What Google Translate can tell us about vibecoding

> I feel confident in asserting that people who say this would not have hired a translator or learned Japanese in a world without Google Translate; they’d have either not gone to Japan at all, or gone anyway and been clueless foreigners as tourists are wont to do.

The correlation here would be something like: the people using AI to build apps previously would simply never have created an app, so it’s not affecting software development as a career as much as you first expect.

It would be like saying AI art won’t affect artists, because the people who would put in such little effort probably would never have commissioned anyone. Which may be a little true (at least in that it reduces the impact).

However, I don’t necessarily know if that’s true for software development. The ability to build software enabled huge business opportunities at very low costs. I think the key difference is this: the people who are now putting in such low effort into commissioning software maybe did hire software engineers before this, and that might throw off a lot of the numbers.

I know enough Japanese to talk like a small child, make halting small talk in a taxi, and understand a dining menu / restaurant signage broadly. I also have been enough times to understand context where literal translation to English fails to convey the actual message.. for example in cases where they want to say no to a customer but can't literally say no.

I have found Google Translate to be similarly magical and dumb for 15 years of traveling to Japan without any huge improvements other than speed. The visual real-time image OCR stuff was an app they purchased (Magic Lens?) that I had previously used.

So who knows, maybe LLM coding stays in a similar pretty-good-never-perfect state for a decade.

While professionals still produce much better quality translations, the demand for everything but the most sensitive work is nearly gone. Would you recommend your offspring get into the industry?