I'm going to take this a step further. Software development is not engineering.
Software development is more like being a construction worker that uses engineered materials. The engineers, on the other hand, develop the structural components (steel beams, the actual dry wall), an architect designs the whole system, and a contractor manages it.
With vibe coding, you make yourself the contractor and turn agent into the other roles. You can choose to build a building without an architect (you or the agent) and without using engineered components (a proper database for example), which will likely lead to leaks or a full on collapse.
Frankly, this is no different to the franksystems build in midieval times.
By "franksystems" do you mean those cathedrals which will outlast most buildings we're putting up today? We could go even farther back in history: how about the Pantheon, still the largest unreinforced concrete dome ever made?
You have the causality inverted. People want big tech on their resume because it makes them look qualified. People with top qualifications work at big tech because of pay. If low quality engineers worked in big tech, it wouldn't be a coveted qualification.
The causality of what? I'm probably missing something obvious here. The cause of people getting paid less in game development I said has to do with margins (although I now think there is more to it than that).
> People want big tech on their resume because it makes them look qualified.
I think I said that?
> People with top qualifications work at big tech because of pay.
Actually I am not sure if that is true. I think top qualification people work at these places because of other reasons than just money. I'm talking Carmack working at Facebook for example is because of more possibilities and less the pay. Like FB is we have this really smart team for you and this tech for you and you can make your own products etc.
After all there is academia and that mostly pays shit and plenty of qualified people there.
> If low quality engineers worked in big tech, it wouldn't be a coveted qualification.
And I think that is probably happening more now. The 10x developer was kind of a myth. More people for less money these days particularly with AI is becoming more of the norm.
Carmack level folks are the exception. the vast majority of faang interest is money. In fact if youve been in dev long enough, youd see even the makeup of the tyipical eng has changed, there are quite a few normies in the field these days, many of whom im not sure even like coding at all. Its seen as a reliably high paying field worth steering towards regardless of interest. It has lately reminded me of the kinds of people id see in medicine. smart, capable, not particularly interested in the field as such.
I encourage you to crack open a dependency tree for any project and ask: how many of these do I understand? Then open one and ask: do you really understand whats happening? How much of the code there do you even use?
The experience will feel uncannily similar to AI generated code. So treat slop the same way. Give it a good, well tested API, and file an issue or PR when something breaks.
"Frontend's Lost Decade" has nothing to do with a11y or semantic HTML. The original talk argues performance went to hell because of React and friends, which is why we have electron CRUD apps that consume 2GB+ RAM.
The bit that goes unsaid about Electron is... why?
If the goal is a legitimate app that has the lifecycle of an app that you start up and then shut down today the answer is "just write a web application" and then it "just works" on Windows, MacOS, Linux, iOS, Android, Meta Quest, etc.
Mostly people get pissed about Electron because they have 15 Electron apps running in the tray burning up resources all the time and popping up stuff that covers the tray and other tray applications in those (very rare) cases that you want to interact with something in the tray.
It's a tray problem, not an Electron problem. That is, people use Electron specifically because they want to made rude applications which march all over your desktop in muddy boots: Electron is not a framework for writing well-behaved, polite, x-platform applications; you don't need that, you have the web! Electron is a framework for making rude applications that inhabit your tray, pop-up distracting notifications, etc.
The resource burn is an Electron problem. I member using HTML as "Active Desktop" in the Windows 98 era. You could drag an Internet Explorer widget into VB6 applications if you wanted (OLE, COM and ActiveX, damn that was an era of powerful technologies!). But it was one shared runtime across the OS which meant it did not have anywhere near close to the performance impact that even one Electron app has today.
People think they are upset about new technology, but what they are actually upset about is the general consensus being that the new technology has a better value prop.
And the irony is that the author of that talk spent that same decade busy shoving as much Javascript into browsers as possible. After all he's the originator and the main promoter of web components where every single thing including built-in browser functionality like form participation has to be done in Javascript.
Edit: There's not just one lost decade of the web. There's the browser wars and IE stagnant dominance. There's the 2010s with millions of man hours spent on web components and starving other directions of resources or actively hindering them (e.g. scoped css was continuously postoponed because it's highly incompatible with Shadow DOM) while pushing everything into Javascript (and partly breaking JS e.g. with the bolted-on class-based OOP).
It remains to see if Google's complete dominance breaks the web further
I don't think its entirely class. I've met many people who have convinced themselves they have some special sauce--even in software! And even those who are insulated like doctors and plumbers don't realize they're still at risk from second order effects. What happens when half of their customers are broke? That possibility is not an exaggeration. Even if everyone re-skills over night, people will default on their mortgages at a scale greater than the '08 financial crisis.
