Comment by onethought
2 months ago
But anyone didn't do it... you an expert in software development did it.
I would hazard a guess that your knowledge lead to better prompts, better approach... heck even understanding how to build a status bar menu on Mac OS is slightly expert knowledge.
You are illustrating the GP's point, not negating it.
> I would hazard a guess that your knowledge lead to better prompts, better approach... heck even understanding how to build a status bar menu on Mac OS is slightly expert knowledge.
You're imagining that I'm giving Claude technical advice, but that is the point I'm trying to make: I am not.
This is what "vibe-coding" tries to specify.
I am only giving Claude UX feedback from using the app it makes. "Add a dropdown that lets me change the girth".
Now, I do have a natural taste for UX as a software user, and through that I can drive Claude to make a pretty good app. But my software engineering skills are not utilized... except for that one time I told Claude to use an AGDT because I fancy them.
My mother wouldn't be able to do what you did. She wouldn't even know where to start despite using LLMs all the time. Half of my CS students wouldn't know where to start either. None of my freshman would. My grad students can do this but not all of them.
Your 20 years is assisting you in ways you don't know; you're so experienced you don't know what it means to be inexperienced anymore. Now, it's true you probably don't need 20 years to do what you did, but you need some experience. Its not that the task you posed to the LLM is trivial for everyone due to the LLM, its that its trivial for you because you have 20 years experience. For people with experience, the LLM makes moderate tasks trivial, hard tasks moderate, and impossible tasks technically doable.
For example, my MS students can vibe code a UI, but they can't vibe code a complete bytecode compiler. They can use AI to assist them, but it's not a trivial task at all, they will have to spend a lot of time on it, and if they don't have the background knowledge they will end up mired.
The person at the top of the thread only made a claim about "non-experts".
Your mom wouldn't vibe-code software that she wants not because she's not a software engineer, but because she doesn't engage with software as a user at the level where she cares to do that.
Consider these two vibe-coded examples of waybar apps in r/omarchy where the OP admits he has zero software experience:
- Weather app: https://www.reddit.com/r/waybar/comments/1p6rv12/an_update_t...
- Activity monitor app: https://www.reddit.com/r/omarchy/comments/1p3hpfq/another_on...
That is a direct refutation of OP's claim. LLM enabled a non-expert to build something they couldn't before.
Unless you too think there exists a necessary expertise in coming up with these prompts:
- "I want a menubar app that shows me the current weather"
- "Now make it show weather in my current location"
- "Color the temperatures based on hot vs cold"
- "It's broken please find out why"
Is "menubar" too much expertise for you? I just asked claude "what is that bar at the top of my screen with all the icons" and it told me that it's macOS' menubar.
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