I love this so much. It's hacky, janky, and absolutely phenomenal and life changing. This is like perfectly in the spirit of the hacker ethos. This dude scraped together pieces around him and made a useful product that solves the problems he wants to solve, the way he wants to solve them.

The code is probably garbage. You can tell the UI is weird and jumpy. He's using timed delays to manipulate the browser with keyboard keys. The whole thing would be absolutely shredded here. But it's beautiful. It's crafted for function over form with duct tape and bubble gum but it's the difference between his brother being locked helplessly alone in his body, or being able to express himself and have some level of autonomy. It's just awesome.

LLMs rule for this kind of stuff. Solve your problems and move on. The code is not so precious. You'll learn many things along the way and will be able to iterate quickly with a tireless and semi competent but world knowledgeable assistant.

> perfectly in the spirit of the hacker ethos

I would strongly disagree on this count. Hacker ethos, at least as traditionally understood, emphasizes grokking and elegance.

I couldn't think of any two concepts less associated with "hacking".

I think you may have an understanding of that word that is not very common.

It sounds like you're thinking about a "hack", as in quick and dirty solution.

But that does not relate to "hacking", and most certainly does not relate to "hacker ethos". And while "hacking" is sort of ambiguous, I don't recall ever seeing "hacker ethos" defined by quick and dirty solutions.

No, though those concepts are of course related historically, I'm not confusing the two.

The hacker's ethos is about freedom of information, freedom of access (apropos to this video about vibe coding accessibility tools), community, collaboration and so on.

I've never seen or heard "elegance" associated with hackers, hacking, the hacking ethos etc. If I were to go further, elegance as it is used here has some anti-hacker connotations, i.e. it is a gatekeeping term to separate "true" coders from "amateurs" which is very anti-hacker.

Anyway, I don't think I'm conflating these terms, but it could be true that my understanding of the hacker ethos is wrong.

> I've never seen or heard "elegance" associated with hackers, hacking, the hacking ethos etc. If I were to go further, elegance as it is used here has some anti-hacker connotations, i.e. it is a gatekeeping term to separate "true" coders from "amateurs" which is very anti-hacker.

This is where I would strongly disagree. Are you familiar with shibboleths like 1337?

This is literally the sort of empowerment that can be truly awesome. Thank you so much for sharing!

Yeah but if you want to remove those qualities from how a professional swe works, simply have them do it for free.

Yeah, the most important part of that video is where he says: "it works well enough". I think there's lots of room for this kind of bespoke software that's fundamentally unmaintainable -- and not something anyone could reasonably afford to make with professionals -- but good enough for purpose. This seems like a great, life-changing example, but it's still subject to the same thing the article is talking about.

I've had some free time recently so I've been trying to use the various AI tools to do a greenfield project with Rails. I know the stack intimately, so it's been a useful exercise as a check against hype. While I can occasionally trust the tooling to make big changes, most of the time I find that even the small changes are wrong in some important, fundamental way that requires re-writing everything at a later time. Asking the models to fix whatever is broken usually results in an endless cycle of (very junior-like!) random changes, and eventually I just have to go in and figure out the fundamental restructure that fixes the issue.

Would this be good enough for someone writing a one-time-use, bespoke piece of software? Maybe. Would they be able to maintain this code, without having a truly senior-level ability to work with the code itself? No [1].

I'm less fearful of LLM taking experienced programmers' jobs [2], because I fundamentally think this kind of stuff plays in the same end of the market as knockoff designer goods, Ikea furniture, and the like. It makes custom software available to an entire customer segment that couldn't have afforded it before, but nobody is going to confuse it with a product made by a team of skilled professionals [3,4].

[1] But to a really inexperienced developer, it looks the same.

[2] I am more fearful of clueless business types, who think this technology obviates the need for programmers.

[3] ...but will unskilled professionals be under pressure? Maybe!

[4] ...and what about skilled people, using the same tools? My current hypothesis is they're beneficial, but ask me again in six months.

As you said, I think also the key differences between skilled and unskilled devs in the context of AI tooling are :

1°) Know how to diagnose and fix critical problems by themselves, because there will be bugs in production for which AI won't be any help

2°) Write maintainable code, AI doesn't care at all of maintainability of code while devs should (must imho) consider pasting AI code as a merge/pull request.

