One of the genuinely positive things about tools like Copilot and ChatGPT is that they empower people with minimal development experience to create their own programs. Little programs that do useful things - and that’s awesome. More power to the users.
This guy didn't just make a small program, he made a product that is attuned to some very stringent requirements. If you gave this project to experienced software developers it would be heavy on process and light on impact, take forever to make, and stupid expensive.
Yeah, the most important part of that video is where he says: "it works well enough". I think there's lots of room for this kind of bespoke software that's fundamentally unmaintainable -- and not something anyone could reasonably afford to make with professionals -- but good enough for purpose. This seems like a great, life-changing example, but it's still subject to the same thing the article is talking about.
I've had some free time recently so I've been trying to use the various AI tools to do a greenfield project with Rails. I know the stack intimately, so it's been a useful exercise as a check against hype. While I can occasionally trust the tooling to make big changes, most of the time I find that even the small changes are wrong in some important, fundamental way that requires re-writing everything at a later time. Asking the models to fix whatever is broken usually results in an endless cycle of (very junior-like!) random changes, and eventually I just have to go in and figure out the fundamental restructure that fixes the issue.
Would this be good enough for someone writing a one-time-use, bespoke piece of software? Maybe. Would they be able to maintain this code, without having a truly senior-level ability to work with the code itself? No [1].
I'm less fearful of LLM taking experienced programmers' jobs [2], because I fundamentally think this kind of stuff plays in the same end of the market as knockoff designer goods, Ikea furniture, and the like. It makes custom software available to an entire customer segment that couldn't have afforded it before, but nobody is going to confuse it with a product made by a team of skilled professionals [3,4].
[1] But to a really inexperienced developer, it looks the same.
[2] I am more fearful of clueless business types, who think this technology obviates the need for programmers.
[3] ...but will unskilled professionals be under pressure? Maybe!
[4] ...and what about skilled people, using the same tools? My current hypothesis is they're beneficial, but ask me again in six months.
I love this so much. It's hacky, janky, and absolutely phenomenal and life changing. This is like perfectly in the spirit of the hacker ethos. This dude scraped together pieces around him and made a useful product that solves the problems he wants to solve, the way he wants to solve them.
The code is probably garbage. You can tell the UI is weird and jumpy. He's using timed delays to manipulate the browser with keyboard keys. The whole thing would be absolutely shredded here. But it's beautiful. It's crafted for function over form with duct tape and bubble gum but it's the difference between his brother being locked helplessly alone in his body, or being able to express himself and have some level of autonomy. It's just awesome.
LLMs rule for this kind of stuff. Solve your problems and move on. The code is not so precious. You'll learn many things along the way and will be able to iterate quickly with a tireless and semi competent but world knowledgeable assistant.
I didn't look at this video, but be vigilant when seeing one, as I was also surprised by someone demonstrating what they can do with Cursor and I went so far to install the exactly the same version of the app, use the same model and everything (prompt, word capitalization...) I could gather from the video and the results were nowhere near what was demonstrated in the video (recreating mobile web page from screenshot).
I know that LLMs are not deterministic machines, but IMO there is a lot of incentive to be "creative" with marketing of this stuff.
For the reference, this was less than two months ago.
The funny thing is someone somewhere will find a way to make millions off a vibe coded project. I just suspect it will be the outlier and they will be well positioned to make that happen.
And for the rest of the companies that embrace the 30%~ efficiency spike, it will just accelerate our work goals faster.
I like to use it on stuff that we wanna do to enhance the UX but rarely sees the light of day. Plus my wrists have never felt so good since replacing boring syntax choirs with LLMs.
Hence why software developers are out of job, eventually.
The day of only a few people around the factory floor to babysit the robots will come, but lets keep celebrating the day they start unloading them from the delivery trucks for installation.
Why do you not read the article? What you are saying is just total nonsense if you had actually read the article.
>If you gave this project to experienced software developers it would be heavy on process and light on impact, take forever to make, and stupid expensive.