And that's just one devastating outcome. There will be far more, and for some reason, no one is talking about them.
Even if you are a plumber and we don’t automate plumbing, you’ll have half the population displaced and switching to plumbing. Everything that isn’t automated will be over saturated.
I don't think the reason that most people don't DIY plumbing is a lack of accessible information. Any physical craft like that requires practice, so I think there's a real moat there.
There is a lot less information online about the physical trades compared to software development. Plumbers don’t post on ToiletOverflow.com all day helping each other with their little tricks and sharing tribal knowledge. Pick a random brass fitting at the hardware store and try to google its purpose; you’d be surprised by the scant detail even when yielding plenty of shopping links
Where I live, just the call out fee for a plumber would cover the cost of tools and materials with enough left over for beers afterwards. If you’re relatively handy and willing to thing things through, the main obstacle to doing all your own plumbing (again, at least where I live) is regulatory capture.
When we continue this line of thought far enough, we get to ask who's going to pay for the hardware and the electricity to run the AI that's taking all the jobs.
This is exactly the missing long-term perspective. All AI creators are focused either on the projected wins or the shiny technology, ignoring societal effects. Not that they should, they are engineers or MBAs after all, but somebody should. Somebody like us, or better somebody with better reach and better knowledge, should figure out a way to offer a future also to former clerks.
These days I find Gemini often recommends me a youtube video that's just an AI voice reading out a reddit post that was chat gpt generated full of emoji.
Will so many people switch to plumbing though ? Really depends on how old you are when you get canned (I don't think its realistic for most 40 year olds to start a plumbing career), how good you are with your hands and physical things and whether you can survive the switch psychologically; I don't see many investment bankers or software devs survive such a switch.
I'm 42, even if I was very good with my hands (which I'm not) I don't think it would have been a realistic transition; by realistic I mean survivable psychologically.
So people will not all switch to plumbing, indeed. But then to what? There's only so much need for tattoo artists and geriatric care - which your customers must also afford to pay.
Perhaps the feeling is that in a competitive society (which most of us live in) as long as things aren't collapsing I don't see why a plumber/doctor should care if a bunch of lawyers and software devs will be out of a job. They will become relatively wealthier even if their income is taking a hit. Their purchasing power should rise if most of white collar work is collapsing.
They would become wealthier in a real sense, since the services that used to be provided by the scarce labor of lawyers and software devs would now be far cheaper. In fact due to Jevons' paradox, even lawyers and software devs would enjoy far higher living standards due to AI. The boost in efficiency just creates a spike in demand for the remaining human component of the job, no matter how tiny.
How would cheaper software development or lawyers massively raise standard of living for other people? Most people that need their standard of living improved don't even own computers, they generally don't have access to the capital needed to start a businesses, and they have no use for a lawyer outside of criminal matters.
That kind of thinking might work if 1, or 5, or 10% lose their income. If 50% do, there's revolution. And that's not great for anyone, including plumbers and doctors.
We will never see 50% of people lose their income, they'll just gradually transition into newer AI-powered roles. Their income will grow rather than shrink. The people who are at risk of losing their income will be those who reject working with AI entirely, but that's because they will be gradually made uncompetitive.
What are these newer AI-powered roles? Let's get to the specifics, please. I'm open to transition, or learn new, give me please a few starting points. I know AI and agents and skills.md already, so let's skip the basics, indicate me a few new jobs I could take.
The specifics is that AI just isn't good enough and there's a huge amount of viable human white-collar work. We're just speculating about what might happen in a future where AI gets good enough to perform most current white-collar jobs.
Yes, widespread automation of knowledge work is unlikely to decrease total production, so all the goods and services people currently demand will still be provided, but the power dynamic of who is consuming and who is providing might flip around. So a bunch of formerly upwardly-mobile people could end up at the bottom of the social hierarchy while others whom they used to look down upon will be able to afford servants for the first time in their lives.
I see little evidence that any social role reversal is going to occur. This technology is soon going to price out average to poor people when they have to pay true token costs. It might be the case that only the rich and powerful have access to the powerful models.
Poor people with hard-to-automate occupations don't necessarily need to be able to afford token costs for social role reversal to occur. They only need to be able to hire an even poorer person who used to earn a salary that exceeded even those token costs and who was laid off as a result.
After going without food for a few days, even a software dev is going to have to swallow their pride and consider alternative employment options. You might think they could just take a poor person's existing job, but why would for example a meatpacking plant hire a software dev with zero meatpacking experience when they already have lots of experienced meatpackers and meat demand hasn't gone up? Meanwhile, the meatpackers might like it if they could have someone babysit their children, cook for them and clean their now much larger house (which used to belong to a software dev who fell on hard times and had to move out). And a steady supply of desolate characters holding up cardboard signs saying "I used to be a software dev, but now I would do literally anything for a meal" could put such luxury into their affordable range.
