[HN Gopher] A16Z partner says that the theory that we'll vibe co...
___________________________________________________________________
A16Z partner says that the theory that we'll vibe code everything
is ' wrong'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aq0JSbuIppQ
Author : paulpauper
Score : 68 points
Date : 2026-02-20 22:47 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.aol.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.aol.com)
| sanction8 wrote:
| a16z talking again?
|
| This is your regular reminder that
|
| 1) a16z is one the largest backers of LLMs
|
| 2) They named one of the two authors of the Fascist Manifesto
| their patron saint
|
| 3) AI systems are built to function in ways that degrade and are
| likely to destroy our crucial civic institutions. (Quoted from
| Professor Woodrow Hartzog "How AI Destroys Institutions"). Or to
| put it another way, being plausible but slightly wrong and un-
| auditable--at scale--is the killer feature of LLMs and this
| combination of properties makes it an essentially fascist
| technology meaning it is well suited to centralizing authority,
| eliminating checks on that authority and advancing an anti-
| science agenda (quoted from the A plausible, scalable and
| slightly wrong black box: why large language models are a fascist
| technology that cannot be redeemed post).
| arjie wrote:
| I will not claim to be an expert historian but one general
| belief I have is that nomenclature undergoes semantic migration
| over a century. So for the sake of conciseness I will quote the
| first demand of each portion of the Fascist Manifesto. This
| isn't to obscure, because it is in Wikipedia[0] and translated
| in English on EN Wikipedia[1], but so I can share a sample of
| whether this is something we can relate to our present day
| political orientation. Hopefully it will inform what you
| believe "author of the Fascist Manifesto" to imply:
|
| > _..._
|
| > _For this WE WANT:_
|
| > _On the political problem:_
|
| > _Universal suffrage by regional list voting, with
| proportional representation, voting and eligibility for women._
|
| > _..._
|
| > _On the social problem:_
|
| > _WE WANT:_
|
| > _The prompt enactment of a state law enshrining the legal
| eight-hour workday for all jobs._
|
| > _..._
|
| > _On the military issue:_
|
| > _WE WANT:_
|
| > _The establishment of a national militia with brief
| educational services and exclusively defensive duty._
|
| > _..._
|
| > _On the financial problem:_
|
| > _WE WANT:_
|
| > _A strong extraordinary tax on capital of a progressive
| nature, having the form of true PARTIAL EXPROPRIATION of all
| wealth._
|
| > _..._
|
| 0:
| https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programma_di_San_Sepolcro#Test...
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascist_Manifesto#Text
| holden_nelson wrote:
| I'm not particularly political and am also not a historian
| but I don't think it's necessarily correct to equate the
| literal text of the manifesto with the principles and
| practices of fascism.
|
| The message of universal suffrage vs. that of preventing an
| out group from "stealing" an election are not far apart
| semantically. Same with workers rights - in practice the
| worker protection laws that were passed in Italy at this time
| were so full of loopholes and qualifications that ultimately
| the workers do not gain power in that system.
|
| It is this fair, in my view, to question the spirit of the
| manifesto in the first place.
| arjie wrote:
| I suppose we should, in being intellectually consistent,
| take the appropriate position that 8 hours / day and a
| wealth tax are fascist principles.
| nylonstrung wrote:
| This wasn't a16z monolithically speaking as a firm, it was
| Anish Acharya talking on a podcast.
|
| Seems like he's focused on fintech and not involved in many of
| their LLM investments
| duzer65657 wrote:
| >> Anish Acharya says it is not worth it to use AI-assisted
| coding for all business functions. AI should focus on core
| business development, not rebuilding enterprise software.
|
| I don't even know what this means, but my take: we should stop
| listening to VCs (especially those like A16Z) who have an obvious
| vested interest that doesn't match the rest of society. Granting
| these people an audience is totally unwarranted; nobody but other
| tech bros said "we will vibe code everything" in the first place.
