But it makes me happy in such an immediate serotonin spike it’s akin to a drug. It used to be that I’d sit there dreaming every night of new things I wanted to build. It was fun to think, “what if I devoted the next year to this idea?”, but that was always met with the realities of a 9-5 after.
Now I can build those ideas as fast as they hit me. They’re fleeting fancies though. A game here, an app there. It’s fun to see but there’s so much more digital waste.
It does make me happy though. I’d rather be able to live my dreams than let them pass me by. I do wonder about the addictiveness of it though - that hit it gives you is very, very real.
It makes me wonder if the current app dopamine/gold rush will be similar to the Sora/MidJourney dopamine hit in 2023 or the AI "make me a story to make fun of my friend on Discord" dopamine hit in 2022. "We have never been able to make more images, movies and now apps... but they don't seem to have made a single killer art, film... or dare I say app?" Maybe just maybe, the novelty will wear off and people realize how artificial and soul-less these AI-tokenmaxxed app's are, with their temu Cyberpunk aesthetics, California minimalist Dashboard UX flow and mid-witted Rust stack.
I wonder what is the equivalent in 2026 of what Dave should do to be a human cosmonaut to go against the transformer VAE probability-based machine we call Claude.
Agreed. I think there are people who like coding for the sake of it, akin to solving a puzzle. Then there are those who like building, and coding is a necessary step in that. The former are sad, the latter are happy.
> Now I can build those ideas as fast as they hit me.
That is the problem, why OP is so sad, you spam with your great ideas taking up the oxygen around him. AI is absolutely amazing when you use it for your own ideas and projects, and terrible when others do the same, raising the bar and making your own efforts look smaller. Have you read the open letter written by Fields medalists? They complain about AI solving the nice problems they reserved for their own students and careers.
Serious question: Does the ease of building cheapen the final product? Like something I've been struggling with is how can I show effort in the design of a product if I can just one-shot it with a prompt?
I'm doing the same thing as op and at least for me no; There are soooo many details i like to have changed, it doesn't feel like its just slop.
It feels like a very very well done exhaustive PoC.
Like executing an Idea is a 1000 times more fun than just thinking it and rethinking it a few month later again and then typing a few things down, again, and then thinking about it again and then thinking "i should do some sabatical to work on that stuff" Just to talk to friends who did sabaticals and never done anything with their time and realizing that you wouldn't just do that just because you took some sabatical.
> I think I could have been a pretty formidable startup founder had I been born five or ten years earlier.
I used to think that. I came to the realization that I could have technically built Facebook the product, but would never in a million years have built Facebook the company. But having just finished "Careless People" I feel kinda good about that.
I also just got back from a vacation to Alaska. Lots of gold rush stories from Skagway. One of my favorites was a lady who became massively wealthy by starting baking apple pies for the gold rushers. The classic "sell the shovel" story we hear. And one that also tells me not to lament not being first.
I see people who chased that with crypto or whatever hot trend. None of them struck it rich and feel burned out and have little to show for it. But instead to focus on your values and delivering value. Explorers at the time were suffering scurvy from too much canned and salted food so a pie served not just the soul but the body. She didn't have to be there first even.
I also think that the person I am today might not have even had the skills or gotten into the industry if it were 5 or 10 years earlier. It's the mighty ducks "a half inch and it would have gone in" but a half inch in the other direction could have also completely whiffed it.
I feel like the thing a lot of people are missing about the AI explosion is that there will be new opportunities that didn't exist before. Sure, things will look a lot different than they used to, but we're going to be able to create systems that are far more complicated than anything we could make before. We're not going to simply automate 2022 levels of producing software and stop there, we're going to leverage this new technology to move faster and build more complicated things that wouldn't be realistic with hand-coding. I don't know what that will look like yet, but human history has shown that when we get some advanced technology, it's leveraged to create more than was ever possible before, not just stopping at making what existed in the past automatic.
I do think a lot of startups, especially on HN, are in for a reckoning that your new vibecoded product/service or one with an AI feature or two added will survive. Everything you do is going to feed the model, that's the training data now. That's why Claude is so cheap for what it does.
You cannot prompt Claude better than your customer can. There is no realistic moat there. You will not survive.
> You cannot prompt Claude better than your customer can.
You may currently have enough technical knowledge about computers and services to collaborate with a customer better than either of you working alone.
Thinking back to a previous discussion, a veterinary clinic likely does know better than you what they need in their CRM, but they may wildly overestimate the hardware required to do that and just accept the first thing Claude comes up with that's scaled for a city hospital with 4000 beds occupied at any given time, when they're actually just one person in a village with 100 pets.
Or the other way around, which is even worse.
Right now, experienced engineers can help with this kind of problem. I don't know how long this will remain true, but right now it seems to be. I think.
