VIBE CODING is Eating the World...

Vibe coding reminds me of the early days of Flash and Flash games. It was accessible and easy enough to use that you could make your own games and upload them to various websites. It's just a step further accessible; you can now make flash-quality games by simply describing what you want.

Just think about Star Trek:TNG, when someone would program the Holodeck with words before entering. At the end of their description they would say, " run program." So this is what we wanted and now we have it. Why would anyone resist? I've be doing this since the beginning of 2024. It's fun because I know how to code in several languages and this is like having a mentor and also a good way to conceptualize ideas that work. Don't hate - innovate!

ThePrimeagen literally locked himself in the tower with 2 other engineers for a week (streaming on twitch 24/7, still live) to vibe code a game with Cursor as an ad... let me tell this: 80% of time is spent reading documentation and debugging AI written code.

currently doing this a lot and its really fucking good, use to do lists, give it good instructions, tell it to think harder about things, tell it to go over multiple solutions and select the one that it thinks is the best

As a product manager, I am using vibe coding to produce prototypes to test with users and deliver highly detailed, functional POCs to my engineers. Everyone is loving how much risk it is removing and the time it is saving. I thought my engineers would hate it but they actually love it.

The thing is that there would be software developers, but the barrier of expertise that you would need to get paid as a professional has increased because of this technology. This is what scares a lot of developers.

Thinking through your digital camera comparison a bit. Before the time you mention, there were disposable cameras, 35mm cameras, and polaroids. However, digital cameras made photography software-mediated, so it became possible to edit photos in post. This made it easier to fix up bad shots. After becoming software-mediated, automation was applied, and now the automation is integrated with high end sensors in real-time such that it's trivial to take good shots without training now. Something similar has played out with videography with a lag. Even in the software domain, expertise in things like Photoshop has been replaced on the low end with filters and AI-mediated editing. Net result was Instagram, YouTube, etc. There are likely fewer professional photographers and videographers but are way more photos and videos. There are also way more people competing to be influencers than demand can possibly support. Social media is a feasible "side hustle" for a lot of folks though. I perceive professional photography as a precarious form of self-employment with a lot of part-timers now. It's perhaps also a "side hustle" for a lot of folks.

your Architect vs sand castle builder analogy... 👏 well played

I am never dismissive of new tech… I learned Photoshop for my newspaper career… thanks Wes Roth for putting it into perspective.

I remember when the digital cameras first came out -- they focused on the manual features associated with film cameras (it was just a digital version of the film camera), then those "complicated" manual features were removed over a few years to be purely point & shoot (themes or scenes became the manual adjustments), which was frustrating when you enjoyed using the shutter/aperture. It became difficult to get a compact camera that had the features these first ones had. I still use my Sony P200 that's over 20 years old! The only PITA with it is getting the files off the MemoryStickDuo.