Same. New yorker is the other mag I subscribed to.
Until 3 weeks ago I had a high cortisol inducing morning read: nyt, wsj, axios, politico. I went on a weeklong camping trip with no phone and haven't logged into those yet. It's fine.
I agree with this in general but with caveats. For example I think reading national-sized news every day sucks. But if you're of a specific demographic it might be useful to keep pretty up to date on nuanced issues, like if you're a gun owner you will probably want to keep up to date on gun licensing in your area. Or if you're a trans person it's pretty important nowadays to be very aware of laws being passed to dictate your legally going to whatever bathroom or something.
Fair point. But I was addressing leaving the phone at home to "check out". Because without a phone you'll just have to hope you see the masked men before they see you.
Right!? It's like me all the sudden being able to fix my car's engine. I mean, sure, there are mechanics, and it surely isn't rocket science, but I couldn't do it before and now I can!!! A miracle!
Cue the folks saying "well you could DIE!!!" Not if I don't fix brakes, etc ...
But if you are not saving "privileged" information who cares? I mean think of all the WordPress sites out there. Surely vibecoding is not SO much worse than some plugin monstrosity.... At the end of the day if you are not saving user info, or special sauce for your company, it's no issue. And I bet a huge portion of apps fall into this category...
100% this. This is the new age of software - but it will be tiny little apps like this for each little user. They don't need to be mega apps, etc. Bespoke little apps that help your own little business or corner of the world.
I'm teaching my kid what I consider the AI dev stack: AI IDE (Antigravity for us), database (Supabase for us with a nice MCP server), and deployment (Github and Vercel for us). You can make wonderful little integrated apps with this in hours.
Vibecoder here. I don't think so. I am a PE investor, and we are using it in our small portfolio companies to great effect. We can make small little mini-apps that do one thing right and help automate away extra work.
It's a miracle. Simply wouldn't have been done before. I think we'll see an explosion of software in small and midsize companies.
I admit it may be crappy software, but as long as the scope is small - who cares? It certainly is better than the janky manual paper processes, excel sheets, or just stuff in someone's head!
Funnily enough, Excel is the quintessential example of a fourth generation language, IDE, and database and it's the only one aside from SQL which actually succeeded from its time period. It's software, just like what you're building now, and just like what you're building now there are good points and bad points about it. The tradeoffs are different between the JS / Python code you're likely spinning up now vs. the Excel code that was being spun up before, but they rhyme.
100% correct. Wonderful and we will still use it for most use cases. But for stuff where it is just not needed or should be automated, we can now make some amazing tools. (Just like the VBA coders of old.)
I think the parent is talking about the people who post to LinkedIn that "SWE as a profession is dead" non-stop. I fully agree with you that it massively lowered the cost to create, but I'd argue that the people who's saying that SWE is dead wouldn't be able to go past the complexity barrier that most of us are accustomed to handling. I think the real winners would be the ones with domain expertise but didn't have the capacity to code (just like OP and you).
Correct. I think "real" software requires real development and architecture.
And to be honest, even the tiny apps I'm doing I wouldn't have been able to do without some background in how frontend / backend should work, what a relational database is, etc. (I was an unskilled technical PM in the dotcom boom in the 2000s so at least know my way around a database a little. I know what these parts of tech CAN do, but I didn't have the skills to make them do it myself.)
Don't care about the critics. What you're doing is what people were doing in the 80s with their new PCs and tools that democratized this kind of development, like Basic and DBase.
Most developers are too full of themselves, in fact, most of us are a bunch of pretentious pricks. It is no wonder people are happy to be able to get what they want without our smugness and pretentiousness. Too bad some us are not like that and will end up getting unemployed anyway in the next few years.
