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Comment by josephg | Hacker News Reader

I think AI programming just has a bliss period for a lot of people where it feels like you can solve every problem with a prompt. And you can, for a time. Eventually the chickens come home to roost and you realise what a mess you made.

Give it some time. We’ll figure out what LLMs are good and bad at. I think vibe engineering will eventually go up on the wall next to static vs dynamic typing and vi vs eMacs.

At least, that assumes AI models won’t keep improving by leaps and bounds. We’re in a transition period. It’s gonna be chaos.

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> eventually the chickens come home to roost and you realise what a mess you made

But a lot of times they don't. Devs building websites for small businesses used to be a thing, and it was almost universally a crap product. Practically every restaurant in my small town has been able to take control of their own website with AI, and it's a better experience for everyone.

Rapid digitisation meant a lot of low-value work wound up being done by high-value people. The economy is pivoting away from that configuration. The high-value folks getting displaced are pissed, partly rightly, partly out of spite. The folks who had to pay those bills are ecstatic, mostly overexuberantly, but in part correctly.

Until what they need is free or has a heavily subsidized cost. We keep forgetting that

I can use a local model to build a restaurant website. The model generates code fast enough that even my 10 year old server can generate all the code needed in about an hour. It will use about 50 cents of electricity and be better than 90% of the restaurant websites out there.

I’m curious what you’re using for that (if you’re inclined to share).

I saw that blog post about running local models on a Xeon based server so I benchmarked a bunch of local models on it. The server is dual Xeons with 256 GB of DDR4 and I found it capable of running some things locally. It's slow but still faster than coding things manually. Also that was just an example. Even my 6 year old 6900XT is faster.

How is that relevant? The convenience for restaurants owners is how easy, cheap, non-technical, and fast the process is. You proceeded to make a point that does not match any of these four prerequisites

That era is already long gone. Those things have been built in Wix for over a decade. And since then, I haven't had any friends or family ask me for a simple site. The low-value work is already automated.

Your comment is valid, but not for the reason you think. What you should be talking about is the grunt work done in our field to non-trivial applications. Adding a search box to a table, or add an extra field to a form, etc.

So you think about a ticket that often might take a few hours, but in badly architected system might take a week, add a field to a class, edit the DB structure (maybe manually, maybe through via an ORM generated migration), add it to DTOs, add a validator, add it to the FE definitions, edit the page layout, etc..

Low value work that until now had to be performed by high-value employees.

> Low value work that until now had to be performed by high-value employees

The current trend is a proliferation of internal tooling. I've honestly found quite a bit of it useful. The rest is the usual should-have-been-a-Google-form nonsense.

> That era is already long gone. Those things have been built in Wix for over a decade.

I think there's still a lot more custom work than you'd expect. A recent example: My mum is ex-president of a small international NGO. When I visited earlier today, she was bemoaning how the lady who runs their NGO's website charges them an arm and a leg for small changes. As a result, the website is constantly out of date. The current site is entirely built on top of wordpress. There is, of course, politics. This lady holds the login credentials to everything. And she holds them close to her chest.

I showed my mum what we could do with claude design. Claude whipped up a much better looking, working version of (part) of the website in about 5 minutes. I think LLMs aren't quite at the point that my mum could manage the website herself. You do need a little technical knowledge. My mum just doesn't know what to ask for. But we're really close. I've offered to be a human frontend to LLMs for them going forward, if she can wrest control from the "webmaster".

I suspect conversations like this are happening everywhere at the moment. There are an incredible number of small websites out there. Most of them, claude or chatgpt could reimplement in 5 minutes tops.

There's absolutely no way I'd be advising friends or family to run a site vibe coded themself, that's nuts.

This is more a problem of your Mum mismanaging her contractors. She should be threatening hellfire down on this contractor for withholding the admin username + password.

Generating the site with Claude would be a pretty stupid choice for her right now, if she needs something more than a basic info site, word press is still king, but she should be able to do info updates herself.

OTOH, you might be able to ask Claude to do the changes for you.

> There's absolutely no way I'd be advising friends or family to run a site vibe coded themself, that's nuts.

Yeah, I'm going to act as a human claude frontend. But I don't think we're that far off.

the site is not much more complex than a “basic info site”. There are a few small dynamic elements - like a list of donors populated dynamically and a box to sign up to the mailing list. Sites like this are trivially easy for Claude. I got claude to do a mockup based on a screenshot. Its 5 minute mockup has a much nicer design and layout than the current website. 1 Claude code prompt later and it was functional.

But yeah, short term I’ll see if Claude can just update Wordpress directly. I don’t want to spend my weekends learning wordpress. But if Claude can do it for me? Great.

I think there’s a good chance low effort AI content and vibecoding effectively become an eternal September

Yesterday I needed a tool for a specific task. In 1 hour I created a working tool with antigravity. Is it something I'd publish or sell or offer to others? Probably not, but I found that quite impressive. It is an extension of the idea "now I can program and create everything."

Besides I remember what kind of code we had when we first started coding with AI and now with all these coding agents etc. it has become quite impressive.

However, at the end it is still a tool and needs to be used accordingly.

You can create anything you need as long as what you need is a disposable script, a scotch-taped together single page app, or a complex problem and you have thousands of dollars to throw at tokens.

I've been playing with local models for some time, and I've been pleasantly surprised of late. A meager rtx 5080 with 16gb can give pretty good results now. The ecosystem is also improving pretty quickly.

I have a feeling at some point we will have a "Windows 95" moment (when computing really became personal for the masses) in AI, and things will significantly change shape again.

What local model do you recommend these days? I’ve got a 4090, mostly sitting idle.

qwen 3.5 with 9b is being a pretty decent workhorse for me, even with context around 4k.

The answer to which ai model, in mid 2026, is always qwen. Depending on your ram, it’s qwen3.5-9b, qwen3.6-35b-a3 in a 3 or 4 bit quant, or qwen3.6-27b. I’m told a bigger model quantized is better than a smaller model unquantized. In 16Gb vram on 10 year old hardware i can run a 3bit quant of qwen3.6-35b-a3 at ~30tokens/sec, and it can do a lot.

> I think vibe engineering will eventually go up on the wall next to static vs dynamic typing and vi vs eMacs.

What do you mean by "vibe engineering"?

It really depends on what you mean by this on how people can agree or disagree with you.

My guess is that in any sense that you mean it, you're almost certainly wrong. AI coding and engineering will continue to improve until any developer who refuses to use it will be unemployable at corporate gigs, and outcompeted even in freelance stuff.

Hey, at least vi vs emacs is fun, no matter how crappy as an editor Emacs is, no one is getting paid by privacy invasive corporate, to sway people, to cash out more money

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