| Best case scenario: they all go to the same exclusive conference,
| get the branded conference technical vest and that's were the
| asteroid hits.
| 7777777phil wrote:
| Even a16z is walking this back now. I wrote about why the "vibe
| code everything" thesis doesn't hold up in two recent pieces:
|
| (1) https://philippdubach.com/posts/the-saaspocalypse-paradox/
|
| (2) https://philippdubach.com/posts/the-impossible-backhand/
|
| Acharya's framing is different from mine (he's talking book on
| software stocks) but the conclusion is the same: the "innovation
| bazooka" pointed at rebuilding payroll is a bad allocation of
| resources. Benedict Evans called me out on LinkedIn for this
| (https://philippdubach.com/posts/is-ai-really-eating-the-worl...)
| take, which I take as a sign the argument is landing..
| selridge wrote:
| > Benedict Evans called me out on LinkedIn for this take, which
| I take as a sign the argument is landing.
|
| Excellent. And correct lol.
| alephnerd wrote:
| Both AI Fanatics and AI Luddites need to touch grass.
|
| We work in Software _ENGINEERING_. Engineering is all about what
| tools makes sense to solve a specific problem. In some cases, AI
| tools do show immediate business value (eg. TTS for SDR) and in
| other cases this is less obvious.
|
| This is all the more reason why learning about AI/ML fundamentals
| is critical in the same way understanding computer architecture,
| systems programming, algorithms, and design principles are
| critical to being a SWE, because then you can make a data-driven
| judgment on whether an approach works or not.
|
| Given the number of throwaway accounts that commented, it clearly
| struck a nerve.
| rsrsrs86 wrote:
| The irony is, AI coding only works after and if you put a lot
| of work on engineering, like creating a factory.
| alephnerd wrote:
| There is a lot of work that goes on before even reaching the
| point to write code.
|
| For example, being able to vibecode a UI wireframe instead of
| being blocked for 2 sprints by your UI/UX team or templating
| an alpha to gauge customer interest in 1 week instead of 1
| quarter is a massive operational improvement.
|
| Of course these aren't completed products, but customers in
| most cases can accept such performance in the short-to-medium
| term or if it is part of an alpha.
|
| This is _why_ I keep repeating ad nauseum that most
| decisionmakers don 't expect AI to replace jobs. The reality
| is, professional software engineering is about translating
| business requirements into tangible products.
|
| It's not the codebase that matters in most cases - it's the
| requirements and outcomes that do. Like you can refactor and
| prettify your codebase all you want, but if it isn't directly
| driving customer revenue or value, then that time could be
| better spent elsewhere. It's the usecase that your product
| enables which is why they are purchasing your product.
| rsrsrs86 wrote:
| As a researcher in formal methods, I totally get you
| atomic128 wrote:
| Sounds like a16z has some rapidly depreciating software equity
| they want to sell you.
|
| Or maybe they own the debt.
|
| Listen to some of the Marc Andreessen interviews promoting
| cryptocurrency in 2021.
|
| Do that and you will never listen to him or his associates again.
| rsrsrs86 wrote:
| They don't make money by being right, they make money by
| exposing LPs to risk. Zero commitment to insight. Intellectual
| production goes only so far as to attract funding.
| tombert wrote:
| I dunno.
|
| I really hate the expression "the new normal", because it sort of
| smuggles in the assumption that there exists such thing as
| "normal". It always felt like one of those truisms that people
| say to exploit emotions like "in these trying times" or "no one
| wants to work anymore".
|
| But I really do think that vibe coding is the "new normal". These
| tools are already extremely useful, to a point where I don't
| really think we'll be able to go back. These tools are getting
| good enough that it's getting to a point where you _have_ to use
| them. This might sound like I 'm supportive of this, and I guess
| am to some extent, but I find it to be exceedingly disappointing
| because writing software isn't fun anymore.
