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Comment by XorNot | Hacker News Reader

I mean you can be bored all you want, but the technology works. That's the difference. This isn't cryptocurrency where "you gotta get in to make it big (because I need to sell it to you)". It works: the results are real, the code runs, you can read it - the systems it provides are real.

Even the security argument has evaporated: AIs now hack better then people. They're better bug-finders then developers. The tool which exploits your app itself would be another AI system. On a good day you might be smarter then it...but you're not faster, and you don't have the perseverance.

My challenge would simply be: buy a low-tier Claude license. Or some other system - I use Claude so that's the example. Point it at something you wrote. And realize in the span of about an hour how obsolete the human developer writing code truly is.

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Yeah, we know. The technology is definitely impressive, and kinda fascinating actually, I must admit. If you ignore the huge externalities and all the problems it creates, that is.

Can you just guys go vibecoding and stop trying to convince us or yourselves?

I don’t know, I feel like he is using a lot more convincing arguments than just being dismissive without real substance like you are. When you say huge externalities are you referring to something that hasn’t been seen in other major industrial paradigm shifts?

Whats the arguments?? They're making sensationalist claims based of headlines and twitter discourse. This is all zeitgeist nonsense, anyone using AI on the day to day for hard problems knows its capabilities are far less than what you'll see claimed on this site, x the everything app, and LinkedIn.

There's genuinely just a ton of people who work on 40th percential problems and are super impressed. There's people who work on 90th percentile problems who are impressed too, but if you put those 40th percentile problem solvers on the 90th percentile problems they would not have the same outcomes. The agents by themselves are not as impressive as they're made out to be.

its like owning a personal computer in 1986. the tv talking how its going to revolutionize everything and yet their too expensive for most people to own or and 40% problem people were getting bogged down with just owning a pc, writing dear john letters to their VCRs for ever calling them difficult to use.

And all the opinions were conflicting, and all the opinions were correct.

Dan Luu's recent blog post [0] reminded me of Gas Town. Gas Town was all the hype when it debuted. Us, mere mortals, had a few days left in the business of software. Now, only the crickets remain in the Gas Town. Not even its creator is there [1].

[0] We should be more ambitious with the software we build. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50225695

[1] https://x.com/danluu/status/2099800154639581353

Gas Town was never "the hype", it was always a bit of a joke, in fact the original post was hard to separate from satire. Linking to the HN comments here would show that.

I went down a rabbit hole of copyright and one of the things that clicked along the way is that a vibe coded app is not copyrightable. If someone says their app is completely Built with AI, they’re also saying: here is a public domain program that you can repackage as you wish.

It’s not quite that simple - there may be minor things here and there that are copyrightable like the name. But anything purely prompt generated is fair game to be copied and reused.

It will be interesting to see this tested, but companies telling people AI is writing their software may be a liability in the not-to distant future.

(This is based on USCO opinions and congressional testimony: https://www.copyright.gov/ai/ . EULAs are different things, and may restrict rights otherwise granted by the law, etc., etc.)

a professional software developer can simultaneously become completely dependent on a remote account each hour of each day, and lose the ability to copyright the work that the professional software developer makes, or attach a LICENSE.

So, what's not to like?

Welcome to PCB design only imagine spending an order of magnitude more on tooling.

This is actually my fear for SWEs, there is SO MUCH PRECEDENT for making the entire career path completely dependent on a single company selling a subscription at absolutely deranged prices.

> But anything purely prompt generated is fair game to be copied and reused.

This isn't true.

While the "copyrightability" report[1] mostly deals with images (it was written before coding agents) it's quite clear how code generated by an AI driven by humans can be copyrightable:

> The Office finds that the compilation of these images and text throughout the Work contains sufficient creativity under Feist to be protected by copyright. Specifically, the Office finds the Work is the product of creative choices with respect to the selection of the images that make up the Work and the placement and arrangement of the images and text on each of the Work’s pages.

and

> Unlike prompts alone, these tools can enable the user to control the selection and placement of individual creative elements. Whether such modifications rise to the minimum standard of originality required under Feist will depend on a case-by-case determination. In those cases where they do, the output should be copyrightable

[1] https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell...

It depends how that selection is done. If an AI prompts a human with 10 layouts it generates and the human picks ones, it is not copyrightable.

If the human takes some number of individually generated components and composes them in some creative way, the composition is copyrightable but the individual components are not.

One existing precedent was the layout of a graphic novel consisting AI generated panels. The layout was done by a human and protected by copyright. The content of each individual panel was generated by AI and was not. https://www.copyright.gov/docs/zarya-of-the-dawn.pdf

Code is no different. If AI generates a library and GUI, neither are copyrightable. If a dev glues them together, the expressiveness of that work may be, but it also might be the logical application of attaching interfaces and not creative enough to meet the threshold.

