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Comment by Havoc | Hacker News Reader

> you still needed the captain driving the ship.

The question is more what becomes of all the rowers when you’re switching from captain + 100 rowers to captain + steam engine

They’re not all going to get their own boat and captain hat

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But were there ever 100 "rowers"? In this case, the commenter would have developed the website him- or herself instead of using AI. And it would have taken a little longer but probably been higher quality. In my experience, most developers are already capable captains and most of their job is "captaining." One of their main complaints is managers who treat them like rowers. AI just shifts what it means to captain?

Honestly I just wonder if everyone is burnt out so they still want to do their side projects but don't have much energy left over for the passion they had before. So the bar for "good enough" just lowers

Right but in this case, what might have taken me 2-3 days initially took me a day still with many many frustrating “no, I said I don’t want you to edit that file in that way” moments. So it’s faster but annoying.

To me it feels like when doing it’s like when you’re pair programming (which is quite intense anyway) with a frustrating newby who can program but misses the big picture no matter how many times you try. It works better for certain types of software - web it’s great, I have had much worse results when doing data pipeline stuff at work.

>They’re not all going to get their own boat and captain hat

Why not? Anyone can load up Claude code and start trial and erroring until they get something that works and has similar reliability to accepted software … what is the stat about 1 bug per 10 lines of code on average?

I am meeting a lot of non coders telling me about their projects they are getting AI to do for them, stuff to help land title something or other, stuff to work on avalanche forecast, whatever their area of expertise they are unchained and writing programs using AI that they couldn’t before.

Everyone is the captain now

Anyone can load up Claude code and start trial and erroring until they get something that works and has similar reliability to accepted software..

You still need to understand the code that AI is generating to fix the problems that you can't vibe a solution to. You still need to understand the process of developing software to know when something isn't working even if it looks like it is. You still need other people to trust the software that you created. None of those things comes naturally to vibe coders. They're essentially teaching themselves software engineering in a very back-to-front way.

Everybody learned somehow. I wonder what % of programmers actually have relevant training and education in programming vs just taught themselves with online resources.

Maybe the amateurs aren’t going to be writing a new distributed database but CRUD apps must be easier than ever

The studies I have seen show that AI written software is 70% more buggy than human written code [1]. I am curious where you get your data on AI code having “a similar reliability to accepted software”?

[1] https://www.coderabbit.ai/blog/state-of-ai-vs-human-code-gen...

> Everyone is the captain now

Everyone wants to be but I don’t think there will be enough seats. There are people doing boilerplate and simple CRUD stuff - they’re not going to switch to farming. Reckon this will lead to more competition for same number of senior seats

They could do a revolution. 100 rowers vs 1 captain - easy. Labor vs capital.

You mean murder, before capital understands its critics are as moraly bankrupt as capital itself, and deploys killbots?

Is this like a Randian roleplay fetish?

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