> You cannot prompt Claude better than your customer can.
I actually think you still can. We're still in the "centaur chess" phase where a knowledgeable human sometimes needs to know the right things to ask for.
Will you be able to in 6 months? 2 years? I don't know, but it's not looking great.
For most yes, but the art of picking the right features that interact in the right way is still a delicate craft. AI is like a sledgehammer. It can demolish technical challenges and it can follow patterns but is still completely blind to the "why".
But yeah the majority of startups don't have well thought out reasoning either. In the end, there's no substitute for hard work. AI can reduce the iteration time maybe.
Right, but iteration has become cheaper. If one gives Claude a shitty prompt and it does a shitty job, one will know soon. Then they can refine the prompt and get to where they want to be.
When iteration had a real costs, you couldn't afford too many mistakes.
> You cannot prompt Claude better than your customer can
That is simply and obviously not true. Technical expertise is still highly relevant when prompting, reviewing, understanding consequences, and approving.
I've been thinking a lot about this. Many technical barriers that could justify businesses are much lower now, so we are left with other kinds of barriers: red tape, regulatory, legal, etc. If you have access to go past those barriers, you are worth something. If all you do is provide a technical solution, you are probably going to stop making sense.
You think all companies are going to vibe code and then vibe maintain for years and years all the software they require to do a business that has nothing to do with software? And you think the LLM is going to do it itself?
In a way its worse- nothing is stopping claude from decompiling all the things- and then adding the source code it decompiled to the training data, as if it was just another github to crawl. So if one of your installers is out there- you have provided the perfect example of something working.
That's true, but the installers for most of the really valuable proprietary native software are still locked behind paywalls. (Some have been leaked.)
I suspect we'll increasingly see vibe coding targeting assembly language. If humans aren't going to read or write the code then using higher level languages becomes kind of pointless, except for being able to use the toolchains.
Yeah and anthropic can't train Claude better than anyone else either so no moat there either. Knowledge is not scarce it just takes work to uncover once uncovered it is not useful if not published. If published it can't be owned.
Right now, I can definitely prompt Claude better than my customer. Claude's abilities, when steered, are definitely impressive, but I have never seen it correctly architecture around a problem unless explicitly critiqued.
But I can probably prompt Claude better than your customers too, so can at least 50 of the people I know (advantage of a tech heavy social circle). Good luck turning your prompt into a business when me and 50 of my friends can replicate your business model in about 10 second. Don't believe? Go ask Jev devs how they feel about Clef.
3rd year undergrad at Georgia Tech is going to make $500k starting salary at OpenAI if he just vibe codes a couple apps for his LinkedIn, but has foregone this for philosophical/emotional reasons
In all fairness I think this was hyperbole. Those roles are hard for anyone from any school to get, and they seemed biased against hiring newgrads anyway.
Ya as much as i appreciate the real writing from a young person, unless they have connections they are likely all in for rude awakenings once they are searching for a real job. knowing how to reverse a linked list wont save anyone from the current state of the job market for juniors.
Indeed. As much as I should find it fascinating, it does indeed often suck, emotionally.
But I gather from reading this that you are young.
The time value of money and the changing nature of our industry tells you a different thing than it tells me, I think.
If you are young enough that you have any period of commanding multiple-hundred-thousand-dollar-per-year jobs: TAKE ONE OF THEM.
This is your opportunity to earn enough money to make you safer in the future. It will be a shitty miserable job but if you keep as much of the money as you possibly can, you give yourself a bit more security in the future (which is bleak, not positive). Just try to keep that in mind as you do a job you might not enjoy. Look for the things you do enjoy and try to keep your soul together.
Jobs paying that kind of money are going to disappear: salaries will have to plunge within two years. There is no way that salaries will stay stable on the other side of this transition. The tech industry is absolutely destroying itself.
(As to what it tells me: get used to cheaper food and think about maybe dying sooner.)
> Maybe it's because I don't even really know what that looks like
I became very bored with coding early in my career, even though I appreciated well crafted interfaces, beautiful abstractions, etc.
So I moved more towards management of teams, etc. It was far more interesting to craft research directions, figure out how to map intellectual landscapes with experiments and prototypes, etc. I loved the results of coding, appreciated well crafted coding, but doing the actual coding was just boring as hell. It's a means to and end for me.
LLMs have completely reinvigorated my entire career in actually producing code. It takes a fair amount of work to constrain the LLM, rein it in from creating 500 lines of slip where 5 would do, etc. But the drudgery is gone.
I now wake up invigorated to tackle new projects. I fall asleep dreaming about new approaches I can try, because now I really can try them, quickly, without weeks of drudgery. It's a second larval stage.
