It's demotivating to think that:
- LLMs aren't good at producing original / novel work
- You still need experts to advance that stuff
- It will always be slower to move without using LLMs
- Once an innovation is done though, an innovation can always be scooped up by the LLM users
- "Bro why are you doing all this manually, I just vibe coded that in a weekend"
Will it always be this way? It's depressing in the meanwhile, at least.
@cwebber I've been thinking recently about how people are shown to lose skill at a task when automation is introduced to aid that, because they quickly come to rely on the tool rather than trust their own judgment. There was a study, for example, at how the introduction of AI detection models for cancer screenings actually lowered the overall accuracy rate, because no one was checking the machine's output.
Anecdotally, I've seen the same thing with programming, where people will defer to Claude when a problem is encountered rather than thinking critically about it themselves. And so I suspect we'll reach a point where actual skill at this job will be in demand, because people who rely on vibe coding won't be able to reliably fix the issues that they've introduced.
On a more personal level though... the reason I do this is because I enjoy the craft. Solving problems elegantly with code is deeply rewarding to me. And so I very much don't understand why someone would vibe code to begin with. Do they not like the work? And if not, why did they choose this career path? But yeah I agree that the whole situation is super discouraging.
Christine Lemmer-Webber
Sean