This is good and bad. Non-technical users throwing up a prototype quickly is good. Non-technical users pushing that prototype into production with its security holes and non-obvious bugs is bad. It's easy for non-technical users to get a false sense of confidence if the thing they make looks good. This has been true since the RAD days of Delphi and VisualBasic.
I think there's going to be the same problems as there are fixing bad body shop code. The companies that pushed their "vibe code" for a few dollars worth of AI tokens will expect people to work for pennies and/or have unreasonable time demands. There's also no ability to interview the original authors to figure out what they were thinking.
Meanwhile their customers are getting screwed over with data leaks if not outright hacks (depending on the app).
It's not a whole new issue, shitty contractors have existed for decades, but AI is pushing down the value of actual expertise.
Genuinely, it's a lot better.
For nearly 50 years now, software causes disruption, demand drives labor costs, enterprise responds with some silver bullet, haircuts in expensive suits collect bonuses, their masters pocket capital gains, and the chicken come home to roost with a cycle of disruption and labor cost increases. LLMs are being sold as disruption but it's actually another generation of enterprise tech. Hence the confusion. Vibe coding is just PR. Karpathy knows what he's doing.
Even us entrepreneurially minded technical devs cut corners on our personal projects that we just want to through a Stripe integration or Solana Wallet connect on
And large companies with FTC and DOJ involved data breaches just wind up offering credits to users as compensation
so for non-technical creators to get into the mix, this just expands how many projects there are that get big enough to need dedicated UX and engineers
I beg to differ. Non-technical users pushing anything into production is GREAT!
For many, that's the only way they can get their internal tool done.
For many others, that's the only way they might get enough buyers and capital to hire a "real" developer to get rid of the security holes and non-obvious bugs.
I mean, it's not like every "senior developer" is immune from having obvious-in-retrospect security holes. Wasn't there a huge dating app recently with a glaring issue where you could list and access every photo and conversation ever shared, because nobody on their professional tech team secured the endpoints against enumeration of IDs?
I agree it is great that more people can build software, but let's not pretend there are zero downsides.
If a user is confident enough about a no name company that they give them enough info to make identity theft a possibility, it was only a matter of time before a spammer/phishing attack gets them anyway
I agree with you on the downsides.
