Comment by stego-tech | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stego-tech | Hacker News Reader

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> Vibe-coding won't be a net creativity gain to a researcher affected by vibe-immigration-policy, vibe-grant-availability, and vibe-firings, for all of which the unpredictability is a punitive design goal.

Quite literally this is what I’m trying to get at with my resistance to LLM adoption in the current environment. We’re not using it to do hard work, we’re throwing it everywhere in an intentional decision to dumb down more people and funnel resources and control into fewer hands.

Current AI isn’t democratizing anything, it’s just a shinier marketing ploy to get people to abandon skilled professions and leave the bulk of the populace only suitable for McJobs. The benefits of its use are seen by vanishingly few, while its harms felt by distressingly many.

At present, it is a tool designed to improve existing neoliberal policies and wealth pumps by reducing the demand for skilled labor without properly compensating those affected by its use, nor allowing an exit from their walled gardens (because that is literally what all these XaaS AI firms are - walled gardens of pattern matchers masquerading as intelligence).

This is a bit stronger than my point, I should say. I do think that LLMs would have a net benefit to society, by way of their effects on research and innovation... if we could get our political houses in order such that we weren’t negating those effects, and such that we were empowering small businesses and high-tech startups to build with the results of this innovation sustainably.

And in a world where policy is horrid and the effects are mainly negated, things would be even worse if the remaining researchers lost AI as a tool. For better or for worse, fire has been shared with humanity, and we might as well cook.

>Current AI isn’t democratizing anything

I don't work anywhere close with software but I have used chatgpt to program small tools and scripts for me I never would have written myself.

The real boon of AI programming is when normal people use it to program things custom tailored for their use case.

That’s one perspective, but it’s wrong and typical gatekeeping (do you have a software degree by any chance?). People had the same attitude towards open source tooling and low code frameworks - god forbid someone not certified and ordained build a solution in something other than Java...

AI code tools are allowing people to build things they couldn't before due to lack of skillset, time or budget. I’ve seen all sorts of problems solved by semi technical and even non-technical people. My brother for example built a thing with Microsoft copilot that helped automate more in his manufacturing facility (used to be paper).

But yeah, keep yelling at that cloud - the rest of us will keep shipping cool things that we couldn’t before, and faster.

>My brother for example built a thing with Microsoft copilot that helped automate more in his manufacturing facility (used to be paper).

I have harped on this endlessly as a non-programmer working a non-tech job, with 7 "vibe-coded" programs now being used daily by people at my company.

I am sorry, but the tech world is completely missing the forest for the trees here. LLM's are talked about purely as tools that were created to help devs. Some love them, some hate them, but pretty much all of them seem unaware that LLMs allow non-tech people to automate tasks with a computer without having to go through a 3rd-party-created interface.

So yea, maybe Claude is useless troubleshooting your cloud platform. But it certainly isn't useless in helping me forgo a cloud platform by setting up a simple local database to use instead.

Yep, and it allows them to build POCs that they can pass to "real" devs in a way that was not possible before.

Real devs excel at writing software for hundreds, thousands, millions of users with fractal use cases and feature needs.

LLMs excel at writing software for one or a handful of users with a very narrow but very well defined use cases.

I don't need an LLM to write Excel.exe for keeping track of 20 employee's hours. A simple GUI on a SQLite database can easily do that.

Yes!

We're about to enter a world where everyone has their own custom software for their specific use cases. Each of these is relatively simple, yet they may replace something complex. Excel is complex because it needs to handle everyone's use cases, but for any one particular spreadsheet, you could pretty easily vibe-code a replacement that does that one spreadsheet's job better than Excel can.

I've also found that vibe-coding a presentation as a React app is better than using Power Point.

> >My brother for example built a thing with Microsoft copilot that helped automate more in his manufacturing facility (used to be paper).

> I have harped on this endlessly as a non-programmer working a non-tech job, with 7 "vibe-coded" programs now being used daily by people at my company.

Aren't AI coding agent(s) just the next iteration of democratizing app development? This has happened before with Microsoft Access (even Visual Basic), or going back further FoxPro, dBase & Clipper etc? With all of these tools, non-programmers had been able to create apps to help them with their businesses.

This has never happened before. There has never been a plain English programming language.

      Public Class Form1
       Private Sub Form1_Load(sender As Object, e As EventArgs) Handles MyBase.Load
        MessageBox.Show("Hello, World!")
       End Sub
     End Class

Becomes

"Make a message box pop up on the screen that says Hello World!"

From what I understand, what he built was a copilot assisted Access app. He would have not had the time nor skillset without the copilot thing. And they don't have the budget for a bespoke app.

Devs have a hard time seeing vibe coding as UI, but that is what it effectively is for the average user. Describe the problem, get an interactive tool to handle it.

The problem isn't that people can quickly prototype an idea that they've had without contracting an expensive professional, I think this is great. This will give ideas that would never see the light of day a chance. Plus this gives a much better talking point if they do choose to get a professional onboard.

The problem is that it's sold as a complete solution. Use the LLM and you'll get a fully working product. However if you're not an experienced programmer you won't know what's missing, if it's using outdated and insecure options, or is just badly written. This still needs a professional.

The technology is great and it has real potential to change how things are made, but it's being marketed as something it isn't (yet).

> However if you're not an experienced programmer you won't know what's missing, if it's using outdated and insecure options, or is just badly written. This still needs a professional.

I think a lot of this could be solved by a platform that implements appropriate guardrails so that the application code literally cannot screw up the security. Not every conceivable type of software would fit in such a platform, but a lot of what people want to do to automate their day-to-day lives could.

You know the industry that will need a lot more professionals after this - cybersecurity.

This is one of the best comments about the current AI hype.

The elite really don't see why the proletariat should be interested in, or enjoy the dignity of, actual skill and quality.

Hence the enshitification of everything, and now AI promises to commoditize everything into slop.

Sad because it is the very deoth of society that has birthe

John Rockefeller didn't sit down in a big chair, twirl his mustache, and invent AI to funnel money to the hands of the wealthy. This technology was created by researchers and has been mostly accessible to everyone for as long as it has been around.

All technology has the effect of concentrating wealth, and anyone who insists on using their two hands to fashion things when machines exist that can do it better will always be relegated to the "artisan" bin as time rolls on.

> All technology has the effect of concentrating wealth

Even GNU/Linux? :)

Android, cloud platforms etc.

This could be a comment about the industrial revolution.

The industrial revolution's immediate effect was to radically lower lifespans and lengthen working hours. After all of those people suffered and died, lifespans gradually got long again, although working hours never went back to normal.

You might think it was worth it now because you got an iphone, but they didn't get an iphone.

Your view is incomplete. It did lowered lifespans, but also increased them MUCH MORE than before. It was not "oh, it got worse, now it is recovering". It was "it got worse, now it is much better than before". The amount of infant deaths it lowered, for example, is massive.

And it is true, those people did not got an iPhone and died, but this is also you saying this for them. You don't know all the specifics of history or all their motivations, the industrial revolution had a bloody story, but it's origins were also organic, it also had aspects of improvement. The world population grew almost 10x.

I don't think we are in a position to judge those past events to the lens you are posing.

This could be a comment about the Neolithic Revolution

Well, what they were doing before was sure as shit not going to get them an iPhone.

Just because a paradigm shift doesn't miraculously catapult us all into a post-scarcity economy overnight, that doesn't mean it's not an important milestone on a longer road.

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