Comment by ben_w
2 hours ago
> I believe if this was true, we'd already be seeing vibed stuff succeeding everywhere, and pricing out incumbents, but I guess I'm not seeing this? Like at all?
I'm substituting my own[0] vibe coding for buying[1] apps. Language mini-games to help with German? A few prompts. Fluid dynamics simulation for an airzooker? Vibed. A web app listening for a MIDI keyboard, upon which you can drop some .midi files, and get a rhythm action game to learn the piano? Vibed. Webcam for my Raspberry Pi? Vibed. Getting Marathon 2 (well, the open sourced and upgraded engine, Aleph One) working as a web app? Vibed. Isochrone maps? Vibed.
Half of this I can even get done with the free models.
> without reverse centauring ourselves with cameras and mics and oodles of compute everywhere, and so far that hasn't exactly been playing out the way the frontier labs and the singularity folk hoped it would (meta glasses? humane? really?)
Yeah, so fortunate that cameras are expensive and there aren't 6 on my table right now between laptops and phones. :P
Seriously though, what's saving humanity collectively from everything getting automated from the panopticon we'd already built before Transformer models got good enough for even the most basic of classification and translation tasks, let alone anything we now use them for, is that machine learning takes an obscene number of examples before getting competent. Any living creature that needed so many examples would starve to death before learning how to eat.
This difficulty is why, for all the billions of miles that Tesla cars have collectively driven, perhaps pushing trillions now, they're still not sold to the public without steering wheels. Tesla claim to make such vehicles now in the form of the Cybercab, but they're not for sale, and even then some of the pictures that get in the press still show steering wheels.
[0] if you can call anything vibe-coded "my own"
[1] or worse, given the popularity of subscription models in this era, leasing some SaaS
> I'm substituting my own[0] vibe coding for buying[1] apps. Language mini-games to help with German? A few prompts. Fluid dynamics simulation for an airzooker? Vibed. A web app listening for a MIDI keyboard, upon which you can drop some .midi files, and get a rhythm action game to learn the piano? Vibed. Webcam for my Raspberry Pi? Vibed. Getting Marathon 2 (well, the open sourced and upgraded engine, Aleph One) working as a web app? Vibed. Isochrone maps? Vibed.
When do you have time for all of this? I don’t mean the vibing part but the using the app part.
I agree that agents are super good for one shotting throwaway code for tasks that would have required manual human actions previously but I would never have bothered buying an app for that.
Not having to deal with IT support for relatives is a win though since now I can just throw it at an LLM!
> When do you have time for all of this? I don’t mean the vibing part but the using the app part.
Mix of this being spread over more than a year, that I'm not doomscrolling because HackerNews and Telegram are my main social media presences, and being unemployed/prematurely retired (which one depends on what one thinks of €1k/month passive income and no rent).