The 2024 opinion reinforces that determination.

I’m tired of the “omg huge externalities!” argument.

The externalities can literally be solved with just more AI. Especially even better AI as it emerges every year. Problems that primitive agents created back in 2024 have now long been solved by the advanced agents of 2026. And in 2028, agents will solve problems the 2026 agents leave behind.

There is never going to be a moment where a massive problem created by AI finally arrives and everyone throws their hands up and says “oh no we should have just coded by hand all along!” Most software doesn’t really even live that long before it has to be changed due to new requirements.

Every problem will be solved by AI and if not then everything just gets trivially rewritten.

Mind you, we have not even entered the insane era yet where local LLMs etched in silicon chips will be putting out code at an insane 16k/tokens per second for just the cost of electricity. Let that sink in.

It’s over for handwritten code (in professional contexts).

> There is never going to be a moment where a massive problem created by AI finally arrives and everyone throws their hands up and says “oh no we should have just coded by hand all along!”

This is a shortcoming of this way of thinking, IMHO. It's incredibly unlikely that we will never, ever face a massive problem caused by AI.

The problem won’t be because of AI code, it will be because the people controlling the AI have made incorrect fundamental decisions, which would lead to the same problem even if humans were the ones coding.

So I would completely agree with you concerning things like my dayjob. But maybe there are some details and edge cases being overlooked.

Like I would love to make an indie game as good as like Shovel Knight, Celeste, or Into the Breach. I know these are extremely ambitious goals but AI should make my 1000x more productive, right? ... right?

But what Imve realized is that for someone not in the industry and without the experience I'll provably never make it.

You could blame this on the fact that games are asset heavy and involve interaction, but even then, it seems like just pulling a slot machine after your project gets to a certain size.

I'll accept that AI will most certainly be used to great effect in this industry but I don't believe some factory paradigm will arrive leveling an ignoramus like me and an "artisan" to be equal.

Programming has arguably never been the most important part of making video games though, except when people stuff it up and a game doesn't run well on the hardware people want to play it on.

Story, design, game mechanics...these all have something in common, and it's that at a moderate sized studio they're not even slightly the programmers job.

Arguably if you wanted to make games then now is the best time to do it because a lot of the boilerplate won't be in your way.

I agree with this in general and that a game in theory is so much more than code. The the one caveat is that code is the ultimate bottleneck of games. Assets, story, mechanics, design are all mediated my code and that code complexity is what limits scope.

Also, a lot of these aspects are touted as stuff that AI is so good good at: AI can write better fiction, AI can design better, AI can produce better art, AI can infinitely churn out 3D models, etc. There are people 100% sincerely drumming the same beat that we see here concerning code for all these areas... and yet something really isn't there yet.

> Even the security argument has evaporated: AIs now hack better then people.

They hack better (faster, at least) than humans if you have thousands of dollars to spend.

Can you afford to spend that money regularly pentesting all the code you have your AI to write for you, though?

And if you can't, then what link is there between being good at hacking, and being good at writing secure code?

(Those aren't rhetorical questions.)

Another one: When will Bun (at this point a mostly Claude-written project, managed by Anthropic themselves) become at least as secure or reliable as Node.js (a mostly human-written project)? If you're right, it should be any day now. And maybe you are right - maybe by tomorrow Claude will have written a formal proof that Bun is memory-safe and it'll never segfault again.

They arent better bug finders, I can assure you. They definately are great fuzzing tools, but if you really think AI is a better bug hunter than humans there's millions in bounties waiting for you and your claude code session to pick up off the ground. I can assure you its not what you think it is.

I can't personally vouch for whether top AIs have broadly exceeded (median) human ability here, but as far as bounties go (or even just fixing things in existing projects), what I usually hear about involves a lot of maintainers auto-rejecting AI-assisted contributions because they are AI-assisted, with the charitable reason usually being that it's necessary to have some kind of attention gate or else they get flooded out. (To be clear, this seems like a reasonable response to me; the existing structure often wasn't made to handle that kind of influx, and the spectrum of current-day AI includes a ton of lower-quality models and harnesses that will be cheerfully overconfident. The meta signal can be ruined even if there is also high-quality stuff that people who know how to get it can get!) This plus popular anger over AI developments seems to mean that people who do successfully use AI to find bugs have a lot of incentive to not publish anything or try to get it upstreamed because they'll immediately come under fire. Highly reputable people and organizations sometimes use their existing clout to vouch for AI-assisted bug reports for prominent projects, but a lot of others just quietly adopt the AI fix in their own tree and give up on sharing it.

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