Agree on the knock-on effects. My prediction is deflation. Money will be worth more and more. As a consequence governments will have to step in to ensure inflation(with e.g. universal income), otherwise the economy stops.
But honestly I'm not sure this will be enough for people to spend on e.g. restaurants or activities or oh I don't know, children. I think this will imply a freezing or even stepping back on the Maslow pyramid, the majority of people consolidating in the middle.
What I'm mostly concerned about is not even economic, it's psychological. With nothing to do, people will not have purpose, and bored people are a gunpowder keg.
> What I'm mostly concerned about is not even economic, it's psychological. With nothing to do, people will not have purpose, and bored people are a gunpowder keg.
I'm not so sure about this one. The powerful in a society like the one you describe would surely know about that potential powderkeg and supply ample cheap entertainment to dull the edge. Then we'll have a society of mostly dull, idle, useless people with no purpose.
That's even more dystopian than your scenario, if you ask me.
Yeah that also sounds realistic, and actually there's evidence of this dulling effect from even before llms. The attention economy has been literally streamlining.. well, the road to death. And nobody is angry.
I can spin this in a weirdly positive light though. With fertility rates going down, life becoming less and less meaningful and simultaneously a small and decreasing group of people becoming extremely productive.. maybe humanity will finally stop exploiting the planet and start a sort of transition.
AI enhanced increased lifespan forest elves watching over nature. Mm I'd prefer that over soma. We are the heralds of The Great Ones
On the flip side, people think AI is magic: too much magic.
Even with large advances in reasoning and actionability, it still makes insane mistakes and it's wildly prone to prompt attacks. That is a fundamental flaw in the technology.
Even an AGI will lack the millennia of self-preservation evolution that will cause it to do crazy shit. So much of what humans do is governed by a desire to be alive and to be liked.
So, I'm not particularly worried about these changes happening rapid fire. I'm more concerned about the ladder pulling effect and misinformation.
So I am expecting the AI bubble to burst (or at least deflate) some time soon. Perhaps this puts me I an specific camp, I am not sure. But this whole "AI will replace X jobs" does not phase me, not because I think AI is useless. On the contrary I am a daily user, but in my mind, people fail to see that the economy is not built around jobs and capital, but wants (or needs) and trades. Even in a world where everything can be done better by a machine than a human, there will always be the "want" for an item that is handcrafted. AI is yet another tool that accelerates us to satisfy more "wants" and that's great. I'm looking at a whole lot of things that will be available in the future (especially software but not limited to) which are not available today, AI generated or not.
> The internet was made for humans exclusively, designed to keep machines out by default.
The internet is also not made for humans. For years I've wanted something like this for e2e testing or personal scripts (cron etc) and your UX is by far the simplest.
I love AgentMail. It's made email dead simple for agents and testing any paths for email. I even have a /agent-mail skill I use for when I want a design doc or artifact emailed to me.
That said, agent self sign up seems like a novelty. Setting up account programmatically via curl is however useful. I imagine most customers -- especially those willing to pay for your paid tier -- would provision accounts ahead of time or reuse them.
Free for all account creation could be an option but it will attract spammers and their ilk. Your reputation may end up in the toilet which would also break agent mail for me.
> AI isn’t coming for builders or sellers, but it is coming for measurers. Tireless, independent, efficient and available, AI systems can now measure an organization with a level of objective detail and precision that was previously impossible even for the best employees.
Honestly not the apocalyptic scenario I had on my bingo card.
The really, really funny part about this is that he's laying off his regulatory required employees (internal audit). Having worked on building AI systems for this group, the idea that it can be replaced with AI is pretty ludicrous.
Like, firstly this is a requirement from a bunch of regulators, and the whole point of IA is to ensure that your systems are actually doing what they're supposed to. AI definitely helps (massively), but the hallucination rate and over-confidence stop this from being a full replacement.
That being said, I do agree that there are two many measurers in lots of big companies, it's just that I wouldn't have included internal audit in my list of people to go.
Should be an interesting couple of years, if lots of other tech CEOs follow this example.
Software development is more like being a construction worker that uses engineered materials. The engineers, on the other hand, develop the structural components (steel beams, the actual dry wall), an architect designs the whole system, and a contractor manages it.
With vibe coding, you make yourself the contractor and turn agent into the other roles. You can choose to build a building without an architect (you or the agent) and without using engineered components (a proper database for example), which will likely lead to leaks or a full on collapse.
Frankly, this is no different to the franksystems build in midieval times.
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