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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

Every year I think the bar for acceptable software quality couldn't get any lower, and I get proven wrong again and again. I don't get the point of this. Why bother doing something if you're not going to either 1. do it well, or 2. use the exercise as a way to get better? This sounds like building a chair by just randomly nailing pieces of uncut wood together until it barely looks like a chair and supports your weight.

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Sometimes you just need a place to sit

I've seen something similar play out badly, in the context of young Indians (and other South Asians) who are underconfident in their use of English but need to use it in professional contexts. Some I know personally have gone from asking for editorial help on their drafts to completely surrendering to LLMs for all their output. I can't imagine it has helped their self-confidence. From the outside it almost seems they've given up on trying to express themselves entirely.

Surrendering is an excellent way to put it. With the increasingly ubiquitous access to LLMs that are (for all intents and purposes) good enough - I think we're going to see the average person's proficiency at any skill which is fundamentally a "craft" (i.e. writing, foreign language, music, coding, etc.) decrease dramatically.

In software - rarely do you know beforehand that you're building a chair.

Even when you're building in an existing category of products (say, databases), there are still lots of variations and trial and error needed to get "what we need" defined clearly.

I'd say "vibe coding" is just a new name for "exploratory programming" or good old "prototyping"

Because sometimes, the journey is not the destination, and people really just want to get somewhere.

It honestly sounds like reprimanding somebody for sitting on the floor for a bit when they're tired, or ordering an Ikea chair, when a woodworking tutorial is right there on Youtube.

That's my sentiment as well. It seems you can actually go lower and it's so sad and I think at some point that will turn into dangerous as well... The amount of people that actually care what happens when you run code is miniscule. They don't understand that code is not some ideal abstraction. Code actually exists and executes in the real world on real hardware.

A week or so ago I gave a talk at a game jam discussing some of these topics and most of the audience being people in their 20's didn't understand or give weight to what I said at all. Only a few people from that big audience came after and expressed interest to learn more. Hope is not lost, but we have to actively push back and fight against the nonsense that comes from all sides.

I can't wait for the AI, AI bros and hype surrounding it to crash and burn in a few years. It's not that these new technologies are not useful - they are. And they have their place, but quality matters. DO NOT SURRENDER YOUR FACULTIES TO "AI". You get good by struggling! If you don't want to get good at this - then don't do it anymore. As another comment in another thread around code snippets said earlier - "No snippets, no LLMs, no autocomplete".

> This sounds like building a chair by just randomly nailing pieces of uncut wood together until it barely looks like a chair and supports your weight.

Have you been on the internet lately?

Money.

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