Comment by rustyhancock
9 hours ago
This is how I feel about vibe coding.
Frontier models can easily one shot what I ask for, and make adjustments as ask to quickly make an app that meets what I wanted.
But often when I programmed outside of work (and at work too) I learnt something.
Quite often that my favourite pattern is an antipattern in some use cases.
That might never happen again at the rate of development.
The parallel is real, but in math the "cash value" of the results often won't appear for years, if at all, and so the teaching and "intellectual fortification" is the primary point of the whole enterprise (at least, a major part of it).
In contrast, the value of a program is typically just the "black box" service it provides. Indeed, the program itself has always been opaque to most business stakeholders. Before, they paid human programmers and got back a program they didn't understand but could use; now, they pay an LLM provider and get back a program they don't understand but can use. In the pre-LLM era, the economic value of "understanding" and "shared knowledge" about the programs themselves was only that it made maintenance and changes cheaper. It never had intrinsic value, except as intellectual satisfaction to programmers (I was... am... one of those who found that value).
Only if you assume that all software works the way that product managers think it does.
They come up with the features and the implementation is an unimportant detail in realizing their designs.
In reality implementation details frequently drive design and in most cases they are at least highly intertwined.
I can’t count how many products and features I’ve built that ended working completely differently than the initial design, or how many times I was able to simplify a workflow after spending a days thinking about the implementation details.
You can kinda do something similar by spending days or weeks going back and forth with an LLM, but at least in my experience that doesn’t really save much time and I don’t understand the problem quite as well by the end of it.
I don't disagree with the points you've made but what are they rebutting?
The economic value is still the product you delivered. Your understanding of the implementation meant you participated in the work of the "product manager". I think most good devs do. That might be an argument for devs to transition into designer/PM roles. That is effectively happening already, whether or not role titles have caught up.
But in any case the value isn't in the understanding itself. It just happens that the understanding still helps create better block box products. Also, I wouldn't count on this "human advantage" lasting long. I hope it does, but ime LLMs are now good enough to do this "co-design" too, and will only get better.
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That's definitely true, but on the other hand I can produce with a month of literal non-stop vibe coding (agents running overnight, with checklists of what to qa for when I'm up) what took years for others to do, working in teams of tens or hundreds. At that scale, it's not a question of "doing it faster and not learning" or "doing it slowly"; the alternative is it not happening at all.
I use thousands of dollars worth of AI a month at work. I’ve found plenty of things I think it does well.
But paraphrasing
> I can produce in a month what took years for teams of hundreds of people
Is completely insane.
If you can really do that Anthropic would like a word with you.
I don't think that's insane, at least not in the game dev world. I was big into the Bethesda game modding scene 15-ish years ago, and did some work on e.g. Tamriel Rebuilt, and saw the scale and man-hours that went into that- and that was even using a premade modding toolkit, and I compare that to what I can build with Claude...
To be fair, in the game dev world there are a lot of things you can do now that would have been impossible, or required 10,000x the number of devs that it does now, e.g. making No Man's Sky without the proc-gen tools that can exist now would have been physically impossible. Point being, it's perfectly normal to be able to say, "using the tools available now, I can build what would have taken tens or hundreds of devs years of work in the past", in game dev.
The project I'm building rn is a black-box rebuild of a client that has been being developed for ~22 years, and I've rebuilt significant portions of it over the last 2 weeks. That was, quite literally, equivalent to tens or hundreds of peoples' labor.
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I disagree. Humans still learn to read despite other humans reading at an objectively higher level since the beginning of writing.
Learning is not an output-efficient process but is a fantastic outcome. AI lowers some portions of the development workflow but not yet every part, and, efficiently produced outputs aren't always the major outcome desired. In the real world / outside the benchmark lab, you care about robustness, reusability, composability, security, and more. Targeting speed to acceptable average output inferred from a prompt or similar benchmark metrics miss a big part of the game.
I am sure even before vibe coding you used to use plenty of libraries that were open source and had no idea how the implementation was.