[bpt3]

You're talking about a theoretical problem in the future, while I assure you vibe coding and agent based coding is causing major issues today.

Today, LLMs make development faster, not better.

And I'd be willing to bet a lot of money they won't be significantly better than a competent human in the next decade, let alone the next couple years. See self-driving cars as an example that supports my position, not yours.

[anonzzzies]

Does it matter though? Programming was already terrible. There are a few companies doing good things, the rest made garbage already for the past decades. No one cares (well; consumers don't care; companies just have insurance when it happens so they don't really care either; it's just a necessary line item) about their data being exposed etc as long as things are cheap cheap. People daily work with systems that are terrible in every way and then they get hacked (for ransom or not). Now we can just make things cheaper/faster and people will like it. Even at the current level software will be vastly easier and faster to make; sure it will suck, but I'm not sure anyone outside HN cares in any way shape or form (I know our clients don't; they are shipping garbage faster than ever and they see our service as a necessary business expense IF something breaks/messes up). Which means that it won't matter if LLMs get better; it matters that they get a lot cheaper so we can just run massive amounts of them on every device committing code 24/7 and that we keep up our tooling to find possible minefields faster and bandaid them until the next issue pops up.

[Workaccount2]

It kind of reminds me of when Uber launched, and taxi drivers were talking about how it was the death of safe, clean, responsible, and trustworthy taxi service.

[bpt3]

Except taxi drivers were not any safer, cleaner, more responsible, or more trustworthy than the general population, and the primary objective of most taxi companies seemed to be to actively screw with their customer base.

In short, their claims were inaccurate and motivated by protecting their existing racket.

[furyofantares]

> Today, LLMs make development faster, not better.

You don't have to use them this way. It's just extremely tempting and addictive.

You can choose to talk to them about code rather than features, using them to develop better code at a normal speed instead of worse code faster. But that's hard work.

[SpicyLemonZest]

Perhaps I'm doing something wrong, but I can't use them that way, hard work or no. It feels like trying to pair program with a half-distracted junior developer.

[player1234]

Why debate anything when everything, everywhere, all the time is actually super great, you are just holding it wrong.

[bpt3]

What's the point of that? A skilled developer can already develop high quality code at a normal speed?

I will use AI for suggestions when using an API I'm not familiar with because it's faster than reading all the documentation to figure it the specific function call I need, but I then follow up on the example to verify it's correct and I can confidently read the code. Is that what you're taking about?

A vibe coder without 20+ years of experience can't do that, but they can publish an app or website just the same.

[philipp-gayret]

What metric would you measure to determine whether a fully AI-based flow is better than a competent human engineer? And how much would you like to bet?

[bpt3]

In this context, fewer security vulnerabilities exist in a real world vibe coded application (not a demo or some sort of toy app) than one created by a subject matter expert without LLM agents.

I'd be willing to bet 6 figures that doesn't happen in the next 2 years.

[anonzzzies]

The current models cannot be made to become better than humans who are good at their job. Many are not good at their job though and I think (see) we already crossed that. Certain outsourcing countries could have (not yet, but will have) millions of people without jobs as they won't be able to steer the LLMs to making anything usable as they never understood anything to begin with.

For people here on HN I agree with you; not in the next 2 years or, if no-one invents another model than the transformer based model, not for any length of time until that happens.

[bpt3]

Agreed. I think the parent poster meant it differently, but I think self driving cars are an excellent analogy.

They've been "on the cusp" of widespread adoption for around 10 years now, but in reality they appear to have hit a local optimum and another major advance is needed in fundamental research to move them towards mainstream usage.

[rpicard]

No clue, and $1.