[vardalab]

We said the same thing when 3D printing came out. Any sort of cool tech, we think everybody’s going to do it. Most people are not capable of doing it. in college everybody was going to be an engineer and then they drop out after the first intro to physics or calculus class. A bunch of my non tech friends were vibe coding some tools with replit and lovable and I looked at their stuff and yeah it was neat but it wasn't gonna go anywhere and if it did go somewhere, they would need to find somebody who actually knows what they're doing. To actually execute on these things takes a different kind of thinking. Unless we get to the stage where it's just like magic genie, lol. Maybe then everybody’s going to vibe their own software.

[josephg]

I don't think claude code is like 3d printing.

The difference is that 3D printing still requires someone, somewhere to do the mechanical design work. It democratises printing but it doesn't democratise invention. I can't use words to ask a 3d printer to make something. You can't really do that with claude code yet either. But every few months it gets better at this.

The question is: How good will claude get at turning open-ended problem statements into useful software? Right now a skilled human + computer combo is the most efficient way to write a lot of software. Left on its own, claude will make mistakes and suffer from a slow accumulation of bad architectural decisions. But, will that remain the case indefinitely? I'm not convinced.

This pattern has already played out in chess and go. For a few years, a skilled Go player working in collaboration with a go AI could outcompete both computers and humans at go. But that era didn't last. Now computers can play Go at superhuman levels. Our skills are no longer required. I predict programming will follow the same trajectory.

There are already some companies using fine tuned AI models for "red team" infosec audits. Apparently they're already pretty good at finding a lot of creative bugs that humans miss. (And apparently they find an extraordinary number of security bugs in code written by AI models). It seems like a pretty obvious leap to imagine claude code implementing something similar before long. Then claude will be able to do security audits on its own output. Throw that in a reinforcement learning loop, and claude will probably become better at producing secure code than I am.

[oblio]

> This pattern has already played out in chess and go. For a few years, a skilled Go player working in collaboration with a go AI could outcompete both computers and humans at go. But that era didn't last. Now computers can play Go at superhuman levels. Our skills are no longer required. I predict programming will follow the same trajectory.

Both of those are fixed, unchanging, closed, full information games. The real world is very much not that.

Though geeks absolutely like raving about go and especially chess.

[xnx]

> I can't use words to ask a 3d printer to make something

Setting aside any implications for your analogy. This is now possible.

[rhubarbtree]

The design work remains.

I’m not a fan of analogies, but here goes: Apple don’t make iPhones. But they employ an enormous number of people working on iPhone hardware, which they do not make.

If you think AI can replace everyone at Apple, then I think you’re arguing for AGI/superintelligence, and that’s the end of capitalism. So far we don’t have that.

[prpl]

There is verification and validation.

The first part is making sure you built to your specification, the second thing is making sure you built specification was correct.

The second part is going to be the hard part for complex software and systems.

[aleph_minus_one]

> I can't use words to ask a 3d printer to make something.

You can: the words are in the G-code language.

I mean: you are used to learn foreign languages in school, so you are already used to formulate your request in a different language to make yourself understood. In this case, this language is G-code.

[nprz]

You can basically hand it a design, one that might take a FE engineer anywhere from a day to a week to complete and Codex/Claude will basically have it coded up in 30 seconds. It might need some tweaks, but it's 80% complete with that first try. Like I remember stumbling over graphing and charting libraries, it could take weeks to become familiar with all the different components and APIs, but seemingly you can now just tell Codex to use this data and use this charting library and it'll make it. All you have to do is look at the code. Things have certainly changed.

[samlinnfer]

It might be 80-95% complete but the last 5% is either going to take twice the time or be downright impossible.

[bluGill]

I figure it takes me a week to turn the output of ai into acceptable code. Sure there is a lot of code in 30 seconds but it shouldn't pass code review (even the ai's own review).

[skydhash]

> You can basically hand it a design

And, pray tell, how people are going to come up with such design?

[cruffle_duffle]

The number of non-technical people in my orbit that could successfully pull up Claude code and one shot a basic todo app is zero. They couldn’t do it before and won’t be able to now.

They wouldn’t even know where to begin!

