alt Hacker NewsHow would we measure the effects of AI coding tool taking over manual coding ? Would we see an increase in the number of GitHub projects ? In the number of stars (given the ai is so good) ? In the number of start up ipos (surely if all your engineers are 1000x engineers thanks to Claude code, we'll have plenty of googles and Amazons to invest in) ? In the price of software (if I can just vibe code everything, than a 10$ fully compatible replacement for MS Windows is just a few months away, right ?) In the the numbers of app published in the stores ?
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I was looking my homebrewed product hunt data and this week we had 5000 projects submitted, in 5 days. Thats more than a entire month in 2018.
> How would we measure the effects of AI coding tool taking over manual coding ?
Falling salaries?
> How would we measure the effects of AI coding tool taking over manual coding ?
Instead of asking "where are the AI-generated projects" we could ask about the easier problem of "where are the AI-generated ports". Why is it still hard to take an existing fully concrete specification, and an existing test suite, and dump out a working feature-complete port of huge, old, and popular projects? Lots of stuff like this will even be in the training set, so the fact that this isn't easy yet must mean something.
According to claude, wordpress is still 43% of all the websites on the internet and PHP has been despised by many people for many years and many reasons. Why no python or ruby portage? Harder but similar, throw in drupal, mediawiki, and wonder when can we automatically port the linux kernel to rust, etc.
Plot twist: the bottleneck when you have a development force multiplier is __MARKETING__. If you develop at 10X the rate, you still have to grind/growth marketing. Unmarketed products might as well not exist, even if they're fantastic.
Github stars? That's 100% marketing. Shit that clears a low quality bar can rack up stars like crazy just by being well marketed.
Number of startups? That's 100% marketing. Investors put money into products that have traction, or founders that look impressive, and both of those are mostly marketing.
People actually are vibe coding stuff rather than using SaaS though, that one's for real. Your example is hyperbolic, but the Tailwind scenario is just one example of AI putting pressure on products.