Why do I read about all the vibe coders claiming to be 20X engineers in LLM threads and replacing many departments. Yet here is not a fking single commercially successful thing here?
Funny also how Loveable and the like are hiring engineers like crazy, yet think engineers are not needed anymore. Why not just vibecode Loveable itself? Oh wait I can tell you why.
ive seen people using lovable in the wild now, and theyve made things that they are using themselves, and are working on something like a 5-10M CAD/y business serving the oil industry.
I didnt join them because I dont really want to do all the work that comes with owning a business like the accounting. mostly the accounting. i also dont particularly want to be maintaining an extra couple of systems at present. there mught be vibe coding currently, but not vibe operations
they should have the thing up by june at their very slow rate of building with lovable, but theyre not people who would ever frequent HN.
Put "I don't have any experience in software engineering but can vibe code very well" on your resume and see if you get any interest from OpenAI or Anthropic or any one in the long list of companies that have declared software engineering dead and LLMs the future of coding.
It's telling that they will put their own applicants through a dozen rounds of stringent technical interviews, Leetcode exercises, use anti-AI assistance tools and pay their staff $500K or more, all for something they advertise as being easy to vibe code away.
You could probably find a good answer anywhere, but the solution is in a more nuanced view.
Some types of programming benefit more from AI tooling than others. For example, prototyping seems to be the most fruitful area. Also, writing small utilities is much easier, to the extent that a two hour job would now take only a few minutes. That's where you get the multiplier posts from.
But working in a large codebase using proprietary libraries is not a solved problem for AI (yet).
It's just that the average engineer does not spend all of their time on things that can be sped up.
Speeding up 1% of your time by a factor 20 simply does not help very much. But for some roles, I'm sure that a 10% net increase in productivity is realistic.