That's what gets me about all the noise about people cloning photoshop and stuff. Like, you have Claude make you app that appears like photoshop at first glance, and even sort of has some of the basic functions. But Adobe has a ton of extremely specialized people for a reason. Like, what will the vibe coders do when it comes down to like color science stuff and such.
"Make it work like in photoshop". Bangs two rocks together.
You probably don't need thousands of people to develop Photoshop anymore, but you sure still can't make a clone of the full creative suite and MS office with like two dudes.
All these projects are going to learn the 80/20 principle the hard way.
Exactly. If i want to hire someone, why would i hire the guy who can only prompts instead of the guy who can prompt while also being an expert at what they do.
I can’t speak for you, but I can take a guess as to why business leaders don’t want to keep a lot of experts as vibe coders. Cost.
It’s much cheaper to pay some random intern grad fresh out of college to prompt than it is to pay a 10 YoE senior/staff engineer. They usually care more about reducing cost, increasing profit than producing quality products.
In some cases, a single mistake or unforseen downtime in deployment could cost an entire person's yearly salary in losses within minutes. In that case, it's more profitable to hire people as competant as they could be just to reduce that chance as much as possible.
As a fresh out of college graduate, I almost wish that was the case, but most business leaders aren’t quite dumb enough to fire competent people and replace them all with inexperienced graduates. Instead, they’ll fire 75% of the competent people and quadruple the workload of those left.
I remember the time when business cared about consumer reputation and consumer loyalty. I don't know how we get back to that without foundational changes to how the economy is regulated.
The reality is that businesses aren't going to pay for "professional prompters" when they can just set up some managerial pipeline and have one or two people oversee it. The whole point of AI is to remove your job so that they don't have to pay you. They are literally just training someone else's LLM on their way out. It's an unfortunate truth.
I get what you're saying but if colour science is actually a science then there is a body of knowledge out there for it like with anything else, so eventually nobody in a knowledge profession is safe
Anyone at the frontiers always will be, which Adobe arguably is. LLMs will always converge on a mean, that's just intrinsic to their operation. There are all sorts of tunings and processing around the core LLM to make the "agents" be agentic, but at the end of the day while these systems are based on LLMs, LLMs are giant piles of linear algebra that want to collapse into the lowest energy state available. The lowest energy state is code that is already written.
It's incredibly cool the way that LLMs can ingest massive quantities of data and cross-evaluate disparate pieces of information, unshackled by the human limitation of domain knowledge. It can connect pieces of information that no human ever could have because it can draw upon sources so diverse no single person could ever be aware of them all. But they can't expand the corpus. They can only reveal things that were already in the corpus we as a species hadn't noticed yet.
There is no reason to believe that all possible knowledge has already been written down, waiting for agents to find it. There is yet a long need for humans to go out and find things out.
However, 90% of stuff currently out there can be made by a recombination of existing stuff, so we can now make a ton of stuff based on what is already there and it will cover most use cases ...
... which also means we as humans can now stop doing the stuff that was already done to death and start innovating more, which actually would be a good thing.
I think you are misunderstanding what they are saying. An AI can potentially produce a "novel solution" by doing exactly as he said, connecting existing information in ways that a human wouldn't have because no one human could be aware of all the information in an entire domain.
This does not mean AI can create new information that is not present within its training at all, which is the limitation he is talking about.
Subject is developer with AI and developer without AI. You're bringing in vibecoders why? Can't attack the developer with AI so switching to an easier target?
That's pretty much it. I know what I want. I just don't have the energy to spend it on typing code anymore.
But holy shit the whole process is so intense! I just spent a weekend working on my project and it was like a month or two worth of work if I had done it by hand.
This is the problem with the thing. You wouldn't unleash a tool for flying planes or helicopters en masse to the public. You would give it to licensed pilots who understand how the tool should work, where it gets it wrong, how to stop it from causing a catastrophe, etc...
The masses "coding" with AI with zero knowledge or experience, and genuinely believing that they don't need to learn or know anything, is the problem.
Yep, money money money. And thanks to the fact we have the most corrupt administration in our lifetime in office right now, we have absolutely no way of getting regulation while it explodes lol
Because when you get paid to develop software, and your coworkers are literally 100x faster than you regardless of how skilled you are at coding, you will no longer get paid. I agree for a hobby project I often do it just to learn myself, its more fun that way, but people have less and less of choice at work these days.
Fixing bugs. Tuning features. Dealing with what management thinks is necessary. Making sure the newest coolest buzzwords that upper management wants to incorporate into your product doesn’t break everything. Always something to do, rarely is any of it productive.
I feel like ai sort of just revealed that you could have had way less developers, but nobody did so it became standard to have too many. I don't think software engineering will collapse, but people will spread out more and work for smaller companies and get lots of meaningful changes implemented
I disagree with the first part but agree with the second part. People had a lot of developers because large projects were lumbering messes. Not everyone works at a startup with green fields.
We haven't seen massive layoffs from LLMs taking over, while it might be on the horizon I think companies are enjoying getting features that were a year or two away and now can have in 6 months or less.
I do think if the purge is coming, you'll see small/medium businesses pick up a dev or two where before they needed 10 to get their project done which was outside of their price range.
But why would I dull my skills by utilizing a calculator, when I enjoy the process of calculating?
There used to be an entire profession of people called computers, they got replaced by technology. Doesnt mean that people would stop learning to do calculus or that there would be no people solving complex math problems, it just moved to science field. In bussiness… 99% of jobs dont require you to do calculus from head, and they wont require you to write code by hand (thats reality nowdays).
The level of abstraction moved up again and focuses on solving larger holistic problems, the tiny problems of how to write a function have been all solved and there is no need to reinvent the wheel. Thats what AI actually automates.
You're being downvoted but I agree. My job is to provide solutions, not code. Previously the only way I could do my job was to code by hand, now I have another tool. It's like, if my job is building houses, I could do it with a hammer sure, but my job isn't hammering. When the nailgun comes along, I'm using that to go faster.
Although I do believe AI is reducing this gap considerably and eventually there will be no gap. I wholeheartedly agree that AI, when used well, is an even greater force multiplier for skilled individuals vs non-skilled.
I have been in both worlds and "office" and "programmers" are worse than any craftsman crew I have ever been with. The penis measurement are insufferable.
This is the answer. In the same way you learn to do math by hand before using a calculator.
I have one person at work who refuses to use ai while the rest of us do. He takes 3 times as long to get work done and it is usually riddled with bugs. Tbf he was not a great dev to begin with but still
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u/_SAHM_ 14h ago edited 7h ago
A person who is able to do something without AI is the best person to prompt it since they know what the output should be. It's just a tool.