Comment by vineyardmike
6 days ago
I’ll be that voice I guess - I have fun “vibe coding”.
I’m a professional software engineer in Silicon Valley, and I’m fortunate to have been able to work on household-name consumer products across my career. I definitely know how to do “real” professional work “at scale” or whatever. Point is, I can do real work and understand things on my own, and I can generally review code and guide architecture and all that jazz. I became a software engineer because I love creating things that I and others could use, and I don’t care about “solving the puzzle” type satisfaction from writing code. In engineering school, software had the fastest turnaround time from idea in my head to something I could use, and that’s why I became a software engineer.
LLM assisted coding accelerates this trend. I can guide an LLM to help me create things quickly and easily. Things I can mostly create myself, of course, but I find it faster for a whole category of easy tasks like generating UIs. It really lowers the “activation energy” to experiment. I think of it like 3D printing, where I can prototype ideas in an afternoon instead of long weekend or a few weeks.
>because I love creating things that I and others could use, and I don’t care about “solving the puzzle” type satisfaction from writing code.
Please don't take offense to this, but it sounds like you just don't like building software? It seems like the end goal is what excites you, not the process.
I think for many of us who prefer to write code ourselves, the relationship we have with building software is for the craft/intellectual stimulation. The working product is cool of course, but the real joy is knowing how to do something new.
I understand where you're coming from (and I don't take offense), but based on your reply, I don't really feel like my views came across.
When I was a student, I took classes on chip and circuit design. One class, the professor had us work on all these complex circuits to do things like flash lights and produce various signals with analog circuits. The next lesson, he had us replace all that complex work with a microcontroller and 20 lines of C - "the way it's done in industry". The students mourned the loss of the "real" engineering because the circuit that required skill and careful math was replaced by a cheap chip and some trivial software. Their entire concept of the craft was destroyed when they were given a tool that replaced the "fun parts" with some trivial and comparatively boring work. That same concept of replacing circuits with digital logic scaled up is how extremely complex and well engineered circuits like FPGAs work.
Maybe it was just my earlier wording, but I think there is joy in the act of turning your ideas into something real - creation - not just having something real. Shopping is not building. Importantly, it takes careful thought and practice and a learned instinct to engineer and create things correctly, and do it repeatably, as the original article discusses. Craft is about practice, and learning, and trying something new with what you've learned.
If LLMs mean that I'll never have to write another trivial set of methods to store a JSON object in a SQL database, I don't think I'll lose any project-wide joy. Expressing creativity, and trying new things is what's great, not typing something that's been done a million times before. It's a tired analogy, but I do think of it more like a level of abstraction, like the LLM is a "compiler" for design docs or specifications. For myself, I usually don't see a difference between a prompt instructing an LLM to write some function, and the code for the function itself - in same way that a method in Java, bytecode, and asm are basically the same (with some caveats here around complexity and originality).
For a lot of folks, the derivation of joy is not as scale-free as seems necessary to move up the hierarchy in this way. The jump in abstraction kills some joy by removing the tangible process. The tactile enjoyment someone gets from knitting is not there when operating a loom, much less when managing someone else who operates the loom.
The change in agency also kills the joy for me. I thrive on abstraction in the language and mathematics sense. But I do not at all enjoy indirection and delegation through unreliable agents. I am not interested in the loss of control and the new risk management task. I would never accept a "stochastic compiler" that offered to optimize my code but with risk of randomly changing the semantics. That determinism in the semantics needs to remain for me to accept a tool as a valid abstraction.
For context, I am a computer scientist by title and a programmer at heart. I got my CS degree from a liberal arts program rather than an engineering school. My temperament is more that of a hands-on artist at an easel or typewriter and not that of a manager of an engineering department. In my long career, I have thrived with peers or betters on collaborative projects. I have zero interest in "advancing" to a managerial role.
But honestly, the loss of control, lack of trust, and associated risk management is a big problem for me. I have rarely delegated work to less skilled or less reliable juniors, and I have never enjoyed that. The scenario of a confidently wrong subordinate is a huge trigger for me. It evokes long term trauma from growing up with a mentally ill family member. It feels like all of the burden of being a caregiver to someone with delusions, but with none of the moral context to make that worth the cost.
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As a thought experiment, do you think it would be just as fun if you were given access to an infinite database of apps, and you were able to search through the database for an existing app that suit your needs, and then it gave it to you?
Or would it no longer be fun, because it no longer feels like creating?
I'll repeat something I said to a sibling comment. I guess my original wasn't particularly clear.
> I think there is joy in the act of turning your ideas into something real - creation - not just having something real. Shopping is not building.
No, you were clear. I suppose I was interested to see where you drew the distinction between creating and shopping.
For example, lets say LLMs improve to the point where they can now reliably one-shot entire apps with no more input than the original prompt. Would you no longer consider that creating? What's the difference between that and typing your prompt into an infinite app store?