No, it wouldn't. Every single software developer knows how to make programs which "work well enough". This claim is totally ridiculous, it also is not a "product" in any meaningful sense.
What the article is pointing out is that you can not sell software like this. It is not a "product" at all, it is a hobby project. And you can not develop a hobby project like you would develop a commercial product.
Just think for a second what it would take to sell this.
>they empower people with minimal development experience to create their own programs.
The author goes out of their way to play up the toy aspect of the LLMs when driven by the inexperienced. No mention is made of them being used by experienced developers, but I get the impression he feels they aren't useful to the experienced.
I'm just playing with a small client/server tool (rsync but for block devices), and vibe coding allowed me to figure out some rough edges of my design document, and experiment with "what would it look like built with threads? As async code? As procedural?) I would never have done that before because of the sheer amount of time it would take, I'd have picked what I thought was best and then lived with the sunk cost falacy until I had no other choice. It did a pretty good job of catching reasonable exceptions in the communication code which I probably would have just let throw a traceback until I got a bug report. It did a great job of adding logging and debugging options. And I had it take 4 attempts at making a "fancy" --progress display and picked the one I liked the best.
LLMs give a level of exploration to software development that we haven't seen since the good old days when HP set up several groups to each build their next generation workstation environment, and then picked the best one.
IMHO, the experienced software developers stand at a unique position to take advantage of these LLMs that far outstrip what an inexperienced developer can do.
> vibe coding allowed me to figure out some rough edges of my design document, and experiment with "what would it look like built with threads? As async code? As procedural?”
This doesn’t fall under my understanding of the phrase “vibe coding”. In the tweet from Karpathy which many point to for coining the phrase, he says that when vibe coding you essentially “forget the code exists”. I think it’s distinct from regular ol LLM-assisted development
If I wanted to open a large world class fast food chain, I wouldn't be cooking home meals then. That would be silly.
Copilot can help me cook the equivalent of a McDonalds special in terms of software. It's good, I think McDonalds is delicious.
But it cannot help me cook a home meal software. It will insist that my home made fries must go in a little red box, and my fish sandwich needs only half a slice of cheese.
Deeply into that metaphor, maybe someone who has only worked for fast food chains might forget that a lot of good industrial dishes are variations of what previously were home cooked meals.
I am glad that copilot can help young cooks to become fast food workers. That really looks like something.
Well, I take pleasure in cooking home meal software. Can you make a copilot that helps with that?
You know what, nevermind. I don't need a copilot to cook home meals. I have a bunch of really good old books and I trust my taste.
It's not like some big company is going to be interested in some random amateur dish, is it? It was definitely not cooked for them.
I am in the middle of my third AI assisted project. I disagree ~90%.
If you prompt an LLM like an architect and feed it code rather than expecting it to write your code, both ChatGPT 4o and Claude 3.7 Sonnet do a great job. Do they mess up? Regularly. But the key is to guide the LLM and not let the LLM guide you, otherwise you'll end up in purgatory.
It takes some time to get used to what types of prompts work. Remember, LLMs are just tools; used in a naive way, they can be a drain, but used effectively they can be great. The typing speed alone is something I could never match.
But just like anything, you have to know what you're doing. Don't go slapping together a bunch of source files that they spit out. Be specific, be firm, tell it what to review first, what's important and what is not. Mention specific algorithms. Detail exactly how you want something to fit together, or describe shortcomings or pitfalls. I'll be damned if they don't get it most of the time.
> Copilot can help me cook the equivalent of a McDonalds special in terms of software. It's good, I think McDonalds is delicious.
No. The likes of Copilot help you cook the meal you'd like, how you'd like it. In some cases it forgets to crack open eggs, in other cases it cooks a meal far better than whatever you'd be able to pull together in your home kitchen. And does it in seconds.