|
| One of my most upvoted comments on HN talks about how I don't
| enjoy programming, but instead I enjoy problem solving. This was
| written before I was aware of vibe coding stuff, and I think I
| was wrong. I guess I actually did enjoy the process of writing
| the code, instead of just delegating my work to a virtual intern
| while I just watch the AI do the fun stuff.
|
| A very small part of me is kind of hoping that once AI has to be
| priced at "not losing money on every call" levels that I'll be
| forced to actually think about this stuff again.
| syndacks wrote:
| I largely agree with you. And, given your points about "not
| going back" -- how do you propose interviewing SWEs?
| tombert wrote:
| I have thought about this a lot, and I have no idea. I work
| for an "AI-first" company, and we're kind of required to use
| AI stuff as often as we can, so I make very liberal use of
| Codex, but I've been shielded from the interview process thus
| far.
|
| I _think_ I would still kind of ask the same questions,
| though maybe a bit more conceptual. Like, for example, I
| might see if I could get someone to explain how to build
| something, and then ask them about data structures that might
| be useful (e.g. removing a lock by making an append-only
| structure). I find that Codex will generally generate
| something that "works" but without an understanding data
| structures and algorithms, its implementation will still be
| somewhat sub-optimal, meaning that understanding the
| fundamentals has value, at least for now.
| j45 wrote:
| Just because we can code something faster or cheaper doesn't
| increase the odds it will be right.
| falcor84 wrote:
| Arguably it does, because being able to experience something
| gives you much more insight into whether it's right or not - so
| being able to iterate quickly many times, continuously updating
| your spec and definition of done should help you get to the
| right solution. To be clear, there is still effort involved,
| but the effort becomes more about the critical evaluation
| rather than the how.
| packetlost wrote:
| But that's not the only problem.
|
| To illustrate, I'll share what I'm working on now. My
| companies ops guy vibe coded a bunch of scripts to manage
| deployments. On the surface, they appear to do the correct
| thing. Except they don't. The tag for the Docker image used
| is hardcoded in a yaml file and doesn't get updated anywhere
| unless you do it manually. The docs don't even mention half
| of the necessary scripts/commands or implicit setup necessary
| for any of it to work in the first place, much less the tags
| or how any of it actually works. There are two completely
| different deployment strategies (direct to VM with docker +
| GCP and a GKE-based K8s deploy). Neither fully work, and only
| one has any documentation at all (and that documentation is
| completely vibed, so has very low information density). The
| only reason I'm able to use this pile of garbage at all is
| because I already know how all of the independent pieces
| function and can piece it together, but that's after wasting
| several hours of "why the fuck aren't my changes having an
| effect." There are very, _very_ few lines of code that don 't
| matter in well architected systems, but many that _don 't_ in
| vibed systems. We already have huge problems with
| overcomplicated crap made exclusively by humans, that's been
| hard enough to manage.
|
| Vibe coding consistently gives the illusion of progress by
| fixing an immediate problem at the expense of piling on crap
| that obscures what's actually going on and often breaks
| exiting functionality. It's frankly not sustainable.
|
| That being said, I've gotten some utility out of vibe coding
| tools, but it mostly just saves me some mental effort of
| writing boring shit that isn't interesting, innovative, or
| enjoyable, which is like 20% of mental effort and 5% of my
| actual work. I'm not even going to get started on the context
| switching costs. It makes my ADHD feel happy but I'm
| confident I'm _less_ productive because of the secondary
| effects.
| reval wrote:
| The post you're r replying to gets this right- lead time is
| everything. The fast you can iterate, the more likely that
| what you are doing is correct.
|
| I've had a similar experience to what you're describing. We
| are slower with AI... for now. Lean into it. Exploit the
| fact that you can now iterate much faster. Solve smaller
| problems. Solve them completely. Move on.
