Comment by TheRoque
5 days ago
The thing is that the world is already flooded by software, games, websites, everyone is just battling for attention. The demand for developers cannot rise if consumers have a limited amount of money and time anyways.
5 days ago
The thing is that the world is already flooded by software, games, websites, everyone is just battling for attention. The demand for developers cannot rise if consumers have a limited amount of money and time anyways.
Not everything is entertainment. Some software is useful, but buggy or poorly designed.
Yesterday, I was using a slow and poorly organized web app with a fantastic public-facing API server. In one day, I vibe coded an app to provide me with a custom frontend for a use case I cared about, faster and better organized than the official app, and I deployed it to cloud "Serverless" hosting. It used a NodeJS framework and a CSS system I have never learned, and talked to an API I never learned. AI did all the research to find the toolkits and frameworks to use. AI chose the UI layout, color scheme, icons, etc. AI rearranged the UI per my feedback. It added an API debug console and an in-app console log. An AI chatbot helped me investigate bugs and find workarounds. While I was testing the app and generating a punchlist of fix requests, AI was coding the improvements from my previous batch of requests. The edit-compile-test cycle was just a test-test-test cycle until the app was satisfactory.
0 lines of code or config written by me, except vibe instructions for features and debugging conversation.
Is it production quality? No. Was it part of a giant hairy legacy enterprise code base? No. Did it solve a real need? Yes. Did it greatly benefit from being a greenfield standalone app that integrated with extremely well build 3rd party APIs and frameworks? Yes. Is it insecure as all heck thanks to NodeJS? Maybe.
Could a proper developer review it and security-harden it? I believe so. Could a proper develop build the app without AI, including designing and redesigning and repeatedly looping back to the target user for feedback and coding and refactoring in less than a week? No.
If it's a React frontend, unless it put __dangerouslySetInnerHtml in there to render HTML received from the API, the frontend is likely going to be perfectly secure.
Every company I have ever worked for had years of work on their backlog that they didn't have the capacity to handle.
The backlog is here because they didn't care to fix it, because it wasn't that important and it's not what's causing the business to fail. That's not what's gonna drive employment.
I’m less familiar with consumer facing stuff, but even in the last year I’ve seen projects that formerly would have been three people working over multiple sprints turn into something one person could do in an afternoon.
There’s lots of caveats, it’s not everything, but we’re able now to skip a ton of steps. It takes less time now to build up he real software demo than it did before to make the PowerPoint that shows conceptually what the demo would be. In B2C anyway AI has provided a lot of lift.
And I say that as someone generally very sceptical of current AI hype. There’s lots of charlatans but it’s not bs