The "does it in seconds" is the key factor. Everyone heard of the "million monkeys with a typewriter" theorem. The likes of Copilot is like that, but it takes queues and gathers context and is supervised by you. The likes of Copilot is more in line with a lazy intern that you need to hand-hold to get them to finish their assignment. And with enough feedback and retries, it does finish the assignment. With flying colors.
My main takeaway from vibe-coding is that nobody cared enough to fill that niche and expectation. And it was really frustrating, yet we're getting there through convolutated, inefficient and borderline barbaric means.
People are still lamenting after HyperCard. Automation on windows or macos didn't go anywhere. Shortcuts were a better step into that direction but I feel it got stuck in the middle as Apple wasn't going to push it further. Android had more freedom yet you won't see a "normal" user do automation either.
If we're going to point the middle finger at vibe-coding, I wish we had something to point to as a better tool for the general population to quickly make stuff they want/need.
(Doing it as a professional dev is to me another debate, still with nuance in it IMHO. I'd also love better prototyping tools to be honest.)
Python is not exactly a hard language to learn. But the truth is that people generally don’t like to devote time to what they deem unimportant even if the end result would be useful. I’ve seen smart people go though dense mathematics and physics books, but refuses to take an introductory course in programming.
It throws away decades of software engineering principles in favour of unchecked AI output by clicking “accept all” on the output.
You would certainly NOT use ‘vibe coded’ slopware that powers key control systems in critical infrastructure such as energy, banking, hospitals and communications systems.
The ones pushing “vibe coding” are the same ones who are all invested in the AI companies that power it (and will never disclose that).
An incident involving using ‘vibe coded’ slopware is just waiting to happen.
‘OUTSOURCING’ isn’t software engineering.
It throws away decades of software engineering principles in favour of CHEAP output by clicking “I AGREE” on a contract.
You would certainly NOT use ‘OUTSOURCED’ slopware that powers key control systems in critical infrastructure such as energy, banking, hospitals and communications systems.
An incident involving using ‘OUTSOURCED’ slopware is just waiting to happen.
It’s implied that programs are personal but product code goes through peer review, checking the premise of the change as well as the implementation.
When someone reviews vibe coded patches and gives feedback, what should the reviewer expect the author to do? Pass the feedback onto their agent and upload the result? That feels silly.
How has code review changed in our brave, vibey new world? Are we just reviewing ideas now, and leaving the code up to the model? Is our software now just an accumulation of deterministic prompts that can be replayed to get the same result?
The real problem with "vibe coding" (or any coding, or with any product what so ever) is that the end user probably is not a programmer, and therefore cannot have professional judgement on the quality of the implementation. The only thing typical end user care is the perceived behavior, not the implementation details.
As it is easier and cheaper to do anything, the result is low-quality products. This of course serves well for the real professionals, who can now sell premium quality products at premium pricing for those who know and want the quality.
It depends. Market has demonstrated time and again that premium quality is a rather niche product. Is the niche large enough for all the existing "real professionals" to fit into it?
I am happy that there will be work in security for good while. They might first pass run LLMs on that too. But it will miss things and that is where I can come in...
Right now there are thousands of apps getting built with AI that are going to work surprisingly well, will get embedded into all sorts of fundamental processes — and will start to perform unacceptably badly in two or three years. God knows what we do with this information but it seems clear we are setting up for a tsunami of horrible performance regressions
Actually even in the years before AI code generation started, I noticed an increase in code bases that seem very well architected and engineered. But once you start using the code for a week you notice it's full of bugs and the consistent architecture is just make believe. Surely this problem is getting way worse with generated code that is optimized to read like it's very well engineered
This article starts to touch on an important distinction between software and products, but seems to miss the larger picture.
With the cost of developing software dropping to near zero, there are a whole class of product features that may not be relevant for most users.
> You haven’t considered encoding, internationalization, concurrency, authentication, telemetry, billing, branding, mobile devices, deployment.
Software, up until now, was only really viable if you could get millions (or billions) of users.
Development costs are high, and as a product developer you're forced to make software that covers as many edge cases as possible, so that it can meet the needs of the most people.
