Summary
A.I. tools are changing software development by making it faster and easier for many people to create apps and websites. This could lead to huge growth and new jobs, but also disrupt old ways of working. Despite challenges, the author is excited because more people can build useful software without waiting for experts.
Highlights
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This is called “vibe coding,” a term coined a year ago by the artificial intelligence expert Andrej Karpathy. To vibe code is to make software with prompts sent to a specialized chatbot — not coding, but telling — and letting the bot work out the bugs.
Definición de Vibe Coding
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When you watch a large language model slice through some horrible, expensive problem — like migrating data from an old platform to a modern one — you feel the earth shifting. I was the chief executive of a software services firm, which made me a professional software cost estimator. When I rebooted my messy personal website a few weeks ago, I realized: I would have paid 350,000. That last price is full 2021 retail — it implies a product manager, a designer, two engineers (one senior) and four to six months of design, coding and testing. Plus maintenance. Bespoke software is joltingly expensive. Today, though, when the stars align and my prompts work out, I can do hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of work for fun (fun for me) over weekends and evenings, for the price of the Claude $200-a-month plan.
La sensación de que la tierra bajo tus pies se mueve cuando tienes la experiencia de haber resuelto algo imposible, difícil y/o muy tedioso con poquísimo esfuerzo mediante agentes de IA. Es un insight que, en sus versiones más potentes, sólo puede ser experiencial, y tiene efectos importantes en las conductas y disposiciones de los sujetos afectados. Lo he vivido en carne propia: vértigo, entusiasmo, motivación, no poder parar, desorientarse por tener muchas ventanas abiertas, abrir proyectos y no terminarlos, etc. La diferencia entre usar modelos desorientarse lenguaje para responder preguntas respecto de para construir algo es radical.
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I collect stories of software woe. I think of the friend at an immigration nonprofit who needs to click countless times, in mounting frustration, to generate critical reports. Or the small business owners trying to operate everything with email and losing orders as a result. Or my doctor, whose time with patients is eaten up by having to tap furiously into the hospital’s electronic health record system. After decades of stories like those, I believe there are millions, maybe billions, of software products that don’t exist but should: Dashboards, reports, apps, project trackers and countless others. People want these things to do their jobs, or to help others, but they can’t find the budget. They make do with spreadsheets and to-do lists. My industry is famous for saying “no,” or selling you something you don’t need. We have an earned reputation as a lot of really tiresome dudes. But I think if vibe coding gets a little bit better, a little more accessible and a little more reliable, people won’t have to wait on us. They can just watch some how-to videos and learn, and then they can have the power of these tools for themselves. I could teach you now to make a complex web app in a few weeks. In about six months you could do a lot of things that took me 20 years to learn. I’m writing all kinds of code I never could before — but you can too. If we can’t stop the freight train, we could at least hop on for a ride.
Desarrolladores descalzos.