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Comment by freetanga

10 hours ago

I feel like it will be like going back to the 80s, when PCs became a norm and most programmers and hobbyists could code without the need of a University or a Corporation. Thousands of shareware apps you had to navigate, everyone trying to solve the same problems from different angles..

I do agree quality will be missed, and shadow IT will be again a big issue like at the end of the 80s and early 90s.

Coding on 8 and 16 bit home computers still required some skills that most vibe coders certainly lack.

I imagine a much darker future when it’s almost every enterprise system known for stability is now unstable.

Planes falling out of the sky, trains crashing into each other, pacemakers downloading updates and freezing

> most programmers and hobbyists could code without the need of a University or a Corporation.

I don't think so. Back then, the pool of people doing such a thing basically self-selected for intelligent, motivated types who were capable of learning on their own. The new "programmers" "programming" via Claude Code are going to be very different from those hobbyists you're talking about.

  • This is a comically self-absorbed perspective.

    Why are people making things with Claude Code if not because they’re motivated?

    • Because back then you had to care about the differences of e.g. 16bit vs 32bit datatypes & instructions, hardware limitations are not known to modern grown-up dev people - they think hardware is unlimited. Earlier you really had do understand what you were doing, today cou can get along with a prompt - which works great, until it doesnt. Not to blame any vibecode hobbyist here, though real application development usually required some degree of deeper understanding back then.

    • I think the point is that you had to be deeply curious and more of a "hacker" or "computer nerd" type to be able to figure things out.

      But I think the same applies to not just AI but various tools that have abstracted away the complexity of things over the years.

      For example, I would imagine the average person deploying some sort of web app or API today knows far less about networking and infrastructure than someone doing it 10 to 20 years ago.

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    • Knowing that genuine, disincentivized creativity is exceedingly rare (especially in the West), you can assume that the answer looks something like a carrot or a stick.

    • Because it's "easy" (until they hit a wall)

      Once they hit a wall, that is where you find out whether they are motivated or not

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