For 2°) IIRC, I read somewhere that more and more code published on i.e. github is AI-generated. While this means the quality of code is decreasing, i.e. Copilot is also trained on more and more % of AI-generated code. So the quality of AI-generated code is decreasing globally.

As time passes, I think skilled devs will become more skilled and unskilled will become more unskilled.

I think it's already happening. I've been using Claude a lot since 3.5. For a while, I barely bothered to check what it was doing because the code it generated tended to be fairly straightforward and usually worked on the first try. But in the last few weeks, I've started reading everything line by line again, because now it's not only often incorrect but also written in a goofy, convoluted way. AI-generated code being constantly fed back to it in a feedback loop would explain a lot, I think.

That's likely just you starting the read the "straightforward" code and not looking through Rose tinted glasses.

The cutoff date for Claude 3.5 is April 2024, that's currently slightly over one year ago.

There's a lot of subtle, pernicious stuff that "Sneaks In" too--not even stylistic either.

Things like a loss of context about the nature of some installed dependency or something.

You really have to know what you're doing and read carefully to avoid glossing over things that'll catch up to you later.

My experience too, in many cases, is that I already know (even if in a vague sense) how to do the thing I'm trying to coax out of the model, but a quick prompt "split this string on $CHAR" or whatever is much faster than me fiddling with forgotten bash syntax.

This approach is different than blind trust in the output from a place of ignorance.

Clearly beneficial for skilled people imho, I wrote about that here [0] recently.

[0] https://manuel.kiessling.net/2025/03/31/how-seasoned-develop...

its also makes linux shell pipe coding graph node programable.

firefox("find cats") -> gimp ("carton filter cats")-> gimp("compose into partypic") -> google drive ("upload to cat folder")

While I agree that vibe coding holds a lot of potential, we should not fall into the trap of success bias here....

Hence why software developers are out of job, eventually.

The day of only a few people around the factory floor to babysit the robots will come, but lets keep celebrating the day they start unloading them from the delivery trucks for installation.

No. Software development is here to stay, they just will not be writing much software.

Even before AI much of software development was managing overseas teams.

Not everywhere in the globe, the difference now is that those overseas teams can be reduced as well, as we outsource their work into AI managed systems.

I don't know whether they will be or they won't be, but 10 years from now all the employed ones will be using LLMs.

Yes, the difference, like on those factories is that instead of the 100 that were on site when the trucks arrived at the factory, there will be 10 of them left.

I have a lot of uncertainty about the number of professional software developers there will be in the long run, but not about whether they'll be using LLMs.

Yeah, but the number matters to many folks that instead being given the opportunity to use LLMs, will be queueing to get something to work on instead.

It's not clear if the overall number of needed software developers will decrease or simply stop growing. The amount of software necessary in the future will only keep growing. Using the same folks to produce more is a large possibility. I imagine it will take decades to see a shrinking workforce that meaningfully displaces many existing software developers.

Why do you not read the article? What you are saying is just total nonsense if you had actually read the article.

>If you gave this project to experienced software developers it would be heavy on process and light on impact, take forever to make, and stupid expensive.

No, it wouldn't. Every single software developer knows how to make programs which "work well enough". This claim is totally ridiculous, it also is not a "product" in any meaningful sense.

What the article is pointing out is that you can not sell software like this. It is not a "product" at all, it is a hobby project. And you can not develop a hobby project like you would develop a commercial product.

Just think for a second what it would take to sell this.

I didn't look at this video, but be vigilant when seeing one, as I was also surprised by someone demonstrating what they can do with Cursor and I went so far to install the exactly the same version of the app, use the same model and everything (prompt, word capitalization...) I could gather from the video and the results were nowhere near what was demonstrated in the video (recreating mobile web page from screenshot). I know that LLMs are not deterministic machines, but IMO there is a lot of incentive to be "creative" with marketing of this stuff. For the reference, this was less than two months ago.

The funny thing is someone somewhere will find a way to make millions off a vibe coded project. I just suspect it will be the outlier and they will be well positioned to make that happen.

And for the rest of the companies that embrace the 30%~ efficiency spike, it will just accelerate our work goals faster.

I like to use it on stuff that we wanna do to enhance the UX but rarely sees the light of day. Plus my wrists have never felt so good since replacing boring syntax choirs with LLMs.