I like to think of this type of software as "average" -- average in the sense that it's tailored not to one specific user or group of users, but necessarily accommodating a larger more amalgamous "ideal" user.
We've all seen software we love get worse over time, as it tries to expand it's scope to more users.
Salesforce may be the quintessential example of this, with each org only using a small fraction of it's total capabilities.
Vibe coding thus enables users to create programs (rather than products) that do exactly what they want, how they want, when they want. Users are no longer forced into the confines of the average user, and can instead tailor software directly to their needs.
Is that software a product? Maybe one day. For now, it's a solution.
The argument is that vibe coding is great for little personal programs but bad for full-blown products.
I don't think you can ship a fully baked product made exclusively with AI coding yet. But it's *really* useful for investigative product development - e.g. when you have a few different ideas for how something might work but aren't quite sure what's best. I used to regret that I never mastered Figma or other mockup tools - now I never will have to.
This is about the problem with vibe coding your way to a product. But if the vibes are strong enough, maybe we don't need products at all?
They do tend to complicate things, with all of their moats and such. I never wanted a product that did the thing, I really just wanted to do the thing. "Works on my machine" might be good enough if you're unlikely to want to repeat yourself on a different machine.
> I never wanted a product that did the thing, I really just wanted to do the thing.
Would you vibe code your daily driver car's ECU or a high-frequency trading application to use for your 401k? If you were to do these things (more power to you), I rather suspect you'd still do a whole lot of research and critical thinking beforehand, which sort of obviates the "vibes".
If you haven't already read it, you'd probably enjoy "How big things get done" by Brent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner - what you said is the central thesis of the book.
I agree with the article, but that's not how the vibe coders see themselves. From their perspective they can't see the gap between programming and product, and in my experience are pretty hostile to feedback from real software engineers.
I wish there were no "software products" at all. They usually just come in the way. I favor open source, and not imposing unnecessary constraints on users. Every piece of software should be swappable, and tying it to a vendor makes it less so.
Yeah I agree. That was my main takeaway... just because you have a running program doesn't mean you got a product... the vibe-coding thing is just the flashy headline
The real takeaway here is that programs you whip up for your own use, by any means, are not the same things as maintainable products you can deliver to customers.
Vibe coding, or VB tricks and hacks 25 years ago, or whatever, sure, do it if that works for you, but that's not a product you can maintain for a customer base. It's a program, not a product.
I have a fairly successful heuristic - the more words about "empowerment" or "democratization" are being spilled around, less power and democracy common people have. There is a reason corporate snakes love these words so much. But hey, enjoy your vibe-coded app and believe that this tech is hyped because of perspectives on betterment of human society and individual emancipation, not because it will allow our technocratic overlords tighten the leash.
[+] [-] commandersaki|11 months ago|reply
I've changed my outlook on vibe coding after seeing the results of this wholesome vibe coding: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pJUXocn7aE .
This guy didn't just make a small program, he made a product that is attuned to some very stringent requirements. If you gave this project to experienced software developers it would be heavy on process and light on impact, take forever to make, and stupid expensive.
[+] [-] timr|11 months ago|reply
I've had some free time recently so I've been trying to use the various AI tools to do a greenfield project with Rails. I know the stack intimately, so it's been a useful exercise as a check against hype. While I can occasionally trust the tooling to make big changes, most of the time I find that even the small changes are wrong in some important, fundamental way that requires re-writing everything at a later time. Asking the models to fix whatever is broken usually results in an endless cycle of (very junior-like!) random changes, and eventually I just have to go in and figure out the fundamental restructure that fixes the issue.
Would this be good enough for someone writing a one-time-use, bespoke piece of software? Maybe. Would they be able to maintain this code, without having a truly senior-level ability to work with the code itself? No [1].