1. Invoice billing review. Automated 80% of what was a manual process by providing AI suggestions in an automated way. Saved 3 hours per day of managers time. Increased topline by 10%. Dev time: 1 day
2. Data dashboards. We use janky saas that does not have APIs. Automated a scraper to login, download the reports daily, parse and upload to a database, and build a dashboard. Used to take my associate 3 hours per week to do this in a crappy spreadsheet. Now I have it in a perfect database much more frequently. Dev time: 4 hours.
We are attacking little problems all across the business now.
I guess Vibe coding cleanup firms and offensive security researchers are plotting to find bugs costing firms millions of dollars worth of bugs or one creating a dreadful data breach.
Everything is still touched by human - AI is just giving suggestions to humans to speed them up. Can get them 80-90% there.
I think also you need to compare it to what was already there. No QA on the humans. Done off the side of their desk with no oversite, process, or checking. Huge amounts of manual errors.
The new solution just needs to be better than the old one, it doesn't need to be perfect.
(But I 100% agree that I wouldn't let AI live against customers. It is helping us build automations faster, and doing a "little" thinking on recommendation rules that would be very hard to implement without something highly structured, which would be frankly impossible in our environment.)
> I think also you need to compare it to what was already there
No. The bar is "miracle" and can cure cancer etc and can replace all developers etc. The bar is much higher than existing manual processes. It absolutely needs to be perfection to match the lofty claims
Miracle was meant here "figuratively", esp for non tech people this wording seems plausible from their perspective, because they can now do that without dev support
But this nightmare is ALREADY true, except that software is a spreadsheet. Or a piece of paper on someone's desk. Or an email that someone is supposed to send every day.... Yes it's an absolute nightmare to maintain if you built a fortune 500 off of it. But for a 100 person company that is 95% blue collar workers, this is fine. And better.
Curious about why the janky manual paper processes, excel sheets, or stuff not documented, was fixed only when vibe code was available. Was it just cost?
Time and thus cost. Early in my career I would look across a fairly large company at processes being ran on spreadsheets and see if it would be worth the time to create software to address and if those processes should be standardized. We barely scratched the surface with all the possible custom software opportunities for this company.
Cost and managerial overhead. We don't have a dev on staff. Even if we did, there is lots of managerial overhead to explain "the problem" and then iterate to a solution with a dev. Now you can just build the damn solution yourself!
MS Office is hardly "niche professional software." I hate it, and recognize that I can use the online services, but the reality is that I have to send, receive, and work in this application and I can't easily do it on Linux.
How do I join a live editing session of an Excel file with several people using regular Excel with LibreOffice?
I can't.
Or the same with PowerPoint.
I can't.
In a modern workspace it's not just local software running solely on just your local machine emailing around files or clobbering changes in some corporate file share.
If you're working in a corporate environment, this may not be viable. LibreOffice is great software, but it's not 100% compatible. Things may look slightly different, get lost or otherwise cause problems. I've really tried, but at the end of the day I occasionally do need to use actual Microsoft Office.
Yep. And then there is Visio which gets used a lot where I work. LibreOffice Draw doesn't come anywhere near it. It saves a lot of grief just to give our Linux users a Windows VM with Office on it if they need to do any significant docs or drawings.
I used Word to write a reasonably complicated document that necessarily used tables. It was one of the most frustrating, bug inducing experiences of my life. I had to open the document and edit it in LibreOffice to get any sort of stability.
I don’t do corporate work on my home computer? I don’t know who’s suggesting corporate IT departments should convert everyone to Linux. “Work computer” and “home computer” are entirely separate use cases.
(Also a ton of MS Office work is being done through the web interfaces now anyway. I find the web versions pretty terrible but people seem to put up with them.)
I am also forced to use "productivity" software from MS, but I make do with the web versions on Linux at work. I hate it all, but it's okay. I am playing the long term game of trying to get my whole org to Linux. It helps that I can influence technical decisions, slow but steady process.
My behavioral economics pricing idea for storage unit is to charge $1 for the first month but then double every month (or something like that). You shouldn't put stuff in storage long term and you're getting ripped off.
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