Comment by Workaccount2

7 days ago

>My brother for example built a thing with Microsoft copilot that helped automate more in his manufacturing facility (used to be paper).

I have harped on this endlessly as a non-programmer working a non-tech job, with 7 "vibe-coded" programs now being used daily by people at my company.

I am sorry, but the tech world is completely missing the forest for the trees here. LLM's are talked about purely as tools that were created to help devs. Some love them, some hate them, but pretty much all of them seem unaware that LLMs allow non-tech people to automate tasks with a computer without having to go through a 3rd-party-created interface.

So yea, maybe Claude is useless troubleshooting your cloud platform. But it certainly isn't useless in helping me forgo a cloud platform by setting up a simple local database to use instead.

7 comments

Workaccount2

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cpursley  7 days ago

Yep, and it allows them to build POCs that they can pass to "real" devs in a way that was not possible before.

  • Workaccount2  6 days ago

    Real devs excel at writing software for hundreds, thousands, millions of users with fractal use cases and feature needs.

    LLMs excel at writing software for one or a handful of users with a very narrow but very well defined use cases.

    I don't need an LLM to write Excel.exe for keeping track of 20 employee's hours. A simple GUI on a SQLite database can easily do that.

    • kentonv  6 days ago

      Yes!

      We're about to enter a world where everyone has their own custom software for their specific use cases. Each of these is relatively simple, yet they may replace something complex. Excel is complex because it needs to handle everyone's use cases, but for any one particular spreadsheet, you could pretty easily vibe-code a replacement that does that one spreadsheet's job better than Excel can.

      I've also found that vibe-coding a presentation as a React app is better than using Power Point.

lsllc  6 days ago

> >My brother for example built a thing with Microsoft copilot that helped automate more in his manufacturing facility (used to be paper).

> I have harped on this endlessly as a non-programmer working a non-tech job, with 7 "vibe-coded" programs now being used daily by people at my company.

Aren't AI coding agent(s) just the next iteration of democratizing app development? This has happened before with Microsoft Access (even Visual Basic), or going back further FoxPro, dBase & Clipper etc? With all of these tools, non-programmers had been able to create apps to help them with their businesses.

  • Workaccount2  6 days ago

    This has never happened before. There has never been a plain English programming language.

          Public Class Form1
       Private Sub Form1_Load(sender As Object, e As EventArgs) Handles MyBase.Load
        MessageBox.Show("Hello, World!")
       End Sub
     End Class

    Becomes

    "Make a message box pop up on the screen that says Hello World!"

  • cpursley  6 days ago

    From what I understand, what he built was a copilot assisted Access app. He would have not had the time nor skillset without the copilot thing. And they don't have the budget for a bespoke app.

felipeerias  6 days ago

Devs have a hard time seeing vibe coding as UI, but that is what it effectively is for the average user. Describe the problem, get an interactive tool to handle it.