I'm less fearful of LLM taking experienced programmers' jobs [2], because I fundamentally think this kind of stuff plays in the same end of the market as knockoff designer goods, Ikea furniture, and the like. It makes custom software available to an entire customer segment that couldn't have afforded it before, but nobody is going to confuse it with a product made by a team of skilled professionals [3,4].
[1] But to a really inexperienced developer, it looks the same.
[2] I am more fearful of clueless business types, who think this technology obviates the need for programmers.
[3] ...but will unskilled professionals be under pressure? Maybe!
[4] ...and what about skilled people, using the same tools? My current hypothesis is they're beneficial, but ask me again in six months.
[+] [-] noman-land|11 months ago|reply
The code is probably garbage. You can tell the UI is weird and jumpy. He's using timed delays to manipulate the browser with keyboard keys. The whole thing would be absolutely shredded here. But it's beautiful. It's crafted for function over form with duct tape and bubble gum but it's the difference between his brother being locked helplessly alone in his body, or being able to express himself and have some level of autonomy. It's just awesome.
LLMs rule for this kind of stuff. Solve your problems and move on. The code is not so precious. You'll learn many things along the way and will be able to iterate quickly with a tireless and semi competent but world knowledgeable assistant.
[+] [-] fancythat|11 months ago|reply
[+] [-] y42|11 months ago|reply
[+] [-] brandensilva|11 months ago|reply
And for the rest of the companies that embrace the 30%~ efficiency spike, it will just accelerate our work goals faster.
I like to use it on stuff that we wanna do to enhance the UX but rarely sees the light of day. Plus my wrists have never felt so good since replacing boring syntax choirs with LLMs.
[+] [-] okayishdefaults|11 months ago|reply
[+] [-] pjmlp|11 months ago|reply
The day of only a few people around the factory floor to babysit the robots will come, but lets keep celebrating the day they start unloading them from the delivery trucks for installation.
[+] [-] constantcrying|11 months ago|reply
>If you gave this project to experienced software developers it would be heavy on process and light on impact, take forever to make, and stupid expensive.
No, it wouldn't. Every single software developer knows how to make programs which "work well enough". This claim is totally ridiculous, it also is not a "product" in any meaningful sense.
What the article is pointing out is that you can not sell software like this. It is not a "product" at all, it is a hobby project. And you can not develop a hobby project like you would develop a commercial product.
Just think for a second what it would take to sell this.
[+] [-] t-writescode|11 months ago|reply
[+] [-] ashoeafoot|11 months ago|reply
firefox("find cats") -> gimp ("carton filter cats")-> gimp("compose into partypic") -> google drive ("upload to cat folder")
[+] [-] linsomniac|11 months ago|reply
The author goes out of their way to play up the toy aspect of the LLMs when driven by the inexperienced. No mention is made of them being used by experienced developers, but I get the impression he feels they aren't useful to the experienced.
I'm just playing with a small client/server tool (rsync but for block devices), and vibe coding allowed me to figure out some rough edges of my design document, and experiment with "what would it look like built with threads? As async code? As procedural?) I would never have done that before because of the sheer amount of time it would take, I'd have picked what I thought was best and then lived with the sunk cost falacy until I had no other choice. It did a pretty good job of catching reasonable exceptions in the communication code which I probably would have just let throw a traceback until I got a bug report. It did a great job of adding logging and debugging options. And I had it take 4 attempts at making a "fancy" --progress display and picked the one I liked the best.
LLMs give a level of exploration to software development that we haven't seen since the good old days when HP set up several groups to each build their next generation workstation environment, and then picked the best one.
IMHO, the experienced software developers stand at a unique position to take advantage of these LLMs that far outstrip what an inexperienced developer can do.
[+] [-] SteveDR|11 months ago|reply
This doesn’t fall under my understanding of the phrase “vibe coding”. In the tweet from Karpathy which many point to for coining the phrase, he says that when vibe coding you essentially “forget the code exists”. I think it’s distinct from regular ol LLM-assisted development
[+] [-] tjpnz|11 months ago|reply
[+] [-] alganet|11 months ago|reply
If I wanted to open a large world class fast food chain, I wouldn't be cooking home meals then. That would be silly.
