And? How valuable are individual lines of code? To the author's point, I'm sure AI can translate individual sentences perfectly, but miss the nuance of communication in a bigger project or body of text. In the same vein, when was the last time someone put an AI on a ralph loop, posted the result on r/vibecoding and ended up with actual users.
A simple browser tower defense to enjoy during your lunch break. Written in Kotlin, TeaVM has made it possible to run surprisingly complex Java games, didn't expect it!
Building is not any less important now, AI just highlights this fact. The software I work on is the difference between people getting paid or not, which those people consider very important - I use AI to do that by letting it improve the quality of the software, with less bugs, more performance etc.
The 10000th social media spammming SaaS being built in public is no less important now than it was before AI - we can just see how irrelevant it is now that it can also be built faster, by virtually anybody.
Personal story time: for me it was falling for the indie hacker stuff near covid and realizing the same stuff.
The best solo business is to pretend you are successful i.e. "I'm sitting on the beach sipping my drink while Claude is coding my app that's raking in 20k MRR, just use my {SEO|Social Media|Referral} tool and that will be you!". Hope to get enough people suckered in to become a "voice in the bootstrapper community" i.e. your posts filled with generic tropes get shared around X. But ultimately the product is the (fake) lifestyle. Most of the products in that eco system are not used by anyone in the productive economy, it's a pyramid ponzi of users believing they are getting valuable advice.
That said, I do still build stuff "Solo", because I enjoy the process of making and I can take the time time to meet my own quality standards (classic trope in that community even before AI was "you just gotta build you MVP in 3 days, ship quickly!" and it ends up causing you to churn out soulless software that obviously nobody will use unless they are your bootstrapping internet buddy).
Lot of people I know from those days are still trying to make it and wasted a lot of time/money! Not all bad for me personally though - I learned a lot about entrepeneurship, spotting fakes, etc. and was much more naive and younger then.
Aaaannnnd they're out of business and it was because of slowing demand and tightening credit the whole time.
Here in Europe this is not a thing, I've been hearing about such cases mostly from the US where it's clear that there is a recession going - I don't know why this is not blatantly obvious to everyone who does not view reality as whatever is said by the talking heads on TV.
By making them walk into the landmines and forcing them to fix it - that is how everyone became a good programmer. It's just the scope that has changed.
Yeap, and people are still forcing juniors to make small code changes when they should be learning by creating entire apps on their own, deploying them, etc. WITH a senior giving them feedback occasionally. I think people are going to take a while to catch on though, for better or worse....
This is 100% an issue on the side of the senior developers. Imagine saying "these juniors are useless" because you are making them work in assembly, but C has just been released. You are giving them menial work that is no longer required to do by humans. Instead of giving them the task "update these email templates", the norm should be: "create this new service that automates an internal process". They will make mistakes and they will learn - but what they will be doing is going to be very useful and also give them chance to grow the necessary skills for this new era, with the supervision of a senior.
> For example, to add pagination to this website, I would read the Jekyll docs, find the right plugin to install, read the sample config, and make the change. Possibly this wouldn’t work, in which case I would Google it, read more, try more stuff, retest, etc. In this process it was hard not to learn things.
How is this any different than building Ikea furniture? If I build my "Minska" cupboard using the step-by-step manual, did I learn something profound?
Notice how I said "coding", not "programming". Coding to me is "should I do an early return or use an if/else? Should I extract that variable into a function to make it cleaner?". It's about focusing on the trivialities that come with insisting on meticulously hand typing and reviewing every line instead of focusing on software quality, design and user needs.
I can't relate to this anymore and honestly after embracing vibe coding, I'm sick of reading posts like this (and I don't want to personally attack the write who I sympathize with to some degree). Being able to code doesn't make you better than the "plebs" who are creating massive value with a vibe coded tool. I also remember the brief moment of disbelief when I noticed AI could really code better than me, until I realized that the amount of problems and projects I could solve now basically exploded, while the stuff I was previously forced to deal with is now a waste of time - on to better things, as was always the case in human history.
A programmer is someone telling machines what to do - we will be doing more of that than ever in human history. That said, "coders" not so much - maybe its better to identify as a "person trying to help and care for others" than a profession, since the former will always have a place in society.
Great contrarian indicator for when people say that vibe coding is not "real development work" or economically viable/a job in the future - here is someone asking if another person can vibe code something for them that is single file of swift, the prompt could be as simple as "convert this to linux".
I am working on a game side project where I started to force myself not to look at the code (the foundation was written by hand). I just recently launched a big update, all written with agentic code. I really enjoy it and do believe it's the future...plug for reference: https://thefakeborzi.itch.io/tower-chess/devlog/1321604/the-...