Hacker News Reader

I was sure this article would be about how we tell computers to do things now (writing prompts to an AI in plain English). I was wrong. Interesting nonetheless.

View on HN

LLMs solved this exact problem. Not perfectly (they can sneak in some malicious commands) but good enough for everyone. This is also mostly what non-developers mean by "vibe-coding". They can "tell the computer to do the things" they want. Previously they were limited to existing GUI applications. Now they can automate and customize their workflows as they wish and think they're a 'coder'.

That's a huge part of the appeal. If you're really lazy you can tell an LLM to add a specific column to a specific database, and it will handroll some SQL just for you and run it.

It's slow and very inefficient, but it works.

Why do this? It would be insane for production, but for development it frees you up to improvise and experiment. You can iterate strategies and solutions far more quickly, test as you go, and bake a final production version into static code.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com