If you weren't able to build it before then you aren't able to properly verify it
Verifying is harder than building!
Verifying is harder than building!
GP said "couldn't dream of building". To make an analogy, I wouldn't dream of building a house if I had to do every bit of brick-laying myself. But with others doing what I can't do, I can indeed dream of building a house and I do know how to verify that the house was built to satisfy my dream.
This is exactly the naive gap that is happening with AI. There is no trusted middleman who does the verification and takes the burden of accountability. The AI vendor tries to sell it like magic but with a disclaimer that is is merely entertainment. The user tries to pretend they are reviewing, but often is just implicitly trusting the tool to do right by them on things they have no real capacity to evaluate.
It's a great example of a project that needs accountability, but there's also thousands of other projects that need absolutely no accountability.
It's all relative to the stakes. The lower the stakes the less informed verification is needed.
The real trick is being informed enough on the boundaries to know where it matters. In the construction analogy, you need to be informed enough to know that a house is a bad idea since there are safety concerns. However building something small and non-load-bearing is probably fine to "vibe".
Eg there's no expertise needed to judge a garden trellis or 2 foot picket fence. It either works or it doesn't, and if it fails down the road there's no harm.
This boundary knowledge is the important bit imo.
That's pretty different from "didn't have the time/money/motivation to"
If you didn't have the skills to build something before then you don't have the skills to verify something is correct after
Clicking around a finished UI is not verifying
Maybe start at the first message here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48553444
I still don't have the skill/knowledge to build cross-platform native applications the way I'm doing it with an agent now. I am still able to verify it's correct. How is that possible if what you say is correct?
> Clicking around a finished UI is not verifying
Definitively a part of it, if you care about having mouse interactions and having graphical UIs.
We have plenty of them that humans even find to be pleasant to solve, such as Minesweeper :)
What I’ve learned is quite minimal due to the slop nature. However I’d have never even started this project in the past due to time, so it’s still fun being able to learn small bits of projects I’d otherwise not even touch.