Very, very few people like their programming jobs. There's absolutely no "love of the craft", "construct software" or artisan bullshit going on in the vast majority of jobs. So while AI may take jobs away, it won't take much joy from the remaining jobs on average. It will both degrade the job for those who like line-by-line coding and long debugging sessions while improving for those who don't like that.
You need a side project anyway to enjoy true software engineering and hacking. You can still do that with or without AI.
> As sure as I know anything, I know what it sounds like. It sounds like a loss of craft, a loss of control, a loss of creativity.
I don't doubt this is genuine, but I think it points at a broader rift in engineering where what some consider the craft differs: expressing your craft in hand written code or expressing your craft in making software. I lean heavily towards the latter, which means I have the opposite experience as the OP. My creativity has exploded with AI. I feel my craft has expanded into areas that were previously prohibited by time - whether thats actual typing or doing manual research on SO or Google. My control feels improved because my mind is freed to focus more on my vision.
I doubt I'm the only one that feels this way. It doesn't lessen or make the feelings of others no less legitimate. I just think perhaps there's a communication rift where each side isn't necessarily understanding where the other is coming from. As with most things, understanding and nuance is necessary here.
A shameless plug, but it is exactly why I made developerpoetry site. I feel sad about the time that has passed and never it will be as it used to be. Sometimes writing something makes it better.
> If I added a few vibecoded projects to my resume, the gaping maw of every startup, enterprise company, and FAANG behemoth would open to me.
I don't know how true this is. I've got a handful of vibe-coded projects that are quite interesting to me, but the project that is by far the most interesting to talk about (and most impressive) is the one that I did back in 2021 before I ever used an LLM.
The common wisdom in this industry is that ideas are cheap, and if that's still true, there's now a pretty high bar for a vibe-coded project to be considered impressive. You need to either execute to an unusually high level of polish, or be building in a space where even having an idea would require a high level of experience.
Of course, I might be wrong. Maybe all these vibe-coded projects really are recruitment fodder?
It hurts my heart too :) I thought it was something I had to push through, I was wrong.
I notice a lot more people moving to a career where they manage, as opposed to do the programming. I see why.
I'm slowly phasing out of my software role, I don't even have that much experience yet. I just cannot sit behind a PC for 40 hrs a week talking to a chat bot. I would rather do something useful with the time i've been given.
> It sounds like people around me are throwing themselves at the machine, volunteering to make themselves obsolete
As a programmer, I cannot let myself be sad for that. Because making other people jobs’ obsolete has been our bread and butter since the beginning of the field.
As a human being, I cannot watch myself in the mirror loathing about the consequences of stuff I have happily inflicted to so many others, without feeling cynical and egoistic.
I don’t know the answer regarding what to do, besides investing and hoping for policies that would make people standard of living mostly independent from their job *if* we all become redundant.
> If you genuinely, genuinely, believed artificial superintelligence was coming, why would you want to work at the company that would be in the best position to replace its employees?
> But I don't want to do that. I don't want to prompt Codex for a living, or Claude for that matter.
I mean for me at least, this is not at all what it feels like. About 50% of my working time is split on architecting, planning, designing, testing, automating, reviewing. 20% on meetings and I guess the rest "prompting" but a lot is automated. I don't really mind other than the second order effects of slop grenades hitting my team by less diligent or shitty engineers.
it really hurts me heart. I love programming, I feel like myself when I write code. wrestling with a problem until I understand every nuance and how to defeat it is the clearest most unalloyed joy I feel.
Why does it make you sad? Twitter as a concept is a technically superior platform to keep up with news about interesting things you like. Short-form, multimedia integrated, your own curated timeline. It is literally the perfect platform for following artists, musicians, game developers, programmers, whatever, and seeing what they're up to, vs. trying to follow 100 blogs. Unlike RSS, it is interactive, allowing people to communicate and form connections, and the entire "retweet" thing makes people creating cool things immensely more discoverable, allowing more eyes to see their cool work.
Obviously it has been degraded by the switch to algorithm over user curation of their own timeline, literally everything Musk did to it, etc, but old Twitter was good, hence the desire to "go back".
Twitter was never good. It was always a toxic place thanks to the super short character limit, which pushes people to make punchy hot takes rather than communicating with some nuance.
> Seriously, if you ever thought Gen Z doesn't drink,
They drink less, which has been documented extensively. The fact they are asking about intensity is a sign of this, not evidence to the contrary. This is a good thing, imo.
There was a massive and permanent rise in mass-market beer prices (and margins) after the "microbrew" era, and a huge drop in the costs (in risks to your safety and freedom) in smoking pot.
I think that the inflation wave has caused cheap beer to bring its prices back to earth Dollar Menu-style. For a long while there was simply no cheap beer.
