551–560 of 658 posts
I just wish the tools that provides that feeling was a deterministic front-end code generator built from software technology and software engineering insights and not a neural network utilizing a pseudo-random number generator...
Factory work began when people could use other people as machines. For example, mechanized looms could weave cloth but each cloth weaving machine needed a machine to run it. So use people. Children, real slaves anyone. Slave labor. Thus began the Factory Age.
Now AI can replace people for repetitive labor. AI Can run the machines, it is the new Slave Labor. The problem now is what to do with all the freed slaves? If AI can make us the things that are needed, then how are we needed? We are not. As freed slaves, suddenly we are out of work. We are obsolete.
Unfortunately, for corporations that are now rushing to free themselves from the old, difficult, demanding, contentious slaves, they have missed one gigantic element of the equation. Hmmm. What could it be? Can you guess? What could possibly go wrong here?
Fortunately, for us - the freed slaves and factory workers - it turns out we are not just slaves after all. We were just trained to be slaves. So we have a future. If we can adapt to being free. And that is not a joke.
Now TypeScript catches a lot of my mistakes before they reach runtime.
Now I have good enough browser automation testing tools to catch regressions in the frontend.
Now it’s quick and easy to run a specific database version for each app I’m working on with docker.
Now I can automate deployment to the cloud instead of having to rely on an entire IT department.
Now I have a scalable way to publish and consume reusable units of code as npm packages.
None of this was the case in what this author seems to think were the good old days. If web development seemed easy to him back then, I doubt he was working on complex projects
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Wrong. I will spend 30 minutes having the LLM explain every line of code and why it's important, with context-specific follow-up questions. An LLM is one of the best ways to learn ...
So far, eqch and every time I used an LLM to help me with something it hallucinated non-existant functions or was incorrect in an important but non-obvious way. Though, I guess I do treat LLM's as a last resort longshot for when other documentation is failing me.
Factory work began when people could use other people as machines. For example, mechanized looms could weave cloth but each cloth weaving machine needed a machine to run it. So use people. Children, real slaves anyone. Slave labor. Thus began the Factory Age. Now AI can replace people for repetitive labor. AI Can run the machines, it is the new Slave Labor. The problem now is what to do with all the freed slaves? If…
Last paragraph resonated so deeply with me. Especially this: ```It’s also not the typing of code that I really enjoy, nor is it the syntax or structure or boilerplate that’s required to build anything. It’s the fact you get to build something out of nothing, writing code was just how you got there. And with today’s tooling, that saves a ton of time.``` I never really related with folks that code for beauty or are put…
There is tons of satsifaction in actually creating nuts and bolts frameworks. After you encounter difficulties in creating a real world product you see the need for tools to solve those problems, so crafting those tools and then using them does feel like winning and shipping and solving real problems.
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No shame in that. I keep struggling to figure out the point of view of the CSS designers. They don't think like graphic designers, or like programmers. It's not easy for beginners. It's not aimed at ease of implementation. It's not amenable to automated validation. It's not meant to be generated. If there is some person for whom CSS layout comes naturally, I have not met them. As far as I can tell their design goal w…
> I keep struggling to figure out the point of view of the CSS designers. Before 2017, the web had no page layout ability. Think about it. Before the advent of Flexbox and CSS Grid, certain layouts were impossible to do. All we had were floats, absolute positioning, negative margin hacks, and using the table element for layout. > They don't think like graphic designers or like programmers. It's not easy for beginners…
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> That might be true, but it doesn't have to be immediately true. It's an arbitrage problem: seeing a gap, knowing you can apply this new tool to make a new entrant, making an offering at a price that works for you, and hoping others haven't found a cheaper way or won the market first. In other words, that's all business as usual. I'm hearing what you are saying, but the "business as usual" way almost always requires…
All fair points, I think I agree with your take overall but we might each be focusing on situations involving different levels of capital, time, and skill: I'm imagining situations where AI use brought the barrier down substantially for some entrants, but the barriers still meaningfully exist, while it sounds to me like you're considering the essentially zero barrier case. My Glad example was off the cuff but it stil…
I think a better analogy (i.e. one that we both agree one) is Excel preadsheets.
There are very few "Excel consultants" available that companies hire. You can't make money be providing solutions in Excel because anyone who needs something that can be done in Excel can just do it themselves.
It's like if your mum needed to sum income and expenditures for a little side-business: she won't be hiring an excel consultant to do write the formulas into the 4 - 6 cells that contain calculations, she'll simply do it herself.
I think vibe coding is going to be the same way in a few years (much faster than spreadsheets took off, btw, which occurred over a period of a decade) - someone who needs a little project management applications isn't going to buy one, they can get one in an hour "for free"[1].
Just about anything you can vibe-code, an office worker with minimal training (the average person in 2026, for example) can vibe-code. The skill barrier to vibe-coding little apps like this is less than the skill barrier for creating Excel workbooks, and yet almost every office worker does it.
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[1] In much the same way that someone considers creating a new spreadsheet to be free when they already have Excel installed, people are going to regard the output of LLMs "free" because they are already paying the monthly fee for it.
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I was very anti AI (mainly because I am scared that I'll take my job). I did a side project that would have took me weeks in just two days. I deployed it. It's there, waiting for customers now. I felt in love with the process to be honest. I complained my wife yesterday: "my only problem now is that I don't have enough time and money to pay all the servers", because it opened to me the opportunities to develop and de…
As a customer, I don't want to pay for vibe-coded products, because authors also don't have a time (and/or skills) to properly review, debug and fix products.
Factory work began when people could use other people as machines. For example, mechanized looms could weave cloth but each cloth weaving machine needed a machine to run it. So use people. Children, real slaves anyone. Slave labor. Thus began the Factory Age. Now AI can replace people for repetitive labor. AI Can run the machines, it is the new Slave Labor. The problem now is what to do with all the freed slaves? If…
People were dirt cheap, but machines were vastly more productive (and some inventions were stolen so that no royalties had to be paid).