alt Hacker NewsA big difference is cutting quality for the sake of mass production when it enables creating more necessities for people to live is a good thing. It is a good tradeoff. Cutting quality to make previously deterministic software more non deterministic does not improve anyones life except Sam Altman, Dario Amodei and the rest of the billionaire class.
I have no doubt in the future there will be a class of vibe software and it will be known as distinctly lower quality than human understood software. I do think the example you describe is a good use of vibing. I also think tech orgs mandating 100% LLM code generation are short sighted and stupid.
A lot of this push for “slop” is downstream of our K shaped economy. Give the people more money and quality becomes a lot more important. Give them less, and you’re selling to their boss who is often insulated from the effects of low quality.
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Agreed. Those expensive silk scarves are worth exactly zilch to the average person if they'll never see one in their entire life. They might as well not exist.
Mass production makes things accesible, and if the handmade product cannot compete relative to it, then it's clearly not that much better or some people would still pay that premium to keep it around.
With programming that's very much the case, nobody's gonna vibe code a self driving car stack or a production grade DBMS. Even the cheapest scarf still works as a scarf in 99.9% of use cases though, if maybe not for as long.
Was software authorship ever deterministic? Whether it be human or AI, the output can vary wildly, and is constrained by the finite specifications provided.