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Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

I'm showing my age, but this is almost exactly analogous to the rise of Visual Basic in the late nineties.

The promise then was similar: "non-programmers" could use a drag-and-drop, WYSIWYG editor to build applications. And, IMO, VB was actually a good product. The problem is that it attracted "developers" who were poor/inexperienced, and so VB apps developed a reputation for being incredibly janky and bad quality.

The same thing is basically happening with AI now, except it's not constrained to a single platform, but instead it's infecting the entire software ecosystem.

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We turned our back on VB. Do we have the collective will to turn our back on AI? If so I suspect it’ll take a catalyzing event for it to begin. My hunch tells me no, no we don’t have the will.

We didn't turn our back on VB. Microsoft killed it when it became a citizen of the .NET ecosystem; pairing C# concepts, requiring extensive code changes and an IDE that was read-only during debug (yah, you couldn't edit the code while debugging) killed the product.

Greed (wanting an enterprise alternative to Java and C++ builder) killed VB, not the community.

Fwiw I honestly think it was a mistake to turn our back on vb.

Yes there were a lot of crappy barely functioning programs made in it. But they were programs that wouldn’t have existed otherwise. Eg. For small businesses automating things vb was amazing and even if the program was barely functional it was better than nothing.

When the Derecho hit Iowa and large parts of my area were without power for over a week we got to discover just how many of our very large enterprise processes were dependent to some degree on "toy" apps built in "toy" technologies running on PCs under people's desks. Some of it clever but all of it fragile. It's easy to be a strong technical person and scoff at their efforts. Look how easily it failed! But it also ran for years with so few issues it never rose to IT's attention before a major event literally took the entire regional company offices offline. It caused us some pain as we had to relocate PCs to buildings with sufficient backup power. But overall the effort was far smaller than building all of those apps with the "proper" tools and processes in the first place.

Large companies can be a red tape nightmare for getting anything built. The process overload will kill simple non-strategic initiatives. I can understand and appreciate less technical people who grab whatever tool they can to solve their own problems when they run into blockers like that. Even if they don't solve it in the best way possible according to experts in the field. That feels like the hacker spirit to me.

Please don’t stop at building “toy” prototypes, it’s a great start, but take some time to iterate, rebuild, bring it to production standards, make it resilient and scalable.

You’d be surprised how little effort it is compared to having to deal a massive outage. E.g. You did eventually had to think about backup power.

Came here looking for this comment!

I think we will need to find a way to communicate “this code is the result of serious engineering work and all tradeoffs have been thought about extensively” and “this code has been vibecoded and no one really cares”. Both sides of that spectrum have their place and absolutely will exist. But it’s dangerous to confuse the two

There's a simple way to communicate it. Just leave in the emoticons added in comments by the LLM.

Wrote it initially as a joke, but maybe it's not that dumb? I already do it on LinkedIn. I'm job hunting and post slop from time to time to game LinkedIn algorithms to get better positioning among other potential candidates. And not to waste anybody's time, I leave in the emotes at beginning of sentences just so people in the know know it's just slop (so as not to waste their time).

Interesting thought. Yeah.. the whole LLM-generated thing might end up being a boon. It is (reasonably) distinctive. At least for now. And rightly or wrongly it triggers defensive reflexes

Drag and drop GUI builders were awesome. Responsive layouts ruined GUI programming for me. It made it too much of a fuss to make anything "professional".

> Do we have the collective will to turn our back on AI?

Why do you believe we should "turn our back on AI"? Have you used it enough to realize what a useful tool it can be?

Wouldn't it make more sense to learn to turn our backs on unhelpful uses of AI?

It's the exact same thing every time a technical bar is lowered and more people can participate in something. From having to manually produce your own film to having film processing readily available on demand to not needing to process film at all and everyone has a camera in their pocket. The number of people taking photos has absolutely exploded. The average quality of photos has to have fallen through the floor. But you've also got a ton of people who couldn't participate previously for one reason or another who go on to do great things with their new found capabilities.

Software is a very different beast though because this crappy technical debt lives on, it often grows "tentacles" with poorly defined boundaries, people and companies come to depend on it, and then the mess must eventually be cleaned up.

Take your photos example. Sure, the number of photos taken has exploded, but who cares if there are now reams and reams of crappy vacation photos - it's not like anyone is really forced to look at it.

With AI-generated code, I think it's actually awesome for small, individual projects. And in capable hands, they can be a fantastic productivity enhancer in the enterprise. But my heart bleeds for the poor sap who is going to eventually have to debug and clean up the mountains of AI code being checked in by folks with a few months/years of experience.

> , people and companies come to depend on it, and then the mess must eventually be cleaned up.

I have found time and again that enough technological advancement will make previously difficult things easy that when it's time to clean up the old stuff, it's not such a huge issue. Especially so if you do not need to keep a history of everything and can start fresh. This probably would not fly in a huge corp but it's fine for small/medium businesses. After all, whole companies disappear and somehow we live on.

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