>couldn't replicate nearly as easily by manually modifying open source. (I'm sure I could do it by starting with open source and using an LLM to make changes, and in other cases I have done exactly that, but at that point I don't really see the conceptual difference -- I'm still getting an LLM to write code and then repeatedly running that code
Yes, that's what I meant, vibecoding something that uses existing software, not manually using open source stuff. It doesn't even need to fork or modify code.
>at that point I don't really see the conceptual difference -- I'm still getting an LLM to write code and then repeatedly running that code
I do agree, it's a subtle difference, about importing higher level dependencies vs building on top of low lever abstractions and writing everything else. Which is ironic/nuanced because I'm a huge proponent of aggressively not using dependencies in industrial programming, to the point where my requirements.txt/package.json is literally empty, and I use POSIX compliant sockets syscalls instead of importing packages like flask or express.
But when it comes to actually using software, whether for personal usecases, or as a sysadmin, my approach takes the opposite form, I aggressively don't write code, I still aggressively minimize dependencies, but the game is actually using the Operating System primitives to combine these dependencies, relying only on OS installers like apt/yum, maybe minimal configuration, if code is written, it's on a scripting capacity, a bash or python script, glue code you know? Sure the line can be fuzzed at some point, but it's clear to me that you can either write an application or be a poweruser of an application, and early in my career I've seen businesses go for the building software in house route for the fun factor, I don't think that was the right answer in the dot com boom, and as time went by, and the corpus of software grew, building your own became even more wrong than using existing third party products.
Now in personal computing, the fun-factor maybe is more important, but I have to judge this personal-software thing on how it will affect the actual important stuff, because that's what the stakes are, and that's how it's being sold. In the industry code agents are either used for building software, or for consuming software, and outside of personal experimentation I still hold that building your own software isn't a good idea, I don't think the advent of LLM materially changes that, the consequence of ending up with an ossified, non standard, low quality product is still there, perhaps even magnified, it's just that it's not something that you notice when you are starting a software product, it's only when your pyramid reaches a couple of hundred meters high that you realize that it can't grow into a skyscraper.
And I get that not everything needs to be a skyscraper, but it feels like one-off software is taking the form factor and tooling of long-term skyscrapers, the logical consequence is that we would end up with thousands of little skyscrapers, which is a place we can only get to by ignorance of the history and essence of skyscrapers, it's something a city child would imagine after going on a road trip once, "what if we had little skyscrapers throughout the whole country instead of very high skyscrapers in a single place?".