The future is perpetually dealing with the fallout from all the vibe coding as the pool of people who'd have a shot at fixing it gets smaller and smaller. Shitty will be the new normal.

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freetanga 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I feel like it will be like going back to the 80s, when PCs became a norm and most programmers and hobbyists could code without the need of a University or a Corporation. Thousands of shareware apps you had to navigate, everyone trying to solve the same problems from different angles..

I do agree quality will be missed, and shadow IT will be again a big issue like at the end of the 80s and early 90s.

	▲	pjmlp 20 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Coding on 8 and 16 bit home computers still required some skills that most vibe coders certainly lack.
	▲	xienze 33 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> most programmers and hobbyists could code without the need of a University or a Corporation. I don't think so. Back then, the pool of people doing such a thing basically self-selected for intelligent, motivated types who were capable of learning on their own. The new "programmers" "programming" via Claude Code are going to be very different from those hobbyists you're talking about.

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ElFitz 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Shitty will be the new normal.

I’ve heard the same from the best devs, and some who thought themselves to be the best, I’ve known long before LLMs were ever a thing.

I’m sure others heard the same when JavaScript and Python became near ubiquitous. When PHP emerged. When C supplanted Fortran and COBOL. When these two took over from Assembly. When punch cards went the way of the dodo.

There’s always someone for whom shitty is becoming the new normal. If that makes it a rule, what do we make of that rule?

	▲	StilesCrisis 9 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> I’m sure others heard the same when JavaScript and Python became near ubiquitous. When PHP emerged. You heard right! Most JavaScript and PHP in the world _is_ profoundly shitty. It's taken 20 years of intense research to make JavaScript compilers that are almost good enough to mostly optimize away the design foibles of the language.
	▲	microtonal 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		There are different magnitudes of shitty. Also we went from compilers with an IDE that had a debugger, profiler, built-in help and would fit on a 3.5" disk and would load on machines with 640KiB RAM (Turbo Pascal) to chat apps or password managers that are hundreds of megabytes and regularly gobble up more than a gigabyte of memory because they ship with their own browser. Something is lost along the way.
	▲	sersi 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		To be fair with how powerful our computers are, it's a pity that electron apps like bitwarden, spotify are so slow and consume so much resources. I do miss the time when a lot of apps were snappy
	▲	freetanga 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Maybe it’s a process. Many of the transitions you mentioned did bring shitty apps (not all of them, the ones replacing tech for tech were mostly ok, the ones democratizing dev did come with a quality drop), but eventually Darwinism will take effect and trim the long tail. Coding per se is not hard. Proper engineering is. I do hope this change brings a change in focus (people train in algorithms, efficiency, solid development patterns) but I am afraid it won’t be the case.
	▲	Saline9515 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		"With a punchcard at least, I can verify what the input is! Unlike those new 'transistors' that are so unreliable!"