| dchuk wrote:
| If you're able to articulate the issues this clearly, it
| would take like an hour to "vibe code" away all of these
| issues. That's the actual superpower we all have now. If
| you know what good software looks like, you can rough
| something out so fast, then iterate and clean it up equally
| fast, and produce something great an order of magnitude
| faster than just a few months ago.
|
| A few times a week I'm finding open source projects that
| either have a bunch of old issues and pull requests, or
| unfinished todos/roadmaps, and just blasting through all of
| that and leaving a PR for the maintainer while I use the
| fork. All tested, all clean best practice style code.
|
| Don't complain about the outputs of these tools, use the
| tools to produce good outputs.
| lelanthran wrote:
| Iteration only matters when the feedback is used to improve.
|
| Your model doesn't improve. It can't.
| baq wrote:
| The magic of test time inference is the harness can improve
| even if the model is static. Every task outcome informs the
| harness.
| thenaturalist wrote:
| > The magic
|
| Hilarious that you start with that as TAO requires
|
| - Continuous adaptation makes it challenging to track
| performance changes and troubleshoot issues effectively.
|
| - Advanced monitoring tools and sophisticated logging
| systems become essential to identify and address issues
| promptly.
|
| - Adaptive models could inadvertently reinforce biases
| present in their initial training data or in ongoing
| feedback.
|
| - Ethical oversight and regular audits are crucial to
| ensure fairness, transparency, and accountability.
|
| Not much magic in there if it requires good old human
| oversight every step of the way, is there?
| mountainriver wrote:
| Your model can absolutely improve
| thenaturalist wrote:
| How would that work out barring a complete retraining or
| human in the loop evals?
| godelski wrote:
| Let's just look at Dijkstra's _On the Foolishness of "Natural
| Language Programming"_. It really does a good job at explaining
| why natural language programming (and thus, Vibe Coding) is a
| dead end. It serves as a good reminder that we developed the
| languages of Math and Programming for a reason. The pedantic
| nature is a feature, not a flaw. It is because in programming
| (and math) we are dealing with high levels of abstraction
| constantly and thus ambiguity compounds. Isn't this something we
| learn early on as programmers? That a computer does exactly what
| you tell it to, not what you intend to tell it to? Think about
| how that phrase extends when we incorporate LLM Coding Agents.
| | The virtue of formal texts is that their manipulations, in
| order to be legitimate, need to satisfy only a few simple rules;
| they are, when you come to think of it, an amazingly effective
| tool for ruling out all sorts of nonsense that, when we use our
| native tongues, are almost impossible to avoid. - Dijkstra
|
| All of you have experienced the ambiguity and annoyances of
| natural language. Have you ever: - Had a boss
| give you confusing instructions? - Argued with someone only
| to find you agree? - Talked with someone and one of you
| doesn't actually understand the other? - Talked with
| someone and the other person seems batshit insane but they also
| seem to have avoided a mental asylum? - Use different words
| to describe the same thing? - When standing next to
| someone and looking at the same thing? - Adapted your
| message so you "talk to your audience"? - Ever read/wrote
| something on the internet? (where "everyone" is the audience)
|
| Congrats, you have experienced the frustrations and limitations
| of natural language. Natural language is incredibly powerful and
| the ambiguity is a feature _and_ a flaw, just like how in formal
| languages the precision is both a feature _and_ a flaw. I mean it
| can take an incredible amount of work to say even very simple and
| obvious things with formal languages[1], but the ambiguity
| disappears[2].
|
| Vibe Coding has its uses and I'm sure that'll expand, but the
| idea of it replacing domain experts is outright laughable. You
| can't get it to resolve ambiguity if you aren't aware of the
| ambiguity. If you've ever argued with the LLM take a step back
| and ask yourself, is there ambiguity? It'll help you resolve the
| problem _and_ make you recognize the limits. I mean just look at
| the legal system, that is probably one of the most serious
| efforts to create formalization in natural language and we still
| need lawyers and judges to sit around and argue all day about all
| the ambiguity that remains.
|
| I seriously can't comprehend how on a site _who 's primary users
| are programmers_ this is an argument. If we somehow missed this
| in our education (formal or self) then how do we not intuit it
| from our _everyday_ interactions?
|
| [0]
| https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD667...
