I have tons of acquaintances like that.
They vibe-code and think they've gained an advantage over those who don't know how to vibe-code
But there's nothing to know — take a 3-hour course, pay 200$ a day for Claude, and there you are, a vibe-coder.
It's just that most skilled developers find it disgusting, because the AI spits out code that doesn't work the way it should, and it all turns into the routine of "threw in a prompt, waited, reviewed, repeated." — only those who were crappy programmers are happy about this.
Always have a good chuckle at these doomerism bullshit posts. Our VPs are so busy it is impossible to find a meeting time, but suddenly they’ll develop ADHD and start vibe coding enough to replace 100 devs. Lol!
It's because everyone is talking about how the bubble will burst! When people talk about it a lot, they tend to believe it.
Everyone just needed to give their computers to Sam so that no one could talk about the bubble, and then everything would be fine.
Divide the amount of revenue from the big AI companies by the total number of developers worldwide and you'll see that most are still mostly hand-coding despite what the megaphones on the internet say.
The overwhelming majority AI spend is being done by startups funded by venture capital.
Meanwhile, big companies have massively cut/capped AI spending at the exact time these companies need to triple prices to get any margins at all.
Perhaps dead internet theory applies more than normal to programming forums.
Seriously, we’re in a bubble here and everything thinks everything is touched by ai now. That’s not true at all, people need to look outside of HN and Twitter. Lots of devs are refusing to use them. Quite a number of companies are happily chugging away by hand.
It's a mixed bag. The company I work for (nearly $6 billion anual revenue, southern EU) only started giving out the lowest tier of Github Copilot licenses this summer, and only widely at the business units they're desperate to see grow (I got lucky there due to wearing multiple hats). Everyone else keeps coding manually, although the nerdiest of us catch up with Codex/Claude/whatever on our own time, same as it ever was.
Meanwhile, a friend at a consulting company of similar scale tells me they don't hire anyone who shows a lack of experience with "agentic engineering" during the interview. They're turning all their projects into software factories from issue ticket to deployment. He's much more resourceful and experienced than me so I trust he isn't automating himself out of his own job, but I'm much more gloomy about this transition.
I agree in principle, but I don't feel in a position to bargain: I'm a junior dev earning below my region's average salary (for all industries, not just tech), far below other engineers my age because reasons, and my education is now becoming obsolete for industry. I'll let others take the high ground, I just want to stay employable and not lock myself out of a decent salary.
You didn’t say that this was part of your job. You said “on [your] own time”. Or are things so terrible that what you do on your free time is forced on you, meaning that that free time is not your free time?
You must have a really good cushion, I envy you. For me, yes, my circumstances forced me to spend way too much time and effort to catch up to a reasonable economic situation, including too much allegedly free time during my 20s. I don't expect this hardship to look any different.
If I now fail to secure a career less than two years into it, and all that effort goes to waste I might as well admit defeat at the game of life and forfeit.
$16B revenue in first half means $32B for the whole year at that ARR. Divided into 47.2M devs gives us $677/yr per dev assuming that ZERO non-devs ever pay for Anthropic. Add in all the OpenAI and Chinese spend and spread them among developers only and the average is still only around $1k/yr/dev.
Top 1% of AI users spend $9,567.53/mo or $114810.36/yr while median spends $15.70 or $188.40/yr. 80% of the top 1% of AI users are backed by venture capital.
Anthropic + OpenAI seem to have in the area of 70-100M users.
Only problem is that 1e6*114,810.36 ~= $114.8B which exceeds stated income of OpenAI, Anthropic, and all the Chinese firms combined.
When you crunch those top 1% guys, you get a number more like just 250-500k or so accounting for almost all current AI spend which leaves 46.5-47M devs using very little AI. You can adjust these numbers by massive margins (around an order of magnitude) and still see that the math doesn't work out like you seem to think.
When all that venture capital/private equity gets crunched, those companies won't be able to afford to keep blowing a hundred thousand per dev. When they back off, AI sales will drop further lowering available venture capital risking a massive downward spiral.
At least in my organization we simply use the cheapest models. It's possible for a developer to do most of their coding with something like GPT6-Luna for less than 100$ a month with current prices.
I don't know anyone dev spending even 500$ a month on AI, but nearly everyone does use it to write code. And I work a broke public sector organization, not some fancy startup or big tech.
I highly doubt that most code by hand. I work for a big, boring public sector organization that is pretty broke, and even we've had Copilot licenses for a long time. We just use the cheapest models to keep the bill in check.
The problem with unconditional basic income and unlimited free time is that a person encounters an oppressive sense of meaninglessness and boredom in their heart, because of which they go to a psychiatrist for antidepressants.
If an LLM finds a bug, is that almost the same as an LLM writing code for you? You can write lazy code as a sketch, for example without thinking about nested loops in your head, and then just use an LLM that will fix this loop in the bug report?
This can be viewed as a level of AI usage: 10% (for example), where vibe coding is 100%.
I think any percentage of usage affects your personal mental sharpness. We know that if something gained somewhere, something lost somewhere. The only question is where the "loss" is, and how it will affect everything and everyone.
> We know that if something gained somewhere, something lost somewhere.
Yeah, but that doesn't imply equivalent exchange.
If you care about being the best sprinter in the world, yeah, put in the time and effort! But if you just want to get to work, there's no way you can beat the speed of a car.
If you're one of the better bug-hunters in the world, you probably lose something by using an LLM. For the rest of us, it's increasingly like trying to race a car.
We definitely need both types - it's important having the humans who do have that top 1% understanding. But increasingly, for everyone else, LLMs outperform doing it by hand.
I suppose that's the split between "writing code" the action and "writing code" the overall development process. I do agree there is some nuance in thoughts here often lost by the term getting overloaded.
> We know that if something gained somewhere, something lost somewhere.
I suppose now it is possible to install a mirror in space, creating shade over countries that receive energy from the sun, and charge a commission for the use of the sun.
The complexity of C++ lies only in template programming, and it doesn't add any efficiency to the final program—on the contrary, it makes the program harder for other programmers to read.
Technically, you're only learning to mentally unfold multi-level nested templates just to verify how they work, and all for the sake of making the program look small with less boilerplate?
This is complete nonsense. For me, C++ died with the 11 standard.
"and whatever you didn't tell it to do will happen with equal probability"
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