It's not perpetual motion, it's very real capability, you just have to be able to learn how to use it.
People yeating a (shitty) Github clone with Claude in a week apparently can't imagine it, but if you know the shit out of Rails, start with a good a boiler plate, and have a good git library, a solo dev can also build a (shitty) Github clone in a week. And they'll be able to take it somewhere, unlike the llm ratsnest that will require increasingly expensive tokens to (frustratingly) modify.
That's not how you prove that code works properly and isn't going to fail due to some obscure or unforessen corner case. You need actual proof that's driven by the code's overall structure. Humans do this at least informally when they code, AI's can't do that with any reliability, especially not for non-trivial projects (for reasons that are quite structural and hard to change) so most coding agents simply work their way iteratively to get their test results to pass. That's not a robust methodology.
One might argue that this is a substitute for metaprogramming, not software developers.
Objectively, my GitHub clone is still shitty, BUT it got several ways github is shitty out of my way and allowed me to add several features I wanted, no small one of which was GitHub not owning my data.
I don't know the shit out of Rails and I don't want to, I know the shit out of other things and I want the tools I'm using to be better and Claude is making that happen.
It's a little odd the skepticism to the level that people keep telling me I'm delusional for being satisfied that I've created something useful for myself. The opposition to AI/LLMs seems to be growing into a weird morality cult trying to convince everybody else that they're leading unhappy immoral lives. I'm exaggerating but it's looking like things are going in that direction... and in my house, so to speak, here on HN there are factions. Like programming language zealots but worse.
Hobby-project vibe coding is pretty cool (if I'm being honest, its fucking miraculous; this tech is wild) but isn't it clear that there's a problem with the linkedincels, the investors, the management that are all convinced this will remove say 50% of programming jobs? I understand these things have legitimate uses, but I'm at my wits end hearing about how deep understanding, craftsmanship, patience and hard work aren't "results oriented".
There's definitely zealotry developing against AI, but I suspect it is a proportional (if unhelpful) response to the hype machine. Is it really zealotry to insist on the value of your mind and your competence? These people saying you should never "hand write" your code-- how the fuck did the discourse move so much that this isn't a laughably stupid thing to say? "I'm a CEO, and if you aren't using consultants to make your decisions you've already lost"
What I am saying is that once the high quality training data runs out, it will drop in its capabilities pretty fast. That is how I compare it to perpetual motion mechanism scams. In the case of a perpetual motion machine, it appear that it will continue to run indefinitely. That is analogous to the impression that you have now. You feel that this will go on and on for ever, and that is the scam you are falling for.
That's more a misunderstood study that over time turned into a confidently stated fact. Yes, the model collapses if you loop the output to the input. But no, that's not how it's done.
The reality is that all the labs are already using synthetic training data, and have been for at least a year now. It basically turned out to be a non-issue if you have robust monitoring and curation in place for the generated data.
yea, look up how it is done.
It is exactly how a perpetual motion machine scam would project an appearance of working like using a generator to drive a motor, and the motor driving the generator..something that would obscure the fact that there is energy loss happening along the way....
Is the world any better for them existing? The decline of coding and sw engineering skills in humans from outsourcing the practice of it to AI is it worth it and sustainable long term?
The world is going to be no worse than it was when humans transitioned from writing assembly to writing compilers for high level languages. Assembly is still necessary, but not that often. In the same way writing code is going to become less necessary as tools are going to be written in higher level language in standards and requirements documents instead of code most of the time, with more specific exact coding only occasionally.
Programmers were mostly solving the same plumbing problems over and over in secret because of "proprietary" needs to hide your code, but one million separate integrations of your billing backend with Stripe didn't really add to humanity. We're cutting out the boring middle drudgery and human effort is going to be freed up to work on the edges of human knowledge instead of tromping around in the middle.
When I open some Electron apps I wish we stopped right about there.
