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Zizizizztoday at 2:39 PM3 repliesview on HN

I think there's an element of truth to what you're saying in respect to the feelings of frustration that people who are non-technical can compete with those who have spent decades of time and effort to learning the crafts of their trade.

What I also think they are thinking (because I am one of them) is not that we can produce value easier and quicker. It's that there's a devaluing of education and expertise to the point where organisations will become wise to the fact that you're able to produce much more quickly because you're just relaying what they want to your prompt. And because you're doing it on their time, can just copy your processes, get rid of you because they have their own ideas. (For personal projects and entrepreneurship this isn't applicable)

Let's take an example organisation with a team of 10 Devs. In the short term, they'll be able to build and provide value to the company and they will see the power that AI can bring. But with time they are now finding it harder to compete because everyone can build similar competitive services. So they try to reduce head count and those who control the purse are often not the devs so they reduce or remove the dev team because prompt engineering has gotten so good that they don't need your expertise anymore, they'll try it themselves.

So in the short term the organisation has all 10 devs producing a bunch of output. In the medium term, the company headcount can shrink because you no longer need to be aware of what is happening under the hood.

But because every business has this realisation, everyone will have the same ideas. So it will be harder to avoid being copied by competitors because ideas are no longer gate-kept by effort and expertise. SaaS will decline, in the medium to long term because you can vibe a replacement, in the long term the open models get good enough that the OpenAIs of the world aren't needed so the moat goes to the Nvidias of the world, then the hardware design can be automated/vibed, so the only moat is the land and raw materials. The manual labour will get flooded with knowledge worker refugees but that flood will probably force costs down there too.

In summary, I think they are mourning the feeling of being an expert and doing things others cannot, but I think more strongly they are looking at the "value" proposition and not seeing how it's sustainable.

I think both sides agree that building is much easier like you have articulated really well. I think they just take it a few steps further.


Replies

alchemismtoday at 3:00 PM

Any organization that vibecodes a significant amount of software in-house instead of buying it will not be reducing developer headcount. I'd bet on it.

The CTO or EngDir will not be able to run 10x10 agent-cli sessions, or review 50 vibe coded PRs per week, no matter how capably autonomous the agents become.

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gedytoday at 4:41 PM

> people who are non-technical can compete with those who have spent decades of time and effort to learning the crafts of their trade.

I say this often, but in 25 years I have not worked with non-technical people who can design a complete, logical product, even with AI/LLMs "unlocking" the coding part now. Maybe I'm just unlucky but quite a few companies and different domains.

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Chris2048today at 4:40 PM

> just copy your processes, get rid of you because they have their own ideas

Implies a process requiring no expert knowledge or understanding. That doesn't seem to match common experience of professional agentic development.

You are describing vibe coding, which is without human design, review or direction.

Models are getting better at this, but it's not yet clear how practical they will be. They often fail on uncommon tasks, or get increasingly more expensive as the code-base grows.

I think things will change, as the technology develops; problem is corps are acting like we are already there, encouraged by ai-providers.

I'm optimistic about ai, pessimistic about the fallout of ai hype.