alt Hacker NewsA drum I've been banging increasingly often recently is that having friction and time to work ideas over in your mind adds huge amounts of value. Vibe coded projects have this very specific, well, vibe to them where you can clearly see that the lack of time to digest has allowed the person to not challenge their own worst impulses. You can see it in the feature bloat, the lack of depth and polish in core features and the wild asides you tend to talk yourself out of still on display.
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I feel this too but it's very hard to argue myself out of adding features like mad. Features, features, features. Tech debt may be an illusion, if the LLM can keep maintaining it all.
Yes, there is a widespread belief in tech that 'removing friction' is a good direction to aim for. But you can have too little friction that completely ruins a product and the user experience.
In game design friction very important; remove all friction and you don't even have a game any more, you might as well show the You Win screen. My favourite metaphor for it is sex: there is no sex without friction.
What LLM have done is massively reduce the friction of intellectual effort, completely devaluing most expressions of it.
Yes and no.
Let's first settle on the definition of vibecoding so that we're not miscommunicating over definitions. I'm using the one that seems the median definition nowadays: >95% of the code written by LLMs, <60% of the output code human-reviewed, meaning there's a large part of the codebase that no human ever reviews.
As you said it's about time invested in thinking about it, yes. But remember that even pre-AI >90% of software got never used, it was dead on arrival. Look up "success rate of software projects in business".
You can put lots of time into thinking and vibecode everything. You can put very little time into thinking and write by hand. Of course, vibecoding makes the former much more likely. But nothing about it is inherent to it.
I think you're right, and I think this principle of friction-is-good-actually applies to a lot more domains than just software, but whether the world will ever accept that is a different question.
I disagree with this, and I've been spending time thinking about it because some of my friends had a similar conversation.
The friction itself does not add value. The time spent thinking on the problem does. Friction should be minimized beyond the absolute bare minimum. Programming is a discipline where your workstation is already streamlined, and it is easy to forget where the friction is. Programming is done in a world of pure though, in a sense, so most of the friction already lives in your head, and it is difficult to distinguish effort wasted fighting friction from effort making real progress.
Consider the Wright brothers. They worked iteratively. When they wanted to design an airplane they moved from Ohio to a windy place with lots of loose sand (NC outer banks). Why? So that they could do test runs with good wind conditions (for an airplane that is barely able to fly this matters a lot) and crash with the least amount of damage. They rebuilt the airplane dozens and dozens of times and had a workshop tuned to their needs on location. They reduced friction wherever they could so that they got the most work done that they could with the least amount of distraction.