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principia_Mathematica
|
| [2] Most programming languages are some hybrid variant. e.g.
| Python uses duck typing: if it looks like a float, operates like
| a float, and works as a float, then it is _probably_ a float. Or
| another example even is C, what used to be called a "high level
| programming language" (so is Python a celestial language?). Give
| up some precision/lack of ambiguity for ease.
| falcor84 wrote:
| > Vibe Coding has its uses and I'm sure that'll expand, but the
| idea of it replacing domain experts is outright laughable.
|
| I don't think that's the argument. The argument I'm seeing most
| is that most of us SWEs will become obsolete once the agentic
| tools become good enough to allow domain experts to fully
| iterate on solutions on their own.
| godelski wrote:
| > The argument I'm seeing most is that most of us SWEs will
| become obsolete
|
| That is equivalent to "replacing domain experts", or at least
| was my intent. But language is ambiguous lol. I do think
| programmers are domain experts. There are also different
| kinds of domain experts but I very much doubt we'll get rid
| of SWEs.
|
| Though my big concern right now is that we'll get rid of
| juniors and maybe even mid levels. There's definitely a push
| for that and incentives from an economic point of view. But
| it will be disastrous for the tech industry if this happens.
| It kills the pipeline. There can be no wizards without noobs.
| So we have a real life tragedy of the commons situation
| staring us in the face. I'm pretty sure we know what choices
| will be made, but I hope we can recognize that there's going
| to need to be cooperation to solve this least we all suffer.
| shalmanese wrote:
| > The argument I'm seeing most is that most of us SWEs will
| become obsolete once the agentic tools become good enough to
| allow domain experts to fully iterate on solutions on their
| own.
|
| That's been the argument since the 5PL movement in the 80s.
| What we discover is that domain expertise an articulation of
| domain expertise into systems are two orthogonal skills that
| occasionally develop in the same person but, in general,
| requires distinct specialization.
| rsrsrs86 wrote:
| Yes, 4GL and 5GL failed, but authoring Access applications
| should be a breeze now.
| selridge wrote:
| Dijkstra also said no one should be debugging and yet here we
| are.
|
| He's not wrong about the problems of natural language YET HERE
| ARE. That would, I think, cause a sensible engineer to start
| poking at the predicate instead of announcing that the foregone
| conclusion is near.
|
| We should take seriously the possibility that this isn't going
| to be in a retrenchment which bestows a nice little atta boy
| sticker on all the folks who said I told you so.
| godelski wrote:
| > Dijkstra also said no one should be debugging
|
| Given how you're implying things, you're grossly
| misrepresenting what he said. You've either been misled or
| misread. He was advocating for the adoption and development
| of provably correct programming.
|
| Interestingly I think his "gospel" is only more meaningful
| today. | Apparently, many programmers derive
| the major part of their intellectual satisfaction and
| professional excitement from not quite understanding what
| they are doing. In this streamlined age, one of our most
| under-nourished psychological needs is the craving for Black
| Magic, and apparently the automatic computer can satisfy this
| need for the professional software engineers, who are
| secretly enthralled by the gigantic risks they take in their
| daring irresponsibility. They revel in the puzzles posed by
| the task of debugging. They defend --by appealing to all
| sorts of supposed Laws of Nature-- the right of existence of
| their program bugs, because they are so attached to them:
| without the bugs, they feel, programming would no longer be
| what is used to be! (In the latter feeling I think --if I may
| say so-- that they are quite correct.) | A program
| can be regarded as an (abstract) mechanism embodying as such
| the design of all computations that can possibly be evoked by
| it. How do we convince ourselves that this design is correct,
| i.e. that all these computations will display the desired
| properties? A naive answer to this question is "Well, try
| them all.", but this answer is too naive, because even for a
| simple program on the fastest machine such an experiment is
| apt to take millions of years. So, exhaustive testing is
| absolutely out of the question. | But as long as
| we regard the mechanism as a black box, testing is the only
| thing we can do. The unescapable conclusion is that we cannot
| afford to regard the mechanism as a black box
|
| I think it's worth reading in full
|
| https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD02xx/EWD288.
