| iterate on their product faster.
i've run into a situation where it really slowed iteration down, because i wasn't able at some point to explain in english what I wanted it to do and had to go into the code, which, lo and behold, I didn't understand. Ended up scrapping everything that had been generated and starting over by hand!
or democracy/civilization attack. DHS/Putin siccing this kind of thing on democratic voter rolls around Nov. elections could be the least of it.
i could see a long tail of impenetrable chaos as private correspondence gets hacked, ppl get divorced, fired, fight back, flood the zone with their own reputationslop so they have a grounds for denial, decide to take it ALL down to distract. recursive waves of tyranny/chaos. this isnt the singularity we were promised!
Let's take that vibe coded product and iterate what it gave you 100 times, as you tweak it to fit your vision. When you do that 101st iteration, can you prevent it from breaking something else, or changing it in a way you don't like it?
What if it doesn't understand what you're asking it to do and keeps failing and you have to keep rolling back? Can you understand the 20,000 lines it's generated so you can make the change yourself without tearing your hair out? Can you fix bugs in it that it can't, without starting from zero and having to understand the whole codebase?
To guard against this, the best course of action is probably modularization and composition, right? The Unix philosophy, ie building small, focused tools out of small, focused tools.
yes - i've thought that could work. returning to a more protected object oriented programming model (with hard-defined interfaces) could be a way - "make these changes but restrict yourself to this object" etc.
If you take the author's arguments on face value, you just hit YOLO button and have one iteration and publish it to production fast so you are on the market before competition does the same.
with these posts I always wonder, what happens when this code runs into a customer? Or 1000 customers, or a million? All with their own divergent needs year over year.
I have just gotten off 3 years as a developer for that kind of project, and I used the best AI tools diligently every day. It often saved me time. Like from some small drudgery of half day of flailing about in config land. Or it could generate some nice rails controllers and a javascript front end from a well-written spec. writing tests was also a strong suit.
but just as often it failed to understand the depth of the product and its myriad concerns and led me down the garden path, reducing my efficiency.
Aside from that, a large part of my job was the parts that weren't coding - wrestling with specs that were far from ready for primetim, chaotic internal processes, deployment, internal coordination/communcation, talking to customers, etc.
In the end it seemed like it saved me maybe 20% of my time overall. Nothing to sneeze at.
I get that greenfield apps that have no customer contact can be created with a phrase now. That's pretty amazing. But I would love to see Opus 4.6 up against a real beast of a codebase that you're far from a master of.
I think it's a more about the cool factor than it is the value creation. I just don't get so many emails that I need something else to summarize them for me and plan my day.
i wonder if the skills will divide a bit. That there will be those who still program by hand - and this will be a needed skill, though AI will be a part of their daily toolset to a greater or lesser degree.
Then there will be the AI wranglers who act almost like DevOps engineers for the AI - producing software in a different way ...
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