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Comment by mikestorrent | Hacker News Reader

Now this is the right take. It's one thing for us to do navel-gazing into the recursive autononomous future; it's another to step back and see what Normal People can do, now that the walls are coming down around our profession. Creating new walls is probably not the answer! From the Cathedral and Bazaar, we now have an entire metaphorical city of development happening, by people who would not have thought it possible a few years ago.

I don't know what the future of my job holds other than what it always had: helping people who have good ideas to get them done properly.

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The thing is though it all still feels so…rudderless/pointless sometimes?

When digital cameras came out, it democratized filmmaking immensely. But it wasn’t just people screwing around - amazing new works of art, received positively by audiences and critics alike, exploded in number. They wound up winning film fests, garnering millions of views (and fans) online, and even on big screens world wide, almost immediately

Where are the vibe coded apps that are actually good? Where are the new, innovative creations built by “normal” people? Because by now you’d think we’d see them. It’s all been parlor tricks, proofs of concept, and post mortems on how a bot ruined half a year’s work or whatever. The “good stuff” is still happening behind closed doors, led by experienced engineers on existing projects. It’s a productivity multiplier more than anything it seems, but it doesn’t seem useful as a tool for new people to make new things in any given space.

Vibe coding is actually "good" for small, bespoke things. The same way that Excel is "good" for small tasks, bad bad for larger things. Too easy to make mistakes, too hard to maintain.

I could equally ask - where are all the Excel workbooks that are actually _good_? No-one needs to share their Excel workbooks. They don't need 10k github stars. They just achieve some small goal of the Excel user. These LLM agents just need to do what the user needs doing at any moment.

(Sometimes, that can be a small part of a larger job in software, or a series of small parts perhaps - but again you are going to see this "show up" as a part of peoples workflow in maintaining enterprise software which is what most programmers are employed to do, in other words, you won't directly see it at all. And no, digital cameras didn't change the field 18 months after the first somewhat-usable one was released - it took quite a while for the technology to become good enough and cheap to democratize filmmaking).

> maintaining enterprise software which is what most programmers are employed to do …

I hear little from those involved with enterprise or line-of-business applications discussing their findings. Forums like this are dominated by SAAS, tool makers, computer and data scientists, and infrastructure concerns.

Anyone using AI with large, complex business systems?

Totally agree. I see a lot of experimentation, initial exploration for an idea, etc. but the middle and end portions are never noteworthy except when it goes haywire and someone makes a blogpost about it.

Ideating is important but it is also very far from what is being promised. It’s also not that useful to the average person most of the time. If this is truly a revolutionary, must-have, daily-use technology, then by now we should have some idea of where it lives. But we don’t! The best and most consistent application so far is coding agents for coders. That’s great, but again, not the promise and very limited in scope.

I don’t care about GitHub stars. There are tons of excel workbooks and such that are useful, publicly available, and utilized.

Wonderful analogy.

I still use spreadsheets regularly. Relieved of the pressure of making something "good", I can get basic things done quickly.

Is it sustainable or maintainable? Nope. Doesn't need to be. Not qualities I'm remotely concerned about when I'm writing a spreadsheet.

Vibe coding is similar in that you can solve a specific problem without much concern for generalization or future reuse.

> Where are the vibe coded apps that are actually good? Where are the new, innovative creations built by “normal” people? Because by now you’d think we’d see them.

They're busy using them. They're probably not GitHub users or HN readers. I've seen some really nice internal (business) apps made.

So we have to assume there’s good stuff being made by newbies that no one else is seeing?

I didn’t have to take it on faith that people were actually making amazing things with digital cameras. I could look at them. I could reproduce it.

I mean, yeah. I've seen a network infrastructure monitoring system for an ISP, a router config generator tool, and a go-based BGP EVPN daemon in the past week. All are in production.

Were any of these created by people using AI who weren’t already capable of making them?

Maybe if you gave them a decade.

Didn’t take a decade for digital cameras to prove they were useful.

What does this comment even mean???

Not GP, but yes and yes.

Our sales and marketing have started making their own tools for themselves. This week. They actually launched a terminal.

They hit a wall with deployment, for now, but it’s amusing to watch.

And since I wouldn’t trust their stuff (or Claude’s) with a 10-mile long stick I strongly suggested we put it on Cloudflare behind eight layers of Access / Zero Trust. Easy deployment, and "solves" (if we can call it that) many of the security issues (or not; maybe I’m wrong).

It’s a tool to replace human creation, not to enable human creation.

I have found that LLM’s are fantastic for rewriting things in ways that get me to break through writer’s block. It’s great for just keeping me going when I can’t think of the next words, even if I just sit on it and come back later. In that way it helps me create. But this covers one major issue that affects my progress, it doesn’t like…do the job for me, if that makes sense. I throw out probably 80% of what the LLM spits out, but even just seeing what you don’t want can often help you decide what you do want.

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