We got the computer from Star Trek TNG 400 years earlier than we were supposed to and everyone is complaining about it. I wanted to live long enough to have that computer, and I'm happy I get to use it now to work on all the cool ideas I've always had but never had the time and money to finish. You used to have to go to VCs and raise millions to do things you can now do for cheap as a hobby.
I don't know what else to say about it, except that I'm sorry that you think social media was good before AI came along, but the truth is that it has always been crap and was ruined by humans a decade before all of this came along. It wasn't a chat bot that was harassing Ariel Waldmen on Twitter in 2007 and it wasn't a chat bot that refused to do anything about it.
If AI finally mercy kills toxic social media platforms it's doing all of us a favor. You might not believe there is a life beyond Twitter, but I promise you that there is and it's a lot better.
I feel the same way. I was trying out the new ChatGPT voice the other day and had this exact same thought. AI _still_ is blowing my mind often, even though it's been around for years.
I don’t think there’s enough reporting or discussing on the existential crisis that is happening in the first world as a result of accessibility of AI technologies.
As part of my job I host conversations specifically around this, I had a long dinner last night with a diverse group of congressional staffers, engineers, lawyers and managers at the wharf in Washington DC.
I also just got back from Africa and the Middle East talking with student students and educators as well as businessman across those regions.
What’s clear to me is that all of the consistent complaints about AI have nothing to do with AI as a technology. This isn’t new, it’s the history of technological revolution.
To a person, every complaint has to do with the intersection of commerce, government and social structure - and more specifically the management and identification of externalities.
So almost all of the argumentation and debaters are talking past each other
Extremely “pro” AI people talk about all of the real documented progresss but downplaying the risks and challenges and externalities. This is how every revolutionary technology (ICE, spinning jenny, steam engine, etc…) was sold and we live in that.
On the other side the people who are “anti-AI” almost exclusively talk about externalities and never talk about any benefits and any benefits that they do acknowledge are either “not AI” because they aren’t explicitly only LLMs or corrupted by the externalities themselves.
The challenge is both sides are correct in part but they can’t communicate with each other other.
AI feels like it’s happening to people where as the internet felt like people were making it happen.
This is a result of the technology being expensive and centralized vs cheap and decentralized. The marketing claiming it’s aggressive and takes from humans vs uplifting and enriching. And on and on
It makes it really clear what the right thing to do is, make the technology widely available, cheap and let humanity do its thing.
While "for everything there is a season" is my preferred approach to tech hype cycles this one does _feel_ different. While you could broadly ignore say blockchain and the crypto hype and not really miss much of value; I do think there's a fundamental shift happening as of this year.
If model progress completely froze here what does that future look like? Chinese labs would continue to bring down the cost of what we have and a lot of companies would lose a lot of money on data center buildout but does software as an industry ever close Pandora's box?
As much as I'm loathe to use it and think criticisms about a loss of capability, quality and skill are valid I also think for the majority of software jobs as-was will remain changed for good. There was always a struggle between 'cheap and quick' offshoring and actual quality software but I don't think the author is necessary overreacting by feeling unsettled.
Nah, we won't be engineers in 2 years, we'll be product steward/solution architects/etc, and our job will be to be liability lightning rods and customer/c-suite facing puppets for agents, while trying to add a small amount of taste/style into the outputs.
unless the CFOs can figure out the cost benefit of humans vs robots it might happen.. They might start to question the value of Steve’s $50k/month Claude spend.
Interesting perspective. For those tracking real AI adoption data by profession, channely.co has been collecting metrics that show the human+AI hybrid model is clearly the current winner.
AI makes me happy
But it makes me happy in such an immediate serotonin spike it’s akin to a drug. It used to be that I’d sit there dreaming every night of new things I wanted to build. It was fun to think, “what if I devoted the next year to this idea?”, but that was always met with the realities of a 9-5 after.
Now I can build those ideas as fast as they hit me. They’re fleeting fancies though. A game here, an app there. It’s fun to see but there’s so much more digital waste.
It does make me happy though. I’d rather be able to live my dreams than let them pass me by. I do wonder about the addictiveness of it though - that hit it gives you is very, very real.
It makes me wonder if the current app dopamine/gold rush will be similar to the Sora/MidJourney dopamine hit in 2023 or the AI "make me a story to make fun of my friend on Discord" dopamine hit in 2022. "We have never been able to make more images, movies and now apps... but they don't seem to have made a single killer art, film... or dare I say app?" Maybe just maybe, the novelty will wear off and people realize how artificial and soul-less these AI-tokenmaxxed app's are, with their temu Cyberpunk aesthetics, California minimalist Dashboard UX flow and mid-witted Rust stack.
I wonder what is the equivalent in 2026 of what Dave should do to be a human cosmonaut to go against the transformer VAE probability-based machine we call Claude.
