alt Hacker NewsI find these throws of passionate despondency similar to the 1980s personal computing revolution. Oh dear. Giving mere mortals the power of computing?! How many people would abandon their computers or phones.
It’s not like it changes our industry’s overall flavour.
How many SaaS apps are excel spreadsheets made production grade?
It’s like every engineer forgets that humans have been building a Tower of Babel for 300000 years. And somehow there is always work to do.
People like vibe coding and will do more of it. Then make money fixing the problems the world will still have when you wake up in the morning.
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But this time is different! For reasons!
Yea, the more things change the more they stay the same. This latest AI hype cycle seems to be no different. Which I think will become more widely accepted over the next couple of years as creating deployable, production-ready, maintainable, sellable, profitable software remains difficult for all the reasons besides the hands-to-keyboard writing of code.
I am not against vibe coding at all, I just don't think people understand how shaky the foundation is. Software wants to be modified. With enough modifications the disconnect between the code as it is imagined and the code in reality becomes too arduous of a distance to bridge.
The current solution is to simply reroll the whole project and let the LLM rebuild everything with new knowledge. This is fine until you have real data, users and processes built on top of your project.
Maybe you can get away with doing that for a while, but tech debt needs to be paid down one way or another. Either someone makes sense of the code, or you build so much natural language scaffolding to keep the ship afloat that you end up putting in more human effort than just having someone codify it.
We are definitely headed toward a future where we have lots of these Frankenstein projects in the wild, pulling down millions in ARR but teetering in the breeze. You can definitely do this, but "a codebase always pays its debts."