alt Hacker NewsThere is indeed a painful dissonance here. I like this new world, but feel sorrow for the loss of something. I try to remember how empowering AI is. It is already allowing millions of people to finally use the devices they've been sitting in front of all these years. No longer do they have to feel constrained by software creators who have made choices for them. Now it is their tool through-and-through, and they can construct software on-the-fly to match their needs precisely. They have been buying computers with both hands tied behind their backs. Now they are in control.
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That really is a great thing. I do wonder at the segment of the population that from the 70s to today that sculpted their brain to think like a von Neumann machine. What will be lost when the last of us passes. It will likely be viewed as an oddity by future generations and people will try to replicate it as a hobby. But many of us began shortly after learning a primary human language, and that degree of specialization isn't something a hobby can reproduce.
I don't even know what this means. Were programming languages and compilers unavailable? I think this overstates the predicament that users were in quite a lot. In fact, I don't think any users even asked or wanted this really other than maybe very simple musings of wanting to say "computer, enhance" or something like that. I'm not sure how vibe-coding has now given the average user something that they know will not have their hands tied behind their backs. Most users will never vibecode anything and most of the non-technical people that will, will try it once or twice as a novelty or an attempt to solve a problem and then give up.
Now, what you might end up doing is removing the need for them to even have a computer to begin with. Someone without a job doesn't need business productivity software that much.
I disagree. There's definitely _some_ who will use these tools to build systems for themselves. But do you think the chef who's been pulling insane hours in the restaurant wants to come home and build his own software? Or the teacher who just had to deal with an annoying classroom all day?
People want software that just works, they'll pay for it, they don't want to use their computers to build their own software. That idea is just software and computer geeks (said affectionately) projecting their own desires on a larger community.