Copilot can help me cook the equivalent of a McDonalds special in terms of software. It's good, I think McDonalds is delicious.
But it cannot help me cook a home meal software. It will insist that my home made fries must go in a little red box, and my fish sandwich needs only half a slice of cheese.
Deeply into that metaphor, maybe someone who has only worked for fast food chains might forget that a lot of good industrial dishes are variations of what previously were home cooked meals.
I am glad that copilot can help young cooks to become fast food workers. That really looks like something.
Well, I take pleasure in cooking home meal software. Can you make a copilot that helps with that?
You know what, nevermind. I don't need a copilot to cook home meals. I have a bunch of really good old books and I trust my taste.
It's not like some big company is going to be interested in some random amateur dish, is it? It was definitely not cooked for them.
[+] [-] caspper69|11 months ago|reply
If you prompt an LLM like an architect and feed it code rather than expecting it to write your code, both ChatGPT 4o and Claude 3.7 Sonnet do a great job. Do they mess up? Regularly. But the key is to guide the LLM and not let the LLM guide you, otherwise you'll end up in purgatory.
It takes some time to get used to what types of prompts work. Remember, LLMs are just tools; used in a naive way, they can be a drain, but used effectively they can be great. The typing speed alone is something I could never match.
But just like anything, you have to know what you're doing. Don't go slapping together a bunch of source files that they spit out. Be specific, be firm, tell it what to review first, what's important and what is not. Mention specific algorithms. Detail exactly how you want something to fit together, or describe shortcomings or pitfalls. I'll be damned if they don't get it most of the time.
[+] [-] doug_durham|11 months ago|reply
[+] [-] barotalomey|11 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] motorest|11 months ago|reply
No. The likes of Copilot help you cook the meal you'd like, how you'd like it. In some cases it forgets to crack open eggs, in other cases it cooks a meal far better than whatever you'd be able to pull together in your home kitchen. And does it in seconds.
The "does it in seconds" is the key factor. Everyone heard of the "million monkeys with a typewriter" theorem. The likes of Copilot is like that, but it takes queues and gathers context and is supervised by you. The likes of Copilot is more in line with a lazy intern that you need to hand-hold to get them to finish their assignment. And with enough feedback and retries, it does finish the assignment. With flying colors.
[+] [-] makeitdouble|11 months ago|reply
My main takeaway from vibe-coding is that nobody cared enough to fill that niche and expectation. And it was really frustrating, yet we're getting there through convolutated, inefficient and borderline barbaric means.
People are still lamenting after HyperCard. Automation on windows or macos didn't go anywhere. Shortcuts were a better step into that direction but I feel it got stuck in the middle as Apple wasn't going to push it further. Android had more freedom yet you won't see a "normal" user do automation either.
If we're going to point the middle finger at vibe-coding, I wish we had something to point to as a better tool for the general population to quickly make stuff they want/need.
(Doing it as a professional dev is to me another debate, still with nuance in it IMHO. I'd also love better prototyping tools to be honest.)
[+] [-] skydhash|11 months ago|reply
[+] [-] TiredOfLife|11 months ago|reply
[+] [-] nonethewiser|11 months ago|reply
Is it:
- just pressing tab and letting copilot code whatever?
- asking an llm to do everything that it can and falling back on your own brain as needed or when its easier.
I guess probably more like the latter. I was just surprised to hear there was a special term for it. I thought everyone was doing that.
[+] [-] charcircuit|11 months ago|reply
[+] [-] sieabahlpark|11 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] rvz|11 months ago|reply
It throws away decades of software engineering principles in favour of unchecked AI output by clicking “accept all” on the output.
You would certainly NOT use ‘vibe coded’ slopware that powers key control systems in critical infrastructure such as energy, banking, hospitals and communications systems.
The ones pushing “vibe coding” are the same ones who are all invested in the AI companies that power it (and will never disclose that).
