Comment by deepdarkforest
17 days ago
just wanted to say this was the most relatable take i have read so far, and i've read a lot. Exact same experiences. And you didnt even touch on the MCP's that enable these things to go wild as well. I think our takes are not being taken seriously for 2 reasons.
First marketing gaslighting from the faangs and hot startups with grifters that managed to raise and need to keep the bullshit windmill going.
Second is that these tools are relatively the best in boilerplate nextjs code that the vibecoders use to make a very simple dashboard and stuff, and they're the noisy minority on twitter.
There is basically zero financial incentive to admit LLM's are pushed dangerously beyond their current limits. I'm still figuring a way to go short this, apart from literally shorting the market.
People see that these things generate code and due to their lack of understanding they automatically assume this is all software engineering is.
Then we have the current batch of YC execs heavily pushing "vibe coded" startups. The sad reality is that this strategy will probably work because all they need is the next incredulous business guy to buy the vibe coded startup. There's so much money in the AI space to the point where I fully believe you can likely make billions of dollars this way through acquisition (see OAI buying Windsurf for billions of dollars, likely to devalue Cursor's also absurd valuation).
I'm not a luddite. I'm a huge fan of companies spending a decent chunk of money on R&D on innovative new projects even when there's a high risk of failure. The current LLM hype is not just an R&D project anymore. This is now being pushed as a full on replacement of human labor when it's clearly not ready. And now we're valuing AI startups at billions of dollars and planning to spend $500B on AI infrastructure so that we can generate more ghibli memes.
At some point this has to stop but I'm afraid by that point the damage will already be done. Even worse, the idiots who led this exercise in massive waste will just hop onto the next hype train.