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Comment by anthk | Hacker News Reader

Good luck with robots traing to lay up bricks, or doing plumbing in a home.

Making a brick laying robot is easy. I'm happy to do that if you want to fund my mid-life crisis... Note that I did not promise my brick laying robot can effectively compete with human break layers on cost. I fully expect my robot to be at least double the cost of humans doing the same work, and it will be less flexible than humans as well (meaning you need a different robot for different buildings)

How would it be double the cost if it can work day and night and on holidays and during bad weather and not have strikes?

Double is probably a low estimate. There is a lot of engineering required in the robot. Much of the effort is setup, someone still needs to bring it to the site, and feed the blueprints in. Cleanup is also a lot of the cost. Not to mention mortar is made of sand which is abrasive and will wear it out fast meaning lots of maintenance work.

Working day and night isn't helpful as the limit to speed is waiting for the mortar to cure before doing the next row. (Generally you do about 5 rows and then wait a day)

could the robots not do more than one site? 5 rows, move to other side, a house if rectangle does have four sides, and a subdivison has multiple houses?

Ummmm in time it's inevitable as in 2026 you do not need any skill to be a computer programmer. AI has replaced that once valuable skill and will continue it's way through ever white collar job til the robots (5 to 10 years) start taking the blue collar jobs away.

The blue collar job boom is great present day, but what they are helping build is their machine driven replacement.

Maybe this all sounds hyperbolic, but it's what Musk and all the AI overlords have said as far back as a 2013 or prior. Musk and Altman have noted the need for everyone to be on welfare (Universal Basic Income) since then. And no doubt we see this taking shape now within white collar jobs that once we held in high regard like programming being replaced by AI. I just created a whole startup web design, front-end, back-end development, native iPhone app, Android app and more using Codex (previously i hired others to help me a UI Design Front End guy).

Vibe coding by people with no programming skills is not going to happen. What will happen is moving to higher and higher code representations. A compiler is already doing 99% of the actual coding when you realize that the only language computers understand is assembly.

I am a UX Researcher, UX Design and Developer by trade since 2009. I don't know iphone development, python, any back end stuff and or in depth JS stuff.

But, Codex does and just by typing I just published a startup in python in two weeks using Codex and it's iPhone app will be available soon.

How do you not think AI will not destroy programming jobs if anyone can type to create anything they want or share your screen with Codex and have it guide you via voice? I just feed screenshot after screenshot to Codex to understand what I need to do next. Look forward to being able to share my screen and have it guide me via a voice conversation.

What is you opinion of U.I "designed" by someone without UX experience, thru prompting. Most likely you cringe at how bad they are, as do the reset of us.

Similarly, programmers have a name for code generated without a coder guiding and reviewing, A.I slop.

Users don't care if they hear amazing song and don't know its AI Music slop or their favorite new iPhone game is powered by slop. The entrepreneurs pumping out said slop and making some to a lot of money don't care what old time programmers think of their slop. They are making money!

Things change and this change is hard for sure ... i'm living it and embracing the change by becoming a vibe coder and starting up businesses.

As for UI Gemini created the same type of UI I would've yet I did tell it what was needed following my years/years of design experience (less is always more).

Getting an idea out there quickly and cheaply is definitely a good use for AI. In the context of the original op, this is not putting any developers out of work. Quite the contrary, if the idea takes off then you will probably want to make a proper implementation with a carefully thought out UX.

The UI/UX Gemini made is less is more and follows how I have designed for years. The idea is musicians/bands find local venues to play out. Which is an easy UI/UX .. a logo ... sign up button, header that says "Bands find local venues to play out," and a search bar below for them to search local spots. Ive done these sites for forever so I know how to describe a startup idea quickly to humans and an LLM. That's a unique skill yet can be taught quickly like stop going on and on about your idea i dont care give it to me in 15 to 30 seconds.

> How do you not think AI will not destroy programming jobs if anyone can type to create anything they want or share your screen with Codex and have it guide you via voice?

Extrapolate that to any other engineering or even medical discipline and you will understand that your conclusion has some flaws.

Well i guess there are two sides of table / arguement. Im on the side of believing the hype of the AI overlords who promote UBI not cause I don't want to work because I personally experience and see it slowly playing out now.

Careful with UBI. What they are thinking is reshuffling/re-branding Medicaid/Food Stamps/Housing voucher, etc, into one lump sum that just like the current welfare, will barely be enough to keep you alive.

People are already doing it to some extent, especially the sort of technical non-programmer crowd. A member of my family was even having a (now pretty out of date) version of chatGPT spit out VBA macros for them with precisely no idea what they were doing, but the result worked well enough for them. Now I know lots of programmers will scoff at that but when you see what the big models can do today in terms of breaking down a fairly large task and executing on all the steps with minimal need to stop it, including going to existing docs/web pages etc. to gather info, correcting itself, even troubleshooting issues and correcting them, it strikes me as hard to see a future where programming skill as such remains considered scarce in the market.

> Vibe coding by people with no programming skills is not going to happen

Hate to break it to you but it is happening, increasingly at the business stakeholder interface later.

> A compiler is already doing 99% of the actual coding when you realize that the only language computers understand is assembly.

Most of the value in the software engineering process isn't in the compiler, it's in deducing the requirements and weighing tradeoffs for various solution paths. LLMs have now automated the next step: translating human language requirements and specifications to code.

The compiler is just the last deterministic step, which while essential, is entirely commoditized in the value chain. When was the last time you paid for a compiler?

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