[slopinthebag]

Not really. What the FE engineer will produce in a week will be vastly different from what the AI will produce. That's like saying restaurants are dead because it takes a minute to heat up a microwave meal.

[nly]

The last 20% is usually what takes 80% of the time

[WarmWash]

Its not our current location, but our trajectory that is scary.

The walls and plateaus that have been consistently pulled out from "comments of reassurance" have not materialized. If this pace holds for another year and a half, things are going to be very different. And the pipeline is absolutely overflowing with specialized compute coming online by the gigawatt for the foreseeable future.

So far the most accurate predictions in the AI space have been from the most optimistic forecasters.

[uplifter]

There is a distribution of optimism, some people in 2023 were predicting AGI by 2025.

No such thing as trajectory when it comes to mass behavior because it can turn on a dime if people find reason to. Thats what makes civilization so fun.

[oblio]

https://xkcd.com/605/

[gjk3]

Thank you for posting this.

Im really tired, and exhausted of reading simple takes.

Grok is a very capable LLM that can produce decent videos. Why are most garbage? Because NOT EVERYONE HAS THE SKILL NOR THE WILL TO DO IT WELL!

[ghurtado]

The answer is taste.

I don't know if they will ever get there, but LLMs are a long ways away from having decent creative taste.

Which means they are just another tool in the artist's toolbox, not a tool that will replace the artist. Same as every other tool before it: amazing in capable hands, boring in the hands of the average person.

[jwpapi]

This goes well along with all my non-tech and even tech co-workers. Honestly the value generation leverage I have now is 10x or more then it was before compared to other people.

HN is a echo chamber of a very small sub group. The majority of people can’t utilize it and needs to have this further dumbed down and specialized.

That’s why marketing and conversion rate optimization works, its not all about the technical stuff, its about knowing what people need.

For funded VC companies often the game was not much different, it was just part of the expenses, sometimes a lot sometimes a smaller part. But eventually you could just buy the software you need, but that didn’t guarantee success. Their were dramatic failures and outstanding successes, and I wish it wouldn’t but most of the time the codebase was not the deciding factor. (Sometimes it was, airtable, twitch etc, bless the engineers, but I don’t believe AI would have solved these problems)

[toyg]

> The majority of people can’t utilize it

Tbh, depending on the field, even this crowd will need further dumbing down. Just look at the blog illustration slops - 99% of them are just terrible, even when the text is actually valuable. That's because people's judgement of value, outside their field of expertise, is typically really bad. A trained cook can look at some chatgpt recipe and go "this is stupid and it will taste horrible", whereas the average HN techbro/nerd (like yours truly) will think it's great -- until they actually taste it, that is.

[satvikpendem]

> To actually execute on these things takes a different kind of thinking

Agreed. Honestly, and I hate to use the tired phrase, but some people are literally just built different. Those who'd be entrepreneurs would have been so in any time period with any technology.

[intended]

3 things

1) I don’t disagree with the spirit of your argument

2) 3D printing has higher startup costs than code (you need to buy the damn printer)

3) YOU are making a distinction when it comes to vibe coding from non-tech people. The way these tools are being sold, the way investments are being made, is based on non-domain people developing domain specific taste.

This last part “reasonable” argument ends up serving as a bait and switch, shielding these investments. I might be wrong, but your comment doesn’t indicate that you believe the hype.

[democracy]

100%, it's like with "Suno" - everyone can create a good quality music/song basically in 2-3 minutes (and vibe programming can only do.... nothing in a few minutes) - how many new great bands and musicions we got )))))

[Otterly99]

You might not get great musicians from using Suno, but an ad company might decide to just generate a jingle rather than hire a musician to do it. Same with images/videos. The result might not be great, but the companies does it in 3 minutes and close-to-zero cost. Similarly, you can vibe-code a website for a restaurant (that does a very basic thing like display a menu, opening hours, maybe a google map location). It might not be the best, but you would be surprised at the amount of people that are willing to sacrifice quality for cheap prices.

[josephg]

I heard a stat on the economist podcast the other day talking about AI music production. They said spotify estimates 40% of songs on their platform are now AI generated. The AI generated songs make up 0.5% of total listening time.

Low quality music made in bulk seems much less useful than low quality code made in bulk.