[zwnow]

Exactly, the actual business value is way smaller people think and its honestly frustrating. Yes they can write boilerplate, yes they sometimes do better than humans in well understood areas. But its negligible considering all the huge issues that come with them. Big tech vendorlocks, data poisoning, unverifiable information, death of authenticity, death of creativity, ignorance of LLM evangelists, power hungriness in a time where humanity should look at how to decrease emissions, theft of original human work, theft of data big tech gets away with since way too long. Its puzzling to me how people actually think this is a net benefit to humanity.

[Huppie]

The best I can tell you (from working with LLM's) is that... it's complicated.

There are moments where spending 10 min on a good prompt saves me 2hrs of typing and it finishes that in the time it takes me to go make myself a cup of coffee (~10 min) Those are the good moments.

Then there are moments where it's more like 30 min savings for 10 min of prompting. Those are still pretty good.

Then there are plenty of moments where spending 10 mins on a prompt saves me about 15mins of work. But I have to wait 5 mins for the result, so it ends up being a wash except it has a downside that I didn't really write it myself so the actual details of the solution aren't fully internalized.

There's also plenty of moments where the result at first glance looks like a good / great result but once I start reviewing and fixing things it still ends up being a wash.

I find it actually quite difficult to determine the result quality because at first glance it always looks pretty decent, and then sometimes once you start reviewing it's indeed the case and other times I'm like "well it needs some tweaking" and subsequently spend an hour tweaking.

Now I think the problem is that the response is akin to gambling / conditioning in a sense. Every prompt has a smallish chance to trigger a great result, and since the average result is still about 25% faster (my gut feeling based on what I've 'written' the last few months working with Claude Code) it's just very tempting to pull that slot machine lever even in tasks that I know I will most likely type faster than I can prompt.

I did find a place where (to me, at least) it almost certainly adds value: I find it difficult to think about code during meetings (I really need my attention in the meetings I do) but I can send a few quick prompts for small stuff during meetings and don't really have to context switch. This alone is a decent productivity booster. Refactorings that would've been a 'maybe, one day' can now just be triggered. Best case I spend 10 minutes reviewing and accept it. Worst case I just throw it away.

[Zababa]

Most of the issues you listed are moral and not technical. Especially "power hungriness in a time where humanity should look at how to decrease emissions", this may be what you think humanity should do but that is just that, what you think.

I derive a lot of business value from them, many of my colleagues do too. Many programmers that were good at writing code by hand are having lots of success with them, for example Thorsten Ball, Simon Willison, Mitchell Hashimoto. A recent example from Mitchell Hashimoto: https://mitchellh.com/writing/non-trivial-vibing.

>Its puzzling to me how people actually think this is a net benefit to humanity.

I've used them personally to quickly spin up a microblog where I could post my travel pictures and thoughts. The idea of making the interface like twitter (since that's what I use and know) was from me, not wanting to expose my family and friends to any specific predatory platform like twitter, instagram, etc was also from me, supabase as the backend was from a colleague (helped a lot!), the code was all Claude. The result is that they were able to enjoy my website, including my grandparents that just had to paste an URL on the website. I like to think of it a a perhaps very small but net benefit for a very small part of humanity.

[danaris]

Is it a moral judgement to say that when the stove is on fire, we shouldn't be pouring more grease on it?

Is it a moral judgement to say that you shouldn't pick up a bear cub with its mother nearby?

If neither of these are moral judgements, then why would it be a moral judgement to say that humanity should be seeking to reduce its emissions? Just because you personally don't like it, and want to keep doing whatever you like?

[Zababa]

Pouring grease on a fire will make it worse. Picking up a bear cub when the mother is nearby will increase (by how much I don't know) the risks of getting attacked by a bear. Both of those sentences to me sound like genuine description of the reality we live in. Climate change is real and caused by human emissions is another one of those, though a bit less precise as "climate change" is less precise. Saying we should or shouldn't do something is something different.

Also, you can increase power capacity by a lot while reducing emissions, with stuff like solar panels or nuclear power.

[zwnow]

So moral issues are not relevant? Typical tech enthusiast mindset unfortunately...

[hitarpetar]

if climate change doesn't matter why the hell should anyone care about your vibe coded personal twitter clone?

[theshrike79]

What if I'm vibe engineering a solution to global warming? Does it cancel itself out?

[hitarpetar]

no

[hansmayer]

> I've used them personally to quickly spin up a microblog where I could post my travel pictures and thoughts.

Sorry but this a perfect example of the typical demographic that currently boosts the usage of these non-tools: trivial, almost unnecessary use-cases, of service to no-one but self (maybe friends and family too). You could have also spun up a simple microblog on one of the many blogging platforms, with trivial UI complexity, low costs and much smaller environmental impact.