[dmix]

A completely non-technical saleslady on our team prototyped a whole JS web app that generated some data based on some user inputs (and even generated PDFs), which solved a problem our customers were having and our devs didnt have the time to develop yet.

This obviously was a temporary tool we'd never let touch our github repo but it still very much worked and solved a niche problem. It even looked like our app because the LLM could consume screenshots to copy our designs.

I'm on board with vibe coding = non-maintainable, non-tested, mostly useless code by non-devs. But the plus side it will expose many many people to learn basic programming and fill many tiny gaps not solved by bigger more serious pieces of code. Especially once people start building infrastructure and tooling around these non-devs, like hosting, deployment, webhook integrations, etc.

[tines]

Do people actually learn when using these tools though? I mean, I’m sure they can be used to learn, just like TikTok could be used to read John Stuart Mill. But I doubt that’s what it’s going to be used for in real life.

[dmix]

If the barrier to entry is lower then more people will engage with it. Everything in life is about incentives. This is a hugely powerful tool for people working in the information industry, which is most people with office jobs. A sales person who can overcome a simple customer objection without a major time investment with devs is a sales person who makes more $$ and gets more promotions.

Most people in practice won't, they'll stick to what they know, but there's tons of semi-nerds on the edges who are going to flourish in the next decade. Which is great news for the economy.

[tines]

Engaging with it is different than "learning" though, that's specifically what I was talking about. LLMs seem to be interesting because they're a technology that doesn't encourage you to learn. I know people who talk to ChatGPT, copy code, run it, paste errors into ChatGPT, copy output, run it, etc. They're not really learning anything, they're a glorified console through which ChatGPT can interact with their machine. I'm not saying that that's exactly what happened in your story. I just think that learning will be the exception, not the rule.