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Who cleans up after the vibe-coding party?

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Re: Who cleans up after the vibe-coding party?

#11

Post by marginalia_nu »

FabCH wrote: post #9
pier25 wrote: post #5

> Now, suddenly, it’s completely normal to have to pay $100 or $200 per month in order to do software development And those prices are still subsidized. OpenAI, Anthropic, etc are nowhere close to generating profits.

Yes, but: 1) They are investing Loony Toons levels of money and using Loony Toons financing a lot of the time for DC buildout. Those are actual physical buildings that once built out, exist and don’t need to be built again. 2) They are pointedly ignoring FPGA and ASIC. With the current model quality, would it really be so bad to burn Claude irrevocably on a chip and have a non-modifiable, cheap to mass produce, order…

> They are pointedly ignoring FPGA and ASIC. With the current model quality, would it really be so bad to burn Claude irrevocably on a chip and have a non-modifiable, cheap to mass produce, order of magnitude faster Claude-in-a-chip? This is what happened to Bitcoin ultimately, there are huge performance gains we know exist lying on the table just because they don’t exist for training. And even for training, TPUs make the first steps in that direction.

Yeah this is copium if I ever saw it.

Re: Who cleans up after the vibe-coding party?

#12

Post by rightbyte »

FabCH wrote: post #9
pier25 wrote: post #5

> Now, suddenly, it’s completely normal to have to pay $100 or $200 per month in order to do software development And those prices are still subsidized. OpenAI, Anthropic, etc are nowhere close to generating profits.

Yes, but: 1) They are investing Loony Toons levels of money and using Loony Toons financing a lot of the time for DC buildout. Those are actual physical buildings that once built out, exist and don’t need to be built again. 2) They are pointedly ignoring FPGA and ASIC. With the current model quality, would it really be so bad to burn Claude irrevocably on a chip and have a non-modifiable, cheap to mass produce, order…

Isn't GPUs a purpose made ASIC for parallell matrix math allready?

Re: Who cleans up after the vibe-coding party?

#13

Post by 3836293648 »

FabCH wrote: post #9
pier25 wrote: post #5

> Now, suddenly, it’s completely normal to have to pay $100 or $200 per month in order to do software development And those prices are still subsidized. OpenAI, Anthropic, etc are nowhere close to generating profits.

Yes, but: 1) They are investing Loony Toons levels of money and using Loony Toons financing a lot of the time for DC buildout. Those are actual physical buildings that once built out, exist and don’t need to be built again. 2) They are pointedly ignoring FPGA and ASIC. With the current model quality, would it really be so bad to burn Claude irrevocably on a chip and have a non-modifiable, cheap to mass produce, order…

An ASIC won't help until models are compute bound. They're still memory bound at all levels.

Re: Who cleans up after the vibe-coding party?

#14

Post by fragmede »

FabCH wrote: post #9
pier25 wrote: post #5

> Now, suddenly, it’s completely normal to have to pay $100 or $200 per month in order to do software development And those prices are still subsidized. OpenAI, Anthropic, etc are nowhere close to generating profits.

Yes, but: 1) They are investing Loony Toons levels of money and using Loony Toons financing a lot of the time for DC buildout. Those are actual physical buildings that once built out, exist and don’t need to be built again. 2) They are pointedly ignoring FPGA and ASIC. With the current model quality, would it really be so bad to burn Claude irrevocably on a chip and have a non-modifiable, cheap to mass produce, order…

That's the approach https://www.cerebras.ai/ is taking.

Re: Who cleans up after the vibe-coding party?

#15

Post by pjmlp »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #10
pjmlp wrote: post #8

In terms of software projects themselves, consulting companies do, the same that now are pushing for AI solutions, which are the trenches I find myself in. Now for the whole economic chaos, unfortunately the whole society will, but not the big tech folks.

IT outsourcing was arguably a sort of precursor to vibecoding, and consulting companies are arguably still eating well cleaning up the legendary mess it created.

As someone that regularly is involved in such projects, fashion driven industry is great for consulting, which is one reason it exists in first place.

Re: Who cleans up after the vibe-coding party?

#16

Post by dzhiurgis »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #10
pjmlp wrote: post #8

In terms of software projects themselves, consulting companies do, the same that now are pushing for AI solutions, which are the trenches I find myself in. Now for the whole economic chaos, unfortunately the whole society will, but not the big tech folks.

IT outsourcing was arguably a sort of precursor to vibecoding, and consulting companies are arguably still eating well cleaning up the legendary mess it created.

I work in Salesforce consulting ecosystem, notorious for producing awful code (occasionally passing project until you find someone code for $1 per hour (I kid you not)).

Now within last year it improved to point I can trust it produce decent quality that beats like 95% of human slop.

Re: Who cleans up after the vibe-coding party?

#17

Post by FabCH »

rightbyte wrote: post #12
FabCH wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but: 1) They are investing Loony Toons levels of money and using Loony Toons financing a lot of the time for DC buildout. Those are actual physical buildings that once built out, exist and don’t need to be built again. 2) They are pointedly ignoring FPGA and ASIC. With the current model quality, would it really be so bad to burn Claude irrevocably on a chip and have a non-modifiable, cheap to mass produce, order…

Isn't GPUs a purpose made ASIC for parallell matrix math allready?

No? You can program a GPU, you can’t program ASIC. TPUs are closer to ASIC than GPUs.

Re: Who cleans up after the vibe-coding party?

#18

Post by FabCH »

3836293648 wrote: post #13
FabCH wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but: 1) They are investing Loony Toons levels of money and using Loony Toons financing a lot of the time for DC buildout. Those are actual physical buildings that once built out, exist and don’t need to be built again. 2) They are pointedly ignoring FPGA and ASIC. With the current model quality, would it really be so bad to burn Claude irrevocably on a chip and have a non-modifiable, cheap to mass produce, order…

An ASIC won't help until models are compute bound. They're still memory bound at all levels.

Models are memory bound.

Startups burning through VC money to build massive warehouses full of hardware those models need to run on currently seem to be quite power grid connector bottlenecked. A more efficient chip would help.

Re: Who cleans up after the vibe-coding party?

#19

Post by pier25 »

FabCH wrote: post #9
pier25 wrote: post #5

> Now, suddenly, it’s completely normal to have to pay $100 or $200 per month in order to do software development And those prices are still subsidized. OpenAI, Anthropic, etc are nowhere close to generating profits.

Yes, but: 1) They are investing Loony Toons levels of money and using Loony Toons financing a lot of the time for DC buildout. Those are actual physical buildings that once built out, exist and don’t need to be built again. 2) They are pointedly ignoring FPGA and ASIC. With the current model quality, would it really be so bad to burn Claude irrevocably on a chip and have a non-modifiable, cheap to mass produce, order…

Inference is probably the cheapest part of it all.

The buildings will last for years, decades even, but the GPUs need to be replaced every 2-3 years in perpetuity.

Re: Who cleans up after the vibe-coding party?

#20

Post by sriramgopalan »

Vibecoding for anything beyond prototypes is a bad idea. Software engineering principles still matter. Good software that is maintainable and has quality in functional, non-functional, and operational axes still matters.

I wrote about this a few weeks ago in my blog. As an industry, we need to move past vibecoding and into rightcoding.

https://sgopalanbtg.substack.com/p/andrej-karpathy-didnt-mea...

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