people like you need slop generators, or other forms of outsourcing, to pretend that the very solution to the problem (!), i. e. "writing code", "isn't super useful".
It depends. Sometimes they joy is in discovering what problem you are solving, by exploring the space of possibilities on features and workflows on a domain. For that, having elegant and simple software is not needed; getting features fast to try out how they work is the basis of the pleasure, so having to write every detail by hand reduces the fun.
Aren't you afraid it's gonna be a race to the bottom ? the software industry is now whoever pays gemini to deploy something prompted in a few days. Everybody can, so the market will be inundated by a lot of people, and usually this makes for a bad market (a few shiny one gets 90% of the share while the rest fight for breadcrumbs) I'm personally more afraid that stupid sales oriented will take my job instead of losing it to solid teams of dedicated expert that invested a lot of skills in making something on their own. it seems like value inversion
As a customer, I don't want to pay for vibe-coded products, because authors also don't have a time (and/or skills) to properly review, debug and fix products.
> I felt in love with the process to be honest. I complained my wife yesterday: "my only problem now is that I don't have enough time and money to pay all the servers", because it opened to me the opportunities to develop and deploy a lot of new ideas. What opportunities? You aren't going to make any money with anything you vibe coded because, even the people you are targeting don't vibe code it, the minute you have even a risk of gaining traction someone else is going to vibe code it anyway . And even if that didn't happen you're just reducing the signal/noise ratio; good luck getting your genuinely good product out there when the masses are spammed by vibe-coded alternatives. When every individual can produce their own software, why do you think that the stuff produced by you is worth paying for?
That might be true, but it doesn't have to be immediately true. It's an arbitrage problem: seeing a gap, knowing you can apply this new tool to make a new entrant, making an offering at a price that works for you, and hoping others haven't found a cheaper way or won the market first. In other words, that's all business as usual. How does Glad sell plastic bags when there are thousands of other companies producing plastic bags, often for far, far less? Branding, contracts, quality, pricing -- just through running a business. No guarantee it's gonna work. Vibe-coding something isn't a guarantee the thing is shit. It can be fine. It still takes time and effort, too, but because it can take lot less time to get a "working product", maybe some unique insight the parent commenter had on a problem is what was suddenly worth their time. Will everyone else who has that insight and the vibe coding skills go right for that problem and compete? Maybe, but, also maybe not. If it's a money-maker, they likely will eventually, but that's just business. Maybe you get out of the business after a year, but for a little while it made you some money.
They're not moving back into development. They're adopting a new approach of producing software, which has nothing to do with the work that software developers do. It's likely that they "left" the field because they were more interested in other roles, which is fine. So now that we have tools that promise to offload the work a software developer does, there are more people interested in simply producing software, and skipping all of that "busy work". The idea that this is the same as software development is akin to thinking that assembling IKEA furniture makes you a carpenter.
Definitely. I'm not disparaging the process of assembling IKEA furniture, nor the process of producing software using LLMs. I've done both, and they have their time and place. What I'm pushing back on is the idea that these are equivalent to carpentry and programming. I think we need new terminology to describe this new process. "Vibe coding" is at the extreme end of it, and "LLM-assisted software development" is a mouthful. Although, the IKEA analogy could be more accurate: the assembly instructions can be wrong; some screws may be missing; you ordered an office chair and got a dining chair; a desk may have five legs; etc. Also, the thing you built is made out of hollow MDF, and will collapse under moderate levels of stress. And if you don't have prior experience building furniture, you end up with no usable skills to modify the end result beyond the manufacturer's original specifications. So, sure, the seemingly quick and easy process might be convenient when it works. Though I've found that it often requires more time and effort to produce what I want, and I end up with a lackluster product, and no learned skills to show for it. Thus learning the difficult process is a more rewarding long-term investment if you plan to continue building software or furniture in the future. :)
My problem is that code review has always been the least enjoyable part of the job. It’s pure drudgery, and is mentally taxing. Unless you’re vibe coding, you’re now doing a lot of code review. It’s almost all you’re doing outside of the high-level planning and guidance (which is enjoyable). I’ve settled on reviewing the security boundaries and areas that could affect data leaks / invalid access. And pretty much scanning everything else. From time to time, I find it doing dumb things- n+1 queries, mutation, global mutable variables, etc, but for the most part, it does well enough that I don’t need to be too thorough. However, I wouldn’t want to inherit these codebases without an AI agent to do the work. There are too many broken windows for human maintenance to be considered.
I find they can make some things look objectively "good", but they just look generic and it feels very easy to spot a site that was made without the vision, polish and judgement. You can get LLMs to create some truly unique sites, but it takes a lot more work than a few prompts.
I've tried vibe coding and hate it. I guess it's okay for people who are only interested in the result, but for me it takes all the fun out of programming. It doesn't feel like it has anything to do with programming at all. I will continue to "vibe code" out of necessity - saving time and achieving more than I can on my own. But I cannot possibly understand how someone could consider it fun.
its also trading one problem for another. when manually coding you understand with little mental effort what you want to achieve, the nuances and constraints, how something interacts with other moving parts, and your problem is implementing the solution when generating a solution, you need to explain in excruciating detail the things that you just know effortlessly. its a different kind of work, but its still work, and its more annoying and less rewarding than just implementing the solution yourself
> when generating a solution, you need to explain in excruciating detail the things that you just know effortlessly This is a great way of explaining the issue.
When stuff was getting too complicated, I looked for ways to make things simpler. Developers have spent decades trying to figure out ways to make things simpler, less code the better, only to throw it all out the window because chatbot go brrrrrr.
And now you can generate javascript infested slop frameworks for $5 per million tokens. Such an improvement. And it's so easy to just ask Claude to make one for you, why even bother standardizing anything when you can just use bespoke slop for anything anymore. Libraries and frameworks? Not needed. Just shove everything into CC/Codex and let it figure it out.
We need better chatbots to fix the bugs from the current chatbots that fixed the bugs from the previous chatbots when they fixed the bugs from the previous generation of chatbots that….. Just give Sam Altman more and more of your money and he’ll make a more advanced chatbot to fix the chatbot he sold you that broke everything. You don’t even need to own a computer, just install an app on your phone to do it all. It doesn’t matter that regular people have been completely priced out of personal computing when GPT is just gonna do all the computing anymore anyway. Clearly a sustainable way forward for the industry.