Comment by 101008
3 days ago
I was very anti AI (mainly because I am scared that I'll take my job). I did a side project that would have took me weeks in just two days. I deployed it. It's there, waiting for customers now.
I felt in love with the process to be honest. I complained my wife yesterday: "my only problem now is that I don't have enough time and money to pay all the servers", because it opened to me the opportunities to develop and deploy a lot of new ideas.
Aren't you afraid it's gonna be a race to the bottom ? the software industry is now whoever pays gemini to deploy something prompted in a few days. Everybody can, so the market will be inundated by a lot of people, and usually this makes for a bad market (a few shiny one gets 90% of the share while the rest fight for breadcrumbs)
I'm personally more afraid that stupid sales oriented will take my job instead of losing it to solid teams of dedicated expert that invested a lot of skills in making something on their own. it seems like value inversion
Anything that can be done in 2 days now with an LLM was low hanging fruit to begin with.
I'll also argue that level of skill depends on what one can make in those two days... it's like a mirror. If you don't know what to ask for, it doesn't know what to produce
I really wonder what long term software engineering projects will become.
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Yes, I worry about this quite a bit. Obviously nobody knows yet how it will shake out, but what I've been noticing so far is that brand recognition is becoming more important. This is obviously not a good thing for startup yokels like me, but it does provide an opportunity for quality and brand building.
The initial creation and generation is indeed much easier now, but testing, identifying, and fixing bugs is still very much a process that takes some investment and effort, even when AI assisted. There is also considerable room for differentiation among user flows and the way people interact with the app. AI is not good at this yet, so the prompter needs to be able to identify and direct these efforts.
I've also noticed in some of my projects, even ones shipped into production in a professional environment, there are lots of hard to fix and mostly annoying bugs that just aren't worth it, or that take so much research and debugging effort that we eventually gave up and accepted the downsides. If you give the AI enough guidance to know what to hunt for, it is getting pretty good at finding these things. Often the suggested fix is a terrible idea, but The AI will usually tell you enough about what is wrong that you can use your existing software engineering skills and experience to figure out a good path forward. At that point you can either fix it yourself, or prompt the AI to do it. My success rate doing this is still only at about 50%, but that's half the bugs that we used to live with that we no longer do, which in my opinion has been a huge positive development.
My prediction is that software will be so cheap that very soon, economy of scale gives way to maximum customization which means everyone writes their own software. There will be no software market in the future.
Possibly which means devs will have to pivot ... I dont know where though since it would mean most jobs are over and a new economy must be invented
I think everyone worries about this. No one knows how it's going to turn out, none of us have any control over it and there doesn't seem to be anything you can do to prepare ahead of time.
As a customer, I don't want to pay for vibe-coded products, because authors also don't have a time (and/or skills) to properly review, debug and fix products.
They do with AI, that's the point.
> I felt in love with the process to be honest. I complained my wife yesterday: "my only problem now is that I don't have enough time and money to pay all the servers", because it opened to me the opportunities to develop and deploy a lot of new ideas.
What opportunities? You aren't going to make any money with anything you vibe coded because, even the people you are targeting don't vibe code it, the minute you have even a risk of gaining traction someone else is going to vibe code it anyway.
And even if that didn't happen you're just reducing the signal/noise ratio; good luck getting your genuinely good product out there when the masses are spammed by vibe-coded alternatives.
When every individual can produce their own software, why do you think that the stuff produced by you is worth paying for?
That might be true, but it doesn't have to be immediately true. It's an arbitrage problem: seeing a gap, knowing you can apply this new tool to make a new entrant, making an offering at a price that works for you, and hoping others haven't found a cheaper way or won the market first. In other words, that's all business as usual. How does Glad sell plastic bags when there are thousands of other companies producing plastic bags, often for far, far less? Branding, contracts, quality, pricing -- just through running a business. No guarantee it's gonna work.
Vibe-coding something isn't a guarantee the thing is shit. It can be fine. It still takes time and effort, too, but because it can take lot less time to get a "working product", maybe some unique insight the parent commenter had on a problem is what was suddenly worth their time.
Will everyone else who has that insight and the vibe coding skills go right for that problem and compete? Maybe, but, also maybe not. If it's a money-maker, they likely will eventually, but that's just business. Maybe you get out of the business after a year, but for a little while it made you some money.
> That might be true, but it doesn't have to be immediately true. It's an arbitrage problem: seeing a gap, knowing you can apply this new tool to make a new entrant, making an offering at a price that works for you, and hoping others haven't found a cheaper way or won the market first. In other words, that's all business as usual.
I'm hearing what you are saying, but the "business as usual" way almost always requires some money or some time (which is the same thing). The ones that don't (performance arts, for example) average a below-minimum-wage pay!
IOW, when the cost of production is almost zero, the market adjusts very quickly to reflect that. What happens then is that a few lottery ticket winners make bank, and everyone else does it for free (or close to it).
You're essentially hoping to be one of those lottery ticket winners.
> How does Glad sell plastic bags when there are thousands of other companies producing plastic bags, often for far, far less?
The cost of production of plastic bags is not near zero, and the requirements for producing plastic bags (i.e. cloning the existing products) include substantial capital.
You're playing in a different market, where the cost of cloning your product is zero.
There's quite a large difference between operating in a market where there is a barrier (capital, time and skill) and operating in a market where there are no capital, time or skill barriers.
The market you are in is not the same as the ones you are comparing your product to. The better comparison is artists, where even though there is a skill and time barrier, the clear majority of the producers do it as a hobby, because it doesn't pay enough for them to do it as a job.
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You're overestimating people's willingness to write code even if they don't have to do it. Most people just don't want to do it even if AI made is easy to do so. Not sure who you're talking to but most people I know that aren't programmers have zero interest in writing their own software even if they could do it using prompts only.