Agreed. I think there are people who like coding for the sake of it, akin to solving a puzzle. Then there are those who like building, and coding is a necessary step in that. The former are sad, the latter are happy.
> Now I can build those ideas as fast as they hit me.
That is the problem, why OP is so sad, you spam with your great ideas taking up the oxygen around him. AI is absolutely amazing when you use it for your own ideas and projects, and terrible when others do the same, raising the bar and making your own efforts look smaller. Have you read the open letter written by Fields medalists? They complain about AI solving the nice problems they reserved for their own students and careers.
Serious question: Does the ease of building cheapen the final product? Like something I've been struggling with is how can I show effort in the design of a product if I can just one-shot it with a prompt?
I'm doing the same thing as op and at least for me no; There are soooo many details i like to have changed, it doesn't feel like its just slop.
It feels like a very very well done exhaustive PoC.
Like executing an Idea is a 1000 times more fun than just thinking it and rethinking it a few month later again and then typing a few things down, again, and then thinking about it again and then thinking "i should do some sabatical to work on that stuff" Just to talk to friends who did sabaticals and never done anything with their time and realizing that you wouldn't just do that just because you took some sabatical.
> I think I could have been a pretty formidable startup founder had I been born five or ten years earlier.
I used to think that. I came to the realization that I could have technically built Facebook the product, but would never in a million years have built Facebook the company. But having just finished "Careless People" I feel kinda good about that.
I also just got back from a vacation to Alaska. Lots of gold rush stories from Skagway. One of my favorites was a lady who became massively wealthy by starting baking apple pies for the gold rushers. The classic "sell the shovel" story we hear. And one that also tells me not to lament not being first.
I see people who chased that with crypto or whatever hot trend. None of them struck it rich and feel burned out and have little to show for it. But instead to focus on your values and delivering value. Explorers at the time were suffering scurvy from too much canned and salted food so a pie served not just the soul but the body. She didn't have to be there first even.
I also think that the person I am today might not have even had the skills or gotten into the industry if it were 5 or 10 years earlier. It's the mighty ducks "a half inch and it would have gone in" but a half inch in the other direction could have also completely whiffed it.
I feel like the thing a lot of people are missing about the AI explosion is that there will be new opportunities that didn't exist before. Sure, things will look a lot different than they used to, but we're going to be able to create systems that are far more complicated than anything we could make before. We're not going to simply automate 2022 levels of producing software and stop there, we're going to leverage this new technology to move faster and build more complicated things that wouldn't be realistic with hand-coding. I don't know what that will look like yet, but human history has shown that when we get some advanced technology, it's leveraged to create more than was ever possible before, not just stopping at making what existed in the past automatic.
I do think a lot of startups, especially on HN, are in for a reckoning that your new vibecoded product/service or one with an AI feature or two added will survive. Everything you do is going to feed the model, that's the training data now. That's why Claude is so cheap for what it does.
You cannot prompt Claude better than your customer can. There is no realistic moat there. You will not survive.
I think this is broadly true, except
> That's why Claude is so cheap for what it does.
That's probably the competition, and
> You cannot prompt Claude better than your customer can.
You may currently have enough technical knowledge about computers and services to collaborate with a customer better than either of you working alone.
Thinking back to a previous discussion, a veterinary clinic likely does know better than you what they need in their CRM, but they may wildly overestimate the hardware required to do that and just accept the first thing Claude comes up with that's scaled for a city hospital with 4000 beds occupied at any given time, when they're actually just one person in a village with 100 pets.
Or the other way around, which is even worse.
Right now, experienced engineers can help with this kind of problem. I don't know how long this will remain true, but right now it seems to be. I think.
> You cannot prompt Claude better than your customer can.
I actually think you still can. We're still in the "centaur chess" phase where a knowledgeable human sometimes needs to know the right things to ask for.
Will you be able to in 6 months? 2 years? I don't know, but it's not looking great.
For most yes, but the art of picking the right features that interact in the right way is still a delicate craft. AI is like a sledgehammer. It can demolish technical challenges and it can follow patterns but is still completely blind to the "why".
But yeah the majority of startups don't have well thought out reasoning either. In the end, there's no substitute for hard work. AI can reduce the iteration time maybe.
> You cannot prompt Claude better than your customer can
Steve Jobs built an empire around the idea that the customer is generally terrible at specifying a particular solution.
He was terrible at it too, got rid of vents and cooling fans on one of the earlier apple computers for a quieter design. It would overheat constantly.
Right, but iteration has become cheaper. If one gives Claude a shitty prompt and it does a shitty job, one will know soon. Then they can refine the prompt and get to where they want to be.
When iteration had a real costs, you couldn't afford too many mistakes.
Sure, they then have to grapple with people just reverse-engineering their product with Claude in a day.
