Comment by slopinthebag
11 hours ago
Not really. What the FE engineer will produce in a week will be vastly different from what the AI will produce. That's like saying restaurants are dead because it takes a minute to heat up a microwave meal.
11 hours ago
Not really. What the FE engineer will produce in a week will be vastly different from what the AI will produce. That's like saying restaurants are dead because it takes a minute to heat up a microwave meal.
There were some good and some pretty terrible FE devs though, and it's not clear which ones prevailed.
It does make the lowest common denominator easier to reach though. By which I mean your local takeaway shop can have a professional looking website for next to nothing, where before they just wouldn't have had one at all.
I think exceptional work, AI tools or not, still takes exceptional people with experience and skill. But I do feel like a certain level of access to technology has been unlocked for people smart enough, but without the time or tools to dive into the real industry's tools (figma, code, data tools etc).
The local takeaway shop could have had a professional looking website for years with Wix, Squarespace, etc. There are restaurant specific solutions as well. Any of these would be better than vibe coding for a non-tech person. No-code has existed for years and there hasn't been a flood of bespoke software coming from end users. I find it hard to believe that vibe-coding is easier or more intuitive than GUI tooling designed for non-experts...
I think the idea that LLM's will usher in some new era where everyone and their mom are building software is a fantasy.
I more or less agree specifically on the angle that no-code has existed, yet non-technical people still aren't executing on technical products. But I don't think vibe-coding is where we see this happening, it will be in chat interfaces or GUIs. As the "scafolding" or "harnesses" mature more, and someone can just type what they want, then get a deployed product within the day after some back and forth.
I am usually a bit of an AI skeptic but I can already see that this is within the realm of possibility, even if models stopped improving today. I think we underestimate how technical things like WIX or Squarespace are, to a non-technical person, but many are skilled business people who could probably work with an LLM agent to get a simple product together.
People keep saying code was never the real skill of an engineer, but rather solving business logic issues and codifying them. Well people running a business can probably do that too, and it would be interesting to see them work with an LLM to produce a product.
2 replies →
Wouldn’t we have more restaurants if there was no microwave ovens? But microwave oven also gave rise to many frozen food industry. Overall more industrializations.