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Comment by sharkbot | Hacker News Reader

There are parallels to the “rapid application development” push of the 90’s. Visual Basic, Tcl/Tk, Python with Tkinter, HyperCard; all of them promised shortening the development cycle and democratizing computing. Code was interpreted rather than compiled, dynamically typed rather than statically, and a lot of batteries were included.

It sorta worked, and sorta didn’t. I’m seeing no evidence that this round is different. LLMs allow coding via natural language and assuming a lot of context that is typical to human conversation, but a lot of coding is delving into nuance, which is going to be work, no matter the tool.

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Every time I see a post about something built with vibe coding, it reminds me of myself at age 12 making a really basic screensaver in GWBASIC.

All the excitement I felt because it was new to me, but it was really just a very basic toy not a real piece of software.

Meanwhile there were seasoned pros who could probably do amazing things even with GWBASIC. But that was more in spite of it than because of it.

> a lot of coding is delving into nuance

this is the core issue. The best language we have for specifying this nuance is still programming languages, not English

Moving up from ASM -> C -> Python we're mainly abstracting over performance and implementation details, not functionality.

Here thouhg, in making the next jump from the high level Python to an English-specified LLM output we're trying to abstract over functionality. This doesn't work. It's flawed from the start

RAD & the rise of VB6 was much more measured in promises, and much more concrete in what it delivered. We wrote an awful lot of VB^ and Foxpro code, much of it quite valuable almost all of it terrible quality - but that didn't matter as much.

Vibe coding promises the world, and behold fails to deliver.

I don't think it's a particularly good comparison. RAD made many things easier, but it still required you to understand coding. Nor were all those things that you list universal. E.g. Delphi was arguably the pinnacle of 90s RAD, yet it was compiled and statically typed (and stricter about it than e.g. C++). VB6 could be compiled and was opt-in typed. And so on.

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