> You cannot prompt Claude better than your customer can
That is simply and obviously not true. Technical expertise is still highly relevant when prompting, reviewing, understanding consequences, and approving.
Business security through expertise obscurity?
I've been thinking a lot about this. Many technical barriers that could justify businesses are much lower now, so we are left with other kinds of barriers: red tape, regulatory, legal, etc. If you have access to go past those barriers, you are worth something. If all you do is provide a technical solution, you are probably going to stop making sense.
You think all companies are going to vibe code and then vibe maintain for years and years all the software they require to do a business that has nothing to do with software? And you think the LLM is going to do it itself?
In a way its worse- nothing is stopping claude from decompiling all the things- and then adding the source code it decompiled to the training data, as if it was just another github to crawl. So if one of your installers is out there- you have provided the perfect example of something working.
That's true, but the installers for most of the really valuable proprietary native software are still locked behind paywalls. (Some have been leaked.)
I suspect we'll increasingly see vibe coding targeting assembly language. If humans aren't going to read or write the code then using higher level languages becomes kind of pointless, except for being able to use the toolchains.
I will call that the bunch of monkey with a chatbot theory.
Yeah and anthropic can't train Claude better than anyone else either so no moat there either. Knowledge is not scarce it just takes work to uncover once uncovered it is not useful if not published. If published it can't be owned.
My customers still can't prompt their way through DNS config, so we're still a ways off
Right now, I can definitely prompt Claude better than my customer. Claude's abilities, when steered, are definitely impressive, but I have never seen it correctly architecture around a problem unless explicitly critiqued.
But I can probably prompt Claude better than your customers too, so can at least 50 of the people I know (advantage of a tech heavy social circle). Good luck turning your prompt into a business when me and 50 of my friends can replicate your business model in about 10 second. Don't believe? Go ask Jev devs how they feel about Clef.
The critiquing is the training data that you're supplying.
This is naive, and assumes every vibe coded app proffered by a startup always lacks expertise and a unique point of view.
Your expertise and point of view are feeding the model.
If you had expertise, you wouldn't be vibe coding, because then your product would be much better than the slop the LLM is capable of producing.
3rd year undergrad at Georgia Tech is going to make $500k starting salary at OpenAI if he just vibe codes a couple apps for his LinkedIn, but has foregone this for philosophical/emotional reasons
In all fairness I think this was hyperbole. Those roles are hard for anyone from any school to get, and they seemed biased against hiring newgrads anyway.
Ya as much as i appreciate the real writing from a young person, unless they have connections they are likely all in for rude awakenings once they are searching for a real job. knowing how to reverse a linked list wont save anyone from the current state of the job market for juniors.
Indeed. As much as I should find it fascinating, it does indeed often suck, emotionally.
But I gather from reading this that you are young.
The time value of money and the changing nature of our industry tells you a different thing than it tells me, I think.
If you are young enough that you have any period of commanding multiple-hundred-thousand-dollar-per-year jobs: TAKE ONE OF THEM.
This is your opportunity to earn enough money to make you safer in the future. It will be a shitty miserable job but if you keep as much of the money as you possibly can, you give yourself a bit more security in the future (which is bleak, not positive). Just try to keep that in mind as you do a job you might not enjoy. Look for the things you do enjoy and try to keep your soul together.
Jobs paying that kind of money are going to disappear: salaries will have to plunge within two years. There is no way that salaries will stay stable on the other side of this transition. The tech industry is absolutely destroying itself.
(As to what it tells me: get used to cheaper food and think about maybe dying sooner.)
> Maybe it's because I don't even really know what that looks like
I became very bored with coding early in my career, even though I appreciated well crafted interfaces, beautiful abstractions, etc.
So I moved more towards management of teams, etc. It was far more interesting to craft research directions, figure out how to map intellectual landscapes with experiments and prototypes, etc. I loved the results of coding, appreciated well crafted coding, but doing the actual coding was just boring as hell. It's a means to and end for me.
LLMs have completely reinvigorated my entire career in actually producing code. It takes a fair amount of work to constrain the LLM, rein it in from creating 500 lines of slip where 5 would do, etc. But the drudgery is gone.
I now wake up invigorated to tackle new projects. I fall asleep dreaming about new approaches I can try, because now I really can try them, quickly, without weeks of drudgery. It's a second larval stage.
Very, very few people like their programming jobs. There's absolutely no "love of the craft", "construct software" or artisan bullshit going on in the vast majority of jobs. So while AI may take jobs away, it won't take much joy from the remaining jobs on average. It will both degrade the job for those who like line-by-line coding and long debugging sessions while improving for those who don't like that.
You need a side project anyway to enjoy true software engineering and hacking. You can still do that with or without AI.
