Yes you can indeed vibe code a startup. But try building on that or doing anything relatively complicated and you're up shit creek. There's literally no one out there doing that in the influencer-sphere. It's all about the initial cut and MVP of a project, not the ongoing story.
The next failure is replacing a 20 year old legacy subsystem with 3MLOC with a new React / microservices thing. This has been sold to the directors as something we can do in 3 months with Claude. Project failure number three.
The only reality is no one learns or is accountable for their mistakes.
AI has led us into a deep spaghetti hole in one product where it was allowed free rein. But when applied to localised contexts. Sort of a class at a time it’s really excellent and productivity explodes.
I mostly use it to type out implementations of individual methods after it has suggested interfaces that I modify by hand. Then it writes the tests for me too very quickly.
As soon as you let it do more though, it will invariably tie itself into a knot - all the while confidently ascertaining that it knows what it’s doing.
Anyone trusting it to just "do its own thing" is out if their mind
I think if someone's goal was just the tutorial code, it would have been very impressive to them the AI can summon it.
I'm too poor for local llms, I think there might be a 2 or 4gb graphics card in one of my junk pcs but thats about it lol
Actual novel stuff is so far out on the long tail of iterations that it's a gamble: it might pop up in an early run, or might take 2000 prompts and $20,000 worth of tokens. And it's still not really engineered, it's 10,000 monkeys with typewriters copying random shakespeare snippets off the chalkboard. At some point you'll get all of Hamlet, but most of the time you'll get garbage, and sometimes you'll get Romeo & The Taming of The Tempest.
The other day though I asked for something simple and it one-shotted the problem. To me, that's new.
I know this success was a statistical outlier, however. I grok how to use it and to not trust it. I'm just shocked so many people smart people fail to understand it.
I reckon the reason the VC rhetoric has reached running-hair-dye-Giuliani-speech level absurdity isn’t because they’re trying to convince other people— it’s because they’re trying to convince themselves. I’d think it was funny as hell if my IRA wasn’t on the line.
Yes my pension is probably going down the same sinkhole with your IRA. Good luck. We need it.
Is he facing charges yet for sneaking drugs into his wife's food, or did he only ever discuss that with his buddy Jeff E and never actually follow through with it
Now programming and art are both gambling.
This is an opportunity. You can have a good long career consulting/contracting for these types of companies.
Emergency clean up work is ridiculous money!
This is a straw man. I don't know anybody who sincerely claims this, even online. However if you dare question people claiming to be solving impossible problems with 15 AI agents (they just can't show you what they're building quite yet, but soon, soon you'll see!), then you will be treated as if you said this.
AI is a superior solution to the problem Stack Overflow attempted to solve, and really great at quickly building bespoke, but fragile, tools for some niche problem you solve. However I have yet to see a single instance of it being used to sustainably maintain a production code base in any truly automated fashion. I have however, personally seen my team slowed down because code review is clogged with terribly long, often incorrect, PRs that are largely AI generated.
They are fine, moderately useful here and there in terms of speeding up some of my tasks.
I wouldn't pay much more than 20 bucks for it though.
> To be clear: I like and use AI when it comes to coding, and even for other tasks. I think it’s been very effective at increasing my productivity—not as effective as the influencers claim it should be, but effective nonetheless.
It's hard to get measured opinions. The most vocal opinions online are either "I used 15 AI agents to vibe code my startup, developers are obsolete" or "AI is completely useless."
My guess is that most developers (who have tried AI) have an opinion somewhere between these two extremes, you just don't hear them because that's not how the social media world works.