51–60 of 80 posts
> Less dependency management, less glue, less accidental complexity from adapting your problem to someone else’s abstraction. Less maintenance and flexibility. You're not really "designing software" until you have a 20+ year old product. Vibe coders really embody the "temporarily embarrassed billionaire" mindset so perfectly.
This is a great take. It applies the SaaS is dead theory at a lower level (libraries are dead) but has it a much more nuanced view. Yeh even if LLMs are 10x better than today you probably still don't want to implement cryptography from scratch, but use a library. I also like the 3d printing analogy. We will see how good LLMs get, but I will say that a lot of AI coded tools today have the same feeling as 3d printed ha…
The time might come when the ai just writes things like http request parsers and crypto libraries on the fly. And it will be somewhat normal
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But why? Even if you could have an AI do that it’s, if anything, a waste of cpu cycles. If you have a battle tested library that works and has been tested for trillions of request cycles why would you even want to write a new one that needs testing and maintenance? No matter how cheap code gen gets it doesn’t make sense. For something like a UI library, sure build something specific to your needs.
Libraries are really built for human beings, not super intelligent machines. ORMs are built because I don’t like to and can’t write complex sql with every edge case. Same with a lot of software, software libraries are designed to work with the deficiencies of the human mind. There’s no reason to think ai needs these libraries in the same way
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This seems like today's version of "I could write Facebook in a weekend." What are the incentives for doing that? What are the incentives for everyone else to move? So if proven things exist for basics, what's the incentive to not use them? If everyone decides they're too heavy, they could make and publish new libraries and tools would pick those up. And since they're old, the feature-set is probably more nuanced tha…
Importing a library for everything will become a dated concept. Similar to the idea that object relational mappers might go away if the ai can just write ultra complicated hyper efficient sql for every query
Gotta love a world in which a tool which has ingested "all the world's libraries" is now trotted out as a solution to replace those libraries. You know what would happen if all the people who handwrote and maintained those libraries revoked their code from the training datasets and forbid their use by the models? :clown face emoji: This LLM-maxxing is always a myopic one-way argument. The LLMs steal logic from the hu…
LLMs write superior code. Maybe they learned from humans, but they have seen further while standing on those shoulders.
How would they know what superior code is? They're trained on all code. My expectation and experience has been that they write median code in the best-case scenario (small greenfields projects, deeply specified, etc).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>LLMs are really quite bad at designing anything interesting Let’s be honest, how many devs are actually creating something interesting/unique at their work? Most of the time, our job is just picking the right combination of well-known patterns to make the best possible trade-offs while fulfilling the requirements.
Unless you work for a consulting firm, you should be working on something new/unique. It’s a winner-takes-all market. There are no buyers for off brand Salesforce or Uber.
Same with Salesforce, there are a few hundred alternatives
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But why? Even if you could have an AI do that it’s, if anything, a waste of cpu cycles. If you have a battle tested library that works and has been tested for trillions of request cycles why would you even want to write a new one that needs testing and maintenance? No matter how cheap code gen gets it doesn’t make sense. For something like a UI library, sure build something specific to your needs.
Libraries are really built for human beings, not super intelligent machines. ORMs are built because I don’t like to and can’t write complex sql with every edge case. Same with a lot of software, software libraries are designed to work with the deficiencies of the human mind. There’s no reason to think ai needs these libraries in the same way
I’m not saying the future can’t get to an ai just producing everything. I’m saying it’s just plain inefficient to keep solving the same problem over and over.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wh … why would we want that?
It’ll just spit the code out. I vibe coded some with cookie handling the other day that worked. Should I have done it? Nope. But the ai did it and I allowed it The concept of using a library for everything will become outdated
It’s easy to write a cookie parser for a simple case; clearly your robot was able to hand you one for millidollars. How confident are you that you’ve exhaustively specified the exact subset of situations your code is going to encounter, so the missing functionality doesn’t matter? How confident are you that its implementation doesn’t blow up under duress? How many tokens do you want to commit to confirming that (reasoning, test, pick your poison)?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’ll just spit the code out. I vibe coded some with cookie handling the other day that worked. Should I have done it? Nope. But the ai did it and I allowed it The concept of using a library for everything will become outdated
The value of a library is not just that it does a thing you want, but that it doesn’t do all the things you’d prefer it didn’t. It’s easy to write a cookie parser for a simple case; clearly your robot was able to hand you one for millidollars. How confident are you that you’ve exhaustively specified the exact subset of situations your code is going to encounter, so the missing functionality doesn’t matter? How confid…