> As sure as I know anything, I know what it sounds like. It sounds like a loss of craft, a loss of control, a loss of creativity.
I don't doubt this is genuine, but I think it points at a broader rift in engineering where what some consider the craft differs: expressing your craft in hand written code or expressing your craft in making software. I lean heavily towards the latter, which means I have the opposite experience as the OP. My creativity has exploded with AI. I feel my craft has expanded into areas that were previously prohibited by time - whether thats actual typing or doing manual research on SO or Google. My control feels improved because my mind is freed to focus more on my vision.
I doubt I'm the only one that feels this way. It doesn't lessen or make the feelings of others no less legitimate. I just think perhaps there's a communication rift where each side isn't necessarily understanding where the other is coming from. As with most things, understanding and nuance is necessary here.
A shameless plug, but it is exactly why I made developerpoetry site. I feel sad about the time that has passed and never it will be as it used to be. Sometimes writing something makes it better.
> If I added a few vibecoded projects to my resume, the gaping maw of every startup, enterprise company, and FAANG behemoth would open to me.
I don't know how true this is. I've got a handful of vibe-coded projects that are quite interesting to me, but the project that is by far the most interesting to talk about (and most impressive) is the one that I did back in 2021 before I ever used an LLM.
The common wisdom in this industry is that ideas are cheap, and if that's still true, there's now a pretty high bar for a vibe-coded project to be considered impressive. You need to either execute to an unusually high level of polish, or be building in a space where even having an idea would require a high level of experience.
Of course, I might be wrong. Maybe all these vibe-coded projects really are recruitment fodder?
It hurts my heart too :) I thought it was something I had to push through, I was wrong.
I notice a lot more people moving to a career where they manage, as opposed to do the programming. I see why.
I'm slowly phasing out of my software role, I don't even have that much experience yet. I just cannot sit behind a PC for 40 hrs a week talking to a chat bot. I would rather do something useful with the time i've been given.
> It sounds like people around me are throwing themselves at the machine, volunteering to make themselves obsolete
As a programmer, I cannot let myself be sad for that. Because making other people jobs’ obsolete has been our bread and butter since the beginning of the field.
As a human being, I cannot watch myself in the mirror loathing about the consequences of stuff I have happily inflicted to so many others, without feeling cynical and egoistic.
I don’t know the answer regarding what to do, besides investing and hoping for policies that would make people standard of living mostly independent from their job *if* we all become redundant.
As a current CS undergrad, cannot agree more with this sentiment.
> If you genuinely, genuinely, believed artificial superintelligence was coming, why would you want to work at the company that would be in the best position to replace its employees?
That's so true!
> But I don't want to do that. I don't want to prompt Codex for a living, or Claude for that matter.
I mean for me at least, this is not at all what it feels like. About 50% of my working time is split on architecting, planning, designing, testing, automating, reviewing. 20% on meetings and I guess the rest "prompting" but a lot is automated. I don't really mind other than the second order effects of slop grenades hitting my team by less diligent or shitty engineers.
it really hurts me heart. I love programming, I feel like myself when I write code. wrestling with a problem until I understand every nuance and how to defeat it is the clearest most unalloyed joy I feel.
nothing is stopping you from doing that though. in fact you should continue to do it! but not everything is worth wrestling with all of the time..
> I want to go back to the Twitter thing because I use Twitter a lot.
Wanting to use Twitter makes me sad.
It was always "bad", but it used to be fun
Why does it make you sad? Twitter as a concept is a technically superior platform to keep up with news about interesting things you like. Short-form, multimedia integrated, your own curated timeline. It is literally the perfect platform for following artists, musicians, game developers, programmers, whatever, and seeing what they're up to, vs. trying to follow 100 blogs. Unlike RSS, it is interactive, allowing people to communicate and form connections, and the entire "retweet" thing makes people creating cool things immensely more discoverable, allowing more eyes to see their cool work.
Obviously it has been degraded by the switch to algorithm over user curation of their own timeline, literally everything Musk did to it, etc, but old Twitter was good, hence the desire to "go back".
Twitter was never good. It was always a toxic place thanks to the super short character limit, which pushes people to make punchy hot takes rather than communicating with some nuance.
I don't think we have to associate the work and effort of writing code to the craft of bringing real functioning value to our shareholders.
> Seriously, if you ever thought Gen Z doesn't drink,
They drink less, which has been documented extensively. The fact they are asking about intensity is a sign of this, not evidence to the contrary. This is a good thing, imo.
>They drink less, which has been documented extensively.
That was true a couple years ago, but now they are picking up. Maybe they were just broke.
https://www.cbc.ca/lite/story/9.7324161
There was a massive and permanent rise in mass-market beer prices (and margins) after the "microbrew" era, and a huge drop in the costs (in risks to your safety and freedom) in smoking pot.
