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From looking at "vibe coding" tools their output is about the quality of bad body shop contractors. It's entirely possible for experienced devs to come in and fix it.

I think there's going to be the same problems as there are fixing bad body shop code. The companies that pushed their "vibe code" for a few dollars worth of AI tokens will expect people to work for pennies and/or have unreasonable time demands. There's also no ability to interview the original authors to figure out what they were thinking.

Meanwhile their customers are getting screwed over with data leaks if not outright hacks (depending on the app).

It's not a whole new issue, shitty contractors have existed for decades, but AI is pushing down the value of actual expertise.



Yeah, the current trend has lots of parallels to the low code/no code trend we had a couple of years back and the workflow engine trend we had about 15 years back... I'm curious why you think it would push down the value of engineering hours though, that didn't even happen in the past.


> From looking at "vibe coding" tools their output is about the quality of bad body shop contractors.

Genuinely, it's a lot better.


I think this is just another correction. The software market is worth several trillion dollars now. Enterprise is pushing against the rise in labor costs. It will backfire as it did every single time and in a few years competent developers will be worth their weight in platinum.

For nearly 50 years now, software causes disruption, demand drives labor costs, enterprise responds with some silver bullet, haircuts in expensive suits collect bonuses, their masters pocket capital gains, and the chicken come home to roost with a cycle of disruption and labor cost increases. LLMs are being sold as disruption but it's actually another generation of enterprise tech. Hence the confusion. Vibe coding is just PR. Karpathy knows what he's doing.


50 years might be overstating it a bit, lookup tables/hash maps were a novelty back then and available compute resources increased by many orders of magnitude... So maybe we actually had some real enablers in the meantime. My gut feeling is the current AI hype is at least as revolutionary as search engines, marketplaces or social networks (not like recommendation engines or block chain). Though not as revolutionary as the loom or electricity




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