This is the problem. If you couldn't have coded it slowly in the old world, you will have problems coding it in AI world.

However if you have a lot of coding experience, you can now compress the time it would have taken you be an enormous amount. My experience is that I can now make extensive changes with very little effort, and very few dead ends. I've been able to take on entire secondary projects where I was just replication existing knowledge with slightly different tools.

Just this week I had a litmus test. I had an existing database that I'm pushing huge amount of data to. I decided to try a different underlying database. This would have taken me a full week of looking at documentation and writing supporting scripts, now I've done it in the spare time I had in two days of my actual work.

And it's not like the AI just did it all unsupervised. It threatened to do down the wrong path a few times, but each time I spotted it and steered it the way I wanted. I also asked it a few questions about curiosities I discovered in the emitted code, and that led to fixes as well.

If I didn't know how to code before, I would still be coding this alternative database.

I truly enjoy programming with AI, it is my favorite hobby by a mile. I'm also happy to say that, for now, I get to capture some of the productivity increase for myself while my employer catches up to how effective it is.

It is sad that there is no space to discuss these new techniques that isn't full of opportunists and clout chasers.

I am not sure what the moral of the story is but it reminds me a bit of that parable about the investor getting his shoes shined and the shoe shine kid giving him investment advice.

Partially I think the idea of an app being so valuable that it makes money without being connected to anything is just not really a thing. Some games (Flappy Bird anyone?) can be like that or some very specific type of lifestyle app, but for the most part you need a real world service connected or it will not be seen as valuable. But perhaps I am wrong.

=> You can use AI to double-check (not single check), avoid overengineering, fill knowledge gaps, scan for inconsistencies and many more things. The main benefit it has for me is not that it codes me stuff real fast. It is that my learning curve improved, drastically, whenever I have a missunderstanding. I dive down and test it. Sometimes AI is wrong and I have to go to docs, sometimes docs are wrong and I have to test and I have to open a issue.

If you combine AI capabilities with debugging skills and testing you have a lot of power as developer nowadays. Its a lot of fun.

To me it seems like most things tend to develop to: It’s more fair. If you are lazy and try to do a shorcut you’ll be punished with wasted time and a lot of frustration. If you try to do thing conscientiousnessly and take ownership for the code you push, publish and run. You’ll learn faster, improve faster, ship faster and have way less headache.

Low effort in -> low effort out

I can actually code so no point in vibing.

To vibe means to never look at the code, where is the fun in that?

Coding is at the stage of maturing from commodity to a craft. This generation will pass it on to the next generation, and so on.

As with all crafts, there will be a great demand for quality craftsmanship. And it will command a much higher price than whatever comes out of the factory.

I generally foresee most AI generated things becoming worthless. It’s basic supply and demand. When copycats and crop up overnight in droves, whats the differentiator? The value goes way down.

I believe that winning differentiator will be quality. Uniqueness. A level of craftsmanship that an LLM can’t copy without knowing the secret sauce.

You can. You just can't do it fast.

You need to build up your tech skills first. But AI platforms are not incentivized to help you do that. So you have to be very controlled about the speed at which you code.

I learned that letting the AI drive implementation wasn't working for me. The speed is intoxicating at first, and you start trusting the output blindly. But eventually you have to face the music and fix up the mess.

So now I just use it as a glorified autocorrect and search engine, as well as a rubber duck (Ask mode in Cursor). This speed works for me. You have to find the speed that works for you.

Perhaps that's obvious to others, but it felt worth saying from my perspective. If vibe coding tools are touting themselves as a key to easy wealth, shame on the product and marketing teams creating the messaging.

I'm still vibe coding in terms of syntax and logic, but I do understand my codebase, and have made some excellent automations at work.

the actual AI companies marketing hype seems to claim:

1) you can make fun non-serious toy apps

2) any day now massive productivity increases for software companies. this is different than anyone can launch a product with no software skills.

But to be fair, this technology is still at an early stage, and we don't know it's limits.

It's scary to imagine a future where the development process in companies is fully handled by AI agents, which are the only ones who can read and maintain the code.

I would love to see Lovable.dev's financials, I think they're running the classic low retention, high marketing dollar consumer playbook and are burning cash fast. Base44 seems to do the same thing after getting acquired by Wix, I'm seeing more and more of their ads.

As someone technical, vibe coding makes me feel disconnected from my product and feel like I don't know what's going on. I eventually just need to dive back into the code and find many things I need to change myself.

Was it perhaps author's wishful thinking?

I also just overall haven't seen a huge influx of new and useful apps and websites as you'd expect based on how tech leaders are talking about the virtues of these new tools.

I don't think AI has really found it's niche yet, and I think it's going to be much subtler than most people think, it's going to be the tools that integrate features like translations and summarization and speech to text in ways that are seamless that end up sticking - all of this other noise is just marketing hype.

They Duk-a-duk! (South Park is awesome isn't it ?)

It takes significant human effort to thoroughly understand, define, and refine specifications to recursively satisfy all important feedback from multiple LLMs. Only then can the coding begin, and the actual coding then takes just a couple of minutes. Following this, the code has to be thoroughly reviewed, perhaps also slightly refactored. Lastly, sometimes some follow-up issues have to be created to improve the feature further before it is shippable.

As with anything else, the quality of the result is proportional to the level of effort you put in.

I regularly use Claude code (and Claude) to write code for

- throwaways data processing or visualization

- connecting to an API I have some documentation for

- demoing some concept

I think it's great for data science and product stuff, and on those merits will be a multi-billion dollar industry. I would never let it near a real codebase.

edit: typo

The greater scam here is that rugged individualism can lead to positive societal outcomes.

Just more free market capitalism, bro! We just need more freedom for the tech bros, the finance bros, bro!

This AI shit is yet another oh look - increase in rugged individual 'productivity' is going to lead to positive societal outcomes, trust me, bro!

It's all bullshit but what else have the western retarded elite got? Or non-western elites for that matter? USA is USSR 2.0 - falling apart from the retarded short-sighted incompetence and selfishness of its sociopathic 'elites'. China will be USSR 3.0 in a generation or two.

It's all so terribly tedious, boring and cruel - the monumental amounts of wasted opportunity and resources because everyone's too busy being 'productive' to ever spend a decade or two to actually think through anything and come up with potential real solutions to real problems. The average 'elite' doesn't even know what the real problems are or how to begin finding out what they might be - they probably think it's climate change or more likely - how to make sure they retain their billions. Oh well, so it goes.