Comment by svara

> On the other hand, where I remain a skeptic is this constant banging-on that somehow this will translate into entirely new things

Really a lot of innovation, even at the very cutting edge, is about combining old things in new ways, and these are great productivity tools for this.

I've been "vibe coding" quite a bit recently, and it's been going great. I still end up reading all the code and fixing issues by hand occasionally, but it does remove a lot of the grunt work of looking up simple things and typing out obvious code.

It helps me spend more time designing and thinking about how things should work.

It's easily a 2-3x productivity boost versus the old fashioned way of doing things, possibly more when you take into account that I also end up implementing extra bells and whistles that I would otherwise have been too lazy to add, but that come almost for free with LLMs.

I don't think the stereotype of vibe coding, that is of coding without understanding what's going on, actually works though. I've seen the tools get stuck on issues they don't seem to be able to understand fully too often to believe that.

I'm not worried at all that LLMs are going to take software engineering jobs soon. They're really just making engineers more powerful, maybe like going from low level languages to high level compiled ones. I don't think anyone was worried about the efficiency gains from that destroying jobs either.

There's still a lot of domain knowledge that goes into using LLMs for coding effectively. I have some stories on this too but that'll be for another day...