| ..
| selridge wrote:
| >no one should be debugging
|
| He literally said those exact words out loud from the
| audience during a job talk.
|
| And yeah, the total aim and the reason why he might just
| blurt that out is because a lot of the frustration and
| esprit de corps of programming is held up in writing
| software that's more a guess about behavior than something
| provably correct. Perhaps we all ought to be writing
| provably correct software and never debugging as a result.
| We don't. But perhaps we ought to. We don't.
|
| Is control via natural language a doomed effort? Perhaps,
| but I'd be cautious rather than confident about predicting
| that.
| godelski wrote:
| > He literally said those exact words out loud from the
| audience during a job talk.
|
| Yes, I even provided the source...
|
| Unfortunately despite being able to provide a summary I'm
| unable to actually read it for you. You'll actually need
| to read the whole thing and interpret it. You have a big
| leg up with my summary but being literate or not is up to
| you. As for me, I'm not going to argue with someone who
| chooses not to read
| selridge wrote:
| I sincerely doubt you produced the source where he asked
| that question in the middle of someone else's job talk.
|
| Which is what I was referring to. I read what you wrote,
| pal. Did you read what I wrote?
| godelski wrote:
| > I sincerely doubt you produced the source
|
| Either I did or didn't. What is not in question is that I
| provided a source. > I read what you
| wrote, pal.
|
| Forgive me for not believing you. I linked a source and
| you made speculations about what was in it. If you can't
| bother to read that then why should I believe you read
| anything else? Reading requires more than saying the
| words aloud in your head. At least if you want to read
| above a 3rd grade level. Yes, I'm being mean, but if you
| don't have the patience to _actually read_ the comment
| you 're responding to you then you shouldn't expect
| anyone to have the patience to respond to your rude
| behavior with kindness.
| benreesman wrote:
| Vibecoding is a net wealth transfer from frightened people to
| unscrupulous people.
|
| Machine assisted rigorous software engineering is an even bigger
| wealth transfer from unscrupulous people to passionate computer
| scientists.
| rsrsrs86 wrote:
| Sadly, this is the most serious comment here. People who are
| not shocked are people who haven't seen what a highly educated
| computer scientist can do in single player mode.
| benreesman wrote:
| Sure they have:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47083506
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47045406
|
| https://youtu.be/uBGotJvlh7E
|
| https://youtu.be/V9YSC4gBagg
|
| https://youtu.be/ghm9F0RCFsY
|
| I'll take all comers, any conceivable combination of
| unassisted engineers of arbitrary Carmack/God-level ability,
| no budgetary limits, and I'll bet my net worth down to
| starvation poverty that I will clobber them flat _by myself_.
| This is not because I 'm such hot shit, it's a weird Venn
| that puts me on the early side on this, but there are others
| and there will be many more as people see the results.
|
| So there are probably people who can beat me today, and that
| probability goes to one as Carmack-type people go full "press
| the advantage" mode on a long enough timeline, there are
| people who are strictly more talented and every bit as
| passionate, and the paradigm will saturate.
|
| Which is why I spend all my time trying to _scale it up_ ,
| I'm working on how to _teach other people how to do it, and
| solve the bottlenecks that emerge_. That 's a different
| paradigm that saturates in a different place, but it is
| likewise sigmoid-shaped.
|
| That, and not single-player heroics, stunts basically, is the
| next thousand-year paradigm. And no current Valley power
| player even exists in that world. So the competition I have
| to worry about is very real, but not at all legible.