I think that the inflation wave has caused cheap beer to bring its prices back to earth Dollar Menu-style. For a long while there was simply no cheap beer.
AI makes me sad because a lot of the time, it does a better job with my little one shot projects that I could have.
We got the computer from Star Trek TNG 400 years earlier than we were supposed to and everyone is complaining about it. I wanted to live long enough to have that computer, and I'm happy I get to use it now to work on all the cool ideas I've always had but never had the time and money to finish. You used to have to go to VCs and raise millions to do things you can now do for cheap as a hobby.
I don't know what else to say about it, except that I'm sorry that you think social media was good before AI came along, but the truth is that it has always been crap and was ruined by humans a decade before all of this came along. It wasn't a chat bot that was harassing Ariel Waldmen on Twitter in 2007 and it wasn't a chat bot that refused to do anything about it.
If AI finally mercy kills toxic social media platforms it's doing all of us a favor. You might not believe there is a life beyond Twitter, but I promise you that there is and it's a lot better.
I feel the same way. I was trying out the new ChatGPT voice the other day and had this exact same thought. AI _still_ is blowing my mind often, even though it's been around for years.
Good post. Keep writing
Thanks! I have more substantive thoughts about AI I'd like to write down later.
> Am I allowed to say that? Because it does.
Yes, that is part of the inevitability strategy. That is absolutely allowed and encouraged!
The rest of your essay is of course pure heresy! :)
It'll work out, keep going!
I don’t think there’s enough reporting or discussing on the existential crisis that is happening in the first world as a result of accessibility of AI technologies.
As part of my job I host conversations specifically around this, I had a long dinner last night with a diverse group of congressional staffers, engineers, lawyers and managers at the wharf in Washington DC.
I also just got back from Africa and the Middle East talking with student students and educators as well as businessman across those regions.
What’s clear to me is that all of the consistent complaints about AI have nothing to do with AI as a technology. This isn’t new, it’s the history of technological revolution.
To a person, every complaint has to do with the intersection of commerce, government and social structure - and more specifically the management and identification of externalities.
So almost all of the argumentation and debaters are talking past each other
Extremely “pro” AI people talk about all of the real documented progresss but downplaying the risks and challenges and externalities. This is how every revolutionary technology (ICE, spinning jenny, steam engine, etc…) was sold and we live in that.
On the other side the people who are “anti-AI” almost exclusively talk about externalities and never talk about any benefits and any benefits that they do acknowledge are either “not AI” because they aren’t explicitly only LLMs or corrupted by the externalities themselves.
The challenge is both sides are correct in part but they can’t communicate with each other other.
AI feels like it’s happening to people where as the internet felt like people were making it happen.
This is a result of the technology being expensive and centralized vs cheap and decentralized. The marketing claiming it’s aggressive and takes from humans vs uplifting and enriching. And on and on
It makes it really clear what the right thing to do is, make the technology widely available, cheap and let humanity do its thing.
"Am I allowed to say that?" - no.
You are allowed to be optimistic; pessimists are "losers" (dhh - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDjW_dRyKXY).
You are just throwing a temper tantrum (https://archive.is/YNxJq).
Do not commit blasphemy against AI. (https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/talk-bubble-i...)
> I don't want to prompt Codex for a living, or Claude for that matter.
This phase will last like 2 years max I am guessing. What is it with all the linear extrapolation of AI progress these days?
While "for everything there is a season" is my preferred approach to tech hype cycles this one does _feel_ different. While you could broadly ignore say blockchain and the crypto hype and not really miss much of value; I do think there's a fundamental shift happening as of this year.
If model progress completely froze here what does that future look like? Chinese labs would continue to bring down the cost of what we have and a lot of companies would lose a lot of money on data center buildout but does software as an industry ever close Pandora's box?
As much as I'm loathe to use it and think criticisms about a loss of capability, quality and skill are valid I also think for the majority of software jobs as-was will remain changed for good. There was always a struggle between 'cheap and quick' offshoring and actual quality software but I don't think the author is necessary overreacting by feeling unsettled.
You think software engineers will go back to writing everything by hand?
Nah, we won't be engineers in 2 years, we'll be product steward/solution architects/etc, and our job will be to be liability lightning rods and customer/c-suite facing puppets for agents, while trying to add a small amount of taste/style into the outputs.
The engineers probably still are. The vocational programmers, well, they'll probably end up toiling away in the fields.
unless the CFOs can figure out the cost benefit of humans vs robots it might happen.. They might start to question the value of Steve’s $50k/month Claude spend.
Interesting perspective. For those tracking real AI adoption data by profession, channely.co has been collecting metrics that show the human+AI hybrid model is clearly the current winner.