An incident involving using ‘vibe coded’ slopware is just waiting to happen.
[+] [-] mc3301|11 months ago|reply
[+] [-] aglione|11 months ago|reply
[+] [-] NitpickLawyer|11 months ago|reply
You would certainly NOT use ‘OUTSOURCED’ slopware that powers key control systems in critical infrastructure such as energy, banking, hospitals and communications systems.
An incident involving using ‘OUTSOURCED’ slopware is just waiting to happen.
... oh, wait...
[+] [-] gorgoiler|11 months ago|reply
When someone reviews vibe coded patches and gives feedback, what should the reviewer expect the author to do? Pass the feedback onto their agent and upload the result? That feels silly.
How has code review changed in our brave, vibey new world? Are we just reviewing ideas now, and leaving the code up to the model? Is our software now just an accumulation of deterministic prompts that can be replayed to get the same result?
[+] [-] 0xCE0|11 months ago|reply
As it is easier and cheaper to do anything, the result is low-quality products. This of course serves well for the real professionals, who can now sell premium quality products at premium pricing for those who know and want the quality.
[+] [-] int_19h|11 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Ekaros|11 months ago|reply
[+] [-] pjs_|11 months ago|reply
[+] [-] blablabla123|11 months ago|reply
[+] [-] jumploops|10 months ago|reply
With the cost of developing software dropping to near zero, there are a whole class of product features that may not be relevant for most users.
> You haven’t considered encoding, internationalization, concurrency, authentication, telemetry, billing, branding, mobile devices, deployment.
Software, up until now, was only really viable if you could get millions (or billions) of users.
Development costs are high, and as a product developer you're forced to make software that covers as many edge cases as possible, so that it can meet the needs of the most people.
I like to think of this type of software as "average" -- average in the sense that it's tailored not to one specific user or group of users, but necessarily accommodating a larger more amalgamous "ideal" user.
We've all seen software we love get worse over time, as it tries to expand it's scope to more users.
Salesforce may be the quintessential example of this, with each org only using a small fraction of it's total capabilities.
Vibe coding thus enables users to create programs (rather than products) that do exactly what they want, how they want, when they want. Users are no longer forced into the confines of the average user, and can instead tailor software directly to their needs.
Is that software a product? Maybe one day. For now, it's a solution.
[+] [-] zachthewf|11 months ago|reply
I don't think you can ship a fully baked product made exclusively with AI coding yet. But it's *really* useful for investigative product development - e.g. when you have a few different ideas for how something might work but aren't quite sure what's best. I used to regret that I never mastered Figma or other mockup tools - now I never will have to.
[+] [-] __MatrixMan__|11 months ago|reply
They do tend to complicate things, with all of their moats and such. I never wanted a product that did the thing, I really just wanted to do the thing. "Works on my machine" might be good enough if you're unlikely to want to repeat yourself on a different machine.
[+] [-] lcnPylGDnU4H9OF|10 months ago|reply
Would you vibe code your daily driver car's ECU or a high-frequency trading application to use for your 401k? If you were to do these things (more power to you), I rather suspect you'd still do a whole lot of research and critical thinking beforehand, which sort of obviates the "vibes".
[+] [-] alexashka|11 months ago|reply
'Vibe coding' is merely an instance.
[+] [-] danparsonson|11 months ago|reply
[+] [-] gscott|11 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Vanit|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] OutOfHere|11 months ago|reply
[+] [-] pfraze|11 months ago|reply
[+] [-] salarhaji|11 months ago|reply
[+] [-] SideburnsOfDoom|11 months ago|reply
[+] [-] revskill|11 months ago|reply
[+] [-] asadotzler|11 months ago|reply
Vibe coding, or VB tricks and hacks 25 years ago, or whatever, sure, do it if that works for you, but that's not a product you can maintain for a customer base. It's a program, not a product.
[+] [-] wolvesechoes|11 months ago|reply