| ▲ | thunky a day ago | |
> If we can really vibe something production-ready in no time, why aren't industry-standard tools being replaced by custom vibe clones? That's a silly argument. Someone could have made all of those clones before, but didn't. Why didn't they? Hint: it's not because it would have taken them longer without AI. I feel like these anti-AI arguments are intentially being unrealistic. Just because I can use Nano Banana to create art does not mean I'm going to be the next Monet. | ||
| ▲ | bccdee a day ago | parent [-] | |
> Why didn't they? Hint: it's not because it would have taken them longer without AI. Yes it is. "How much will this cost us to build" is a key component of the build-vs-buy decision. If you build it yourself, you get something tailored to your needs; however, it also costs money to make & maintain. If the cost of making & maintaining software went down, we'd see people choosing more frequently to build rather than buy. Are we seeing this? If not, then the price of producing reliable, production-ready software likely has not significantly diminished. I see a lot of posts saying, "I vibe-coded this toy prototype in one week! Software is a commodity now," but I don't see any engineers saying, "here's how we vibe-coded this piece of production-quality software in one month, when it would have taken us a year to build it before." It seems to me like the only software whose production has been significantly accelerated is toy prototypes. I assume it's a consequence of Amdahl's law: > the overall performance improvement gained by optimizing a single part of a system is limited by the fraction of time that the improved part is actually used. Toy prototypes proportionally contains a much higher amount of the type of rote greenfield scaffolding that agents are good at writing. The sticker problems of brownfield growth and robustification are absent. | ||