I'm a Normie. Can Normies Vibe Code? | Hacker News Reader

I'm a Normie. Can Normies Vibe Code?

wired.com

27 pointsent10115 comments

>For all the websites and apps I whip through on a given day, they’ve always been mysterious to me — pyramids erected by an unfathomable priesthood. Suddenly I was a pyramid builder.

I think this diffusion of knowledge, which represents the rising floor of progress, is the largest benefit of the AI phenomenon to date.

Yeah for all of the criticism (rightly so), that AI gets. Breaking down any gatekeeping behind creating stuff on the internet has to be a net good.

I get where your sentiment is coming from, but when surveying the internet and world can no longer agree. If we define gatekeeping as the requirement to extend time and effort to gain some level of competence and understanding I'm totally fine with it. "creating stuff on the Internet" has been available to pretty much everyone for a long time, and the value of their product when the creation is easy & free is also easy.

Totally fair. I just want more weird one-off websites from non technically people that aren't terrible squarespace/webflow/whatever clones

People learning how to do things is not gatekeeping. It seems that word has lost all meaning. This person still did not actually create anything.

If you have internet access, there was never any "gatekeeping". There have been free resources to learn web development for ages. Someone not wanting to put in the effort to learn to do something is not being "gatekept", they're just choosing not to learn to do something.

Exactly. I hope the job piloting the airliner I’m sitting in was gatekept such that only people trained as pilots are allowed to do it!

Lowering the amount of effort required to accomplish some task is a good thing. Giving more people the ability to meet their own needs is a significant form of technological advancement.

This was the whole point of Visual Basic, years ago: ordinary people could build their own software. I am glad to see the same sort of thing happening once again.

They are not really accomplishing anything, though. They're not actually building anything. Meeting their needs is one thing, but we don't need to pretend like they're overcoming some insurmountable obstacle.

Beyond that, an accomplishment ceases to be one if you don't actually do anything. It's not an accomplishment if I go buy a bag of chips and eat it, even if my hunger is sated a bit.

Gatekeeping is probably the wrong word here. But like, letting someone create a script that uses regex to parse some annoying forms they have to deal with in my totally made up hypothetical is a good thing.

While there's gratification in leaning how it all works, I don't think that should be a requirement to use a computer to do a task. And the smaller that wall the better IMHO.

> Having needled her repeatedly over the past couple years about AI’s environmental, political, and economic implications, I brushed all that aside on a recent Sunday and drove to her house. After a little tibia talk, I opened her computer and began emitting vibes.

So the author had a moral, environmental, political and economic stance and then just threw them all in the bin.

This is sad to me because I have all of these stances and more. I just cannot bring myself to give in and use a technology wrought with so many systemic problems. And I cannot understand how anyone could feel so strongly about anything to the point of preaching it to others, only to just sort of … ignore them(?).

The author isn't literally discarding their stances, they're temporarily putting it aside to investigate a specific question. The paragraph is pretty clearly a throat-clearing that establishes the author's stance while saying upfront that this article isn't about those stances.

https://archive.ph/5cW7Y

Sure. Anyone can purchase code form an LLM vendor. The more important question is what do you do when things go wrong? Since you didn't code anything (vibe coding is a misnomer) you have no understanding of it. When it breaks or does not work as planned, you are at the mercy of the LLM. That's a hard dependency. Good luck with your purchased code.

Simple - you ask an LLM to fix it. It would be the same hard dependency on a programmer if you hired someone to write code for you as they would need to maintain it and would cost you. LLMs might possibly be interchanged easier than human engineers.

The author mentioned this in passing: > The tasks were menial but doable: ferrying credentials between services, clicking Deploy, watching something fail, pasting the error back to Claude, repeating.

It's no different to a company outsourcing code development for an application to a consultant or another company, just it's using an LLM instead. If that code breaks then the company will need to find another developer to fix it. Sure there are drawbacks to it, but it also lowers the barriers for people to try things out and prototype at low cost and low impact

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