Comment by everforward
6 days ago
> I'm thinking the future of this tech will likely be better tooling with better IDE integrations rather than "Claude plz make me a SaaS kthx"
I think this sort of thinking is a trap, because it presumes that all software has the same constraints.
There's a spectrum of requirements between "chuck this over the wall at Claude, it only has to work once" and "this is a literal rocket ship, formally verify the whole thing".
I've made some things with Claude I don't understand and don't control. It's fine, they're still useful to me. Things for the house that I wasn't going to build manually, some dashboarding stuff and scripts for work, stuff that can crash and burn and I'll be fine.
They won't justify trillions in investment, but they are useful.
Equally, I do agree with you on some things. Sometimes I hand-hold the LLM or forgo it entirely because I want to be 100% sure I know how something works, and can justify a decision if it causes a production outage.
I think the future is probably multiple different tools with different goals. Better IDE integration for some uses, an entirely separate "LLM herd controller" kind of thing for when you're okay with vibe-coding, and the most interesting is something in the middle where you're more in the loop than pure vibe-coding, but don't see the full context like in an IDE. Something where it surfaces changes to key components, but hides things like test changes.
Yeah I mean, there are definitely little scripts and stuff in my codebase that I'm happy to have an AI spit out and never look at because it's not important; but those are nice wins around the margins, not a justification of the "EVERYTHING HAS CHANGED!" insanity we've been seeing these past couple of years.
The thing is though, for that purpose, AI is just an incremental improvement. I mean, in the 80s and 90s people were quickly building crappy-but-useful things with basic or visual basic or spreadsheets and access databases, in the 2000s people built awful but functional websites in PHP, etc. I think AI is an improvement on those "scratch my itch quickly" things, but it's not a replacement for good practices.
I do think it’s a step function improvement, as someone that enjoys those crappy but infinitely-useful tools.
Those tools tend to suck in the sense that they were written for a single person, so the tool assumes that you wrote it and have the context of the author. Help text output often sucks, the UI often sucks or doesn’t exist, it might require 15 packages to be installed that no one has documented because it was never meant to be distributed.
I like it as an MVP thing to trial whether other people would use it and I need to write a “real” version of it, or if I’m the only one that will use it and I can just vibe-code the hell out of it permanently.
You used to have to decide that pretty early on, which meant a lot of talking to other people but also trying to prevent it spinning into a whole project with a PM that will never actually be done.
Dunno, ymmv, I like it a lot in the domain of “stuff that doesn’t have an oncall rotation”. I do find it super useful in that space. Still useful but much less so if the code is something I could be paged for.
It’s what’s called in software engineering as “casual software” as a differentiator of “business software” and “critical software”. Not all types needs a high bar of quality, and most of the software engineering thought practices are tailored for business applications that will be made available to multiple users.
As you said, building a script that only you use personally or a very simple thing that just accomplishes one task and it’s easy to test require almost no engineering, and an LLM can often build those with very little downsides.