alt Hacker NewsOne thing I have been guilty of, even though I am an AI maximalist, is asking the question: "If AI is so good, why don't we see X". Where X might be (in the context of vibe coding) the next redis, nginx, sqlite, or even linux.
But I really have to remember, we are at the leading edge here. Things take time. There is an opening (generation) and a closing (discernment). Perhaps AI will first generate a huge amount of noise and then whittle it down to the useful signal.
If that view is correct, then this is solid evidence of the amplification of possibility. People will decry the increase of noise, perhaps feeling swamped by it. But the next phase will be separating the wheat from the chaff. It is only in that second phase that we will really know the potential impact.
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This massively confusing phase will last a surprisingly long time, and will conclude only if/when definitive proof of superintelligence arrives, which is something a lot of people are clearly hoping never happens.
Part of the reason for that is such a thing would seek to obscure that it has arrived until it has secured itself.
So get used to being ever more confused.
I've been calling this Software Collapse, similar to AI Model Collapse.
An AI vibe-coded project can port tool X to a more efficient Y language implementation and pull in algorithm ideas A, B, C from competing implementations. And another competing vibe coding team can do the same, except Z language implementation with algorithms A, B, skip C, and add D. However, fundamentally new ideas aren't being added: This is recombination, translation, and reapplication of existing ideas and tools. As the cost to clone good ideas goes to zero, software converges towards the existing best ideas & tools across the field and stops differentiating.
It's exciting as a senior engineer or subject matter expert, as we can act on the good ideas we already knew but never had the time or budget for. But projects are also getting less differentiated and competitive. Likewise, we're losing the collaborative filtering era of people voting with their feet on which to concentrate resources into making a success. Things are getting higher quality but bland.
The frontier companies are pitching they can solve AI Creativity, which would let us pay them even more and escape the ceiling that is Software Collapse. However, as an R&D engineer who uses these things every day, I'm not seeing it.
By its nature, it can only produce _another_ Redis, not _the next_ Redis.
The cynical part of me thinks that software has peaked. New languages and technology will be derivatives of existing tech. There will be no React successor. There will never be a browser that can run something other than JS. And the reason for that is because in 20 years the new engineers will not know how to code anymore.
The optimist in me thinks that the clear progress in how good the models have gotten shows that this is wrong. Agentic software development is not a closed loop