Comment by IanCal
9 hours ago
I think you massively underestimate the number of useful apps that are crud and a bit of business logic and styling. They’re useful, can genuinely take time to build, can be unique every time, and yet not brand new research projects.
A lot of stuff is simultaneously useful but not mission critical, which is where I think the sweet spot of LLMs currently lies.
In terms of the state of software quality, the bar has actually been _lowered_, in that even major user-facing bugs in operating systems are no longer a showstopper. So it's no surprise to me that people are vibe-coding things "in prod" that they actually sell to other people (some even theorize claude code itself is vibe-coded, hence its bugs. And yet that hasn't slowed down adoption because of the claude max lock in).
So maybe one alternate way to see the "productivity gains" from vibe-coding in deployed software is that it's actually a realization that quality doesn't matter. The seeds for this were already laid years back when QA vanished as a field.
LLMs occupy a new realm in the pareto frontier, the "slipshod expert". Usually humans grow from "sloppy incompetent newb" to the "prudent experienced dev". But now we have a strange situation where LLMs can write code (e.g. vectorized loops, cuda kernels) that could normally only be done by those with sufficient domain knowledge, and yet (ironically) it's not done with the attention and fastidiousness you'd expect from such an experienced dev.
No totally, I agree. But I don't think that anyone will be YOLO vibe coding massive changes into Blender or ffmpeg any time soon.
Probably not, though additions maybe - I added the feature where the sculpt tool turns as you move it around if I recall right, many moons ago - I don’t think it was that hard but was a useful change.