I see some similarities to 3D printing here. It’s great that everyone can make their own toothbrush holder (or whatever) but I’m probably not going to pay for someone’s weekend project.

I’m “seeing” more devs stepping into the SendCutSend stage where they’re cleaning up/fixing/productizing vibe coded projects so maybe there will be some new demand in that space?

3D printing is a good comparison - it allows almost anyone to make things, but in the end very few do.

Another example is when the WWW first became available, and suddenly everyone COULD be a publisher (browsers even included built-in HTML editors), and for a while MySpace pages proliferated until the excitement died down and people went back to being media consumers.

I expect we'll see the same thing with consumer use of generative AI. Suddendly everyone is generating 3-D worlds/games with Fable because they can, but I expect that just as with the web the novelty will wear off and they'll leave it up to the pros.

Professional use of GenAI, and coding in particular, is certainly here to stay, but it seems we're still in the early experimental/hype phase. At least tokenmaxxing has passed, and it seems most companies are now paying attention to, and limiting, how much they are spending, but it doesn't seem we've yet progressed to the stage where companies are paying attention to what they are actually getting out of it - is the money spent showing up on the bottom line in the form of increased revenues.

A comparison I find useful here is Excel (and spreadsheets in general). Those enabled huge numbers of non-programmers to build software-like things, while the demand for expert developers grew enormously at the same time.

I'm hoping vibe-coding plays out the same way.

It’s terrible and depressing work to take vibe coded garbage and make it a real product. There will be demand, but good engineers won’t want to touch it. And people paying will think they did the hard work so why pay a good rate?