Comment by thewebguyd
2 months ago
> without seeing just how effective it can be once you zoom in.
The love/hate flame war continues because the LLM companies aren't selling you on this. The hype is all about "this tech will enable non-experts to do things they couldn't do before" not "this tech will help already existing experts with their specific niche," hence the disconnect between the sales hype and reality.
If OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, etc. were all honest and tempered their own hype and misleading marketing, I doubt there would even be a flame war. The marketing hype is "this will replace employees" without the required fine print of "this tool still needs to be operated by an expert in the field and not your average non technical manager."
The amount of GUIs I've vibe-coded works against your claim.
As we speak, my macOS menubar has an iStat Menus replacement, a Wispr Flow replacement (global hotkey for speech-to-text), and a logs visualizer for the `blocky` dns filtering program -- all of which I built without reading code aside from where I was curious.
It was so vibe-coded that there was no reason to use SwiftUI nor set them up in Xcode -- just AppKit Swift files compiled into macOS apps when I nix rebuild.
The only effort it required was the energy to QA the LLM's progress and tell it where to improve, maybe click and drag a screenshot into claude code chat if I'm feeling excessive.
Where do my 20 years of software dev experience fit into this except beyond imparting my aesthetic preferences?
In fact, insisting that you write code yourself is becoming a liability in an interesting way: you're going to make trade-offs for DX that the LLM doesn't have to make, like when you use Python or Electron when the LLM can bypass those abstractions that only exist for human brains.
You making a couple of small GUIs that could have been made with a drag and drop editor 10 years ago doesn't work against his claim as much as you think. You're just telling on your self and your "20 years" of supposed dev experience.
Dragging UI components into a WYSIWYG editor is <1% of building an app.
Else Visual Basic and Dreamweaver would have killed software engineering in the 90s.
Also, I didn't make them. A clanker did. I can see this topic brings out the claws. Honestly I used to have the same reaction, and in a large way I still hate it.
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Love that you are disagreeing with parent by saying you built software all on your own, and you only had 20 years software experience.
Isn't that the point they are making?
Maybe I didn't make it clear, but I didn't build the software in my comment. A clanker did.
Vibe-coding is a claude code <-> QA loop on the end result that anyone can do (the non-experts in his claim).
An example of a cycle looks like "now add an Options tab that let's me customize the global hotkey" where I'm only an end-user.
Once again, where do my 20 years of software experience come up in a process where I don't even read code?
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