|
| I don't know much about how this will play other than it's
| the fucking game at geopolitical levels, and the new boss
| will look nothing like the old boss.
| theturtletalks wrote:
| All these articles seem to think people will vibe code by
| prompting:
|
| make me my own Stripe
|
| make me my own Salesforce
|
| make me my own Shopify
|
| It will be more like:
|
| Look at how Lago, an open-source Stripe layer, works and make it
| work with Authorized.net directly
|
| Look at Twenty, an open-source CRM, and make it work in our tech
| stack for our sales needs
|
| Look at how Medusa, an open-source e-commerce platform, works and
| what features we would need and bring into our website
|
| When doing the latter, getting a good enough alternative will
| reduce the need for commercial SaaS. On top of that, these
| commercial SaaS are bloated with features in their attempt to
| work with as many use cases as possible and configuring them is
| "coding" by another name. Throw in Enshittification and the above
| seems to the next logical move by companies looking to move off
| these apps.
| whatever1 wrote:
| So maybe the saas will pivot to just sell some barebone agents
| that include their real IP? The rest (UI, dashboards and
| connectivity) will be tailored made by LLMs
| selridge wrote:
| The right move is this, turned to 11.
|
| Velocity or one-shot capability isn't the move. It's making
| stuff that used to be traumatic just...normal now.
|
| Google fucking vibe-coded their x86 -> ARM ISA changeover. It
| never would have been done without agents. Not like "google did
| it X% faster." Google would have let that sit forever because
| the labor economics of the problem were backwards.
|
| That doesn't MATTER anymore. If you have some scratch, some
| halfway decent engineers, and a clear idea, you can build stuff
| that was just infeasible or impossible. all it takes is time
| and care.
|
| Some people have figured this out and are moving now.
| theturtletalks wrote:
| Exactly, if the engineers know where to look for the solution
| in open-source code and point the AI there, it will get them
| there. Even if the language or the tech stack are different,
| AI is excellent at finding the seams, those spots where a
| feature connects to the underlying tech stack, and figuring
| out how the feature is really implemented, and bringing that
| over.
| jrumbut wrote:
| > Google would have let that sit forever because the labor
| economics of the problem were backwards.
|
| This has been how all previous innovations that made software
| easier to make turned out.
|
| People found more and more uses for software and that does
| seem to be playing out again.
| selridge wrote:
| I really don't think we're living in a "linearly
| interpolate from past behavior" kinda situation.
|
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14928
|
| Just read some of that. It's not long. This IS NOT the past
| telescoping into the future. Some new shit is afoot.
| est31 wrote:
| I think something like an x86 -> ARM change is perfect
| example of something where LLM assisted coding shines. lots
| of busywork (i.e. smaller tasks that don't require lots of
| context of the other existing tasks), nothing totally novel
| to do (they don't have to write another borg or spanner),
| easy to verify, and 'translation'. LLMs are quite good at
| human language translation, why should they be bad at
| translating from one inline assembly language to another?
| selridge wrote:
| Yeah. Lots of busywork where if you had to assign it to a
| human you would need to find someone with deep technical
| expertise plus inordinate, unflagging attention to detail.
| You couldn't pass it off to a batch of summer interns. It
| would have needed to be done by an engineer with some real
| experience. And there is no way in the world you could hire
| enough to do it, for almost any money.
| mattmanser wrote:
| You've missed the subtlety here.
|
| LLMs don't have attention to detail.
|
| This project had extremely comprehensive, easily
| verifiable, tests.
|
| So the LLM could be as sloppy as they usually arez they
| just had to keep redoing their work until the code
| actually worked.
| nradov wrote:
| The value in enterprise SaaS offerings isn't just the
| application functionality but the IaaS substrate underneath.
| The vendor handles server operations, storage, scalability,
| backups, security, compliance, etc. It might be easier for
| companies to vibe code their own custom applications now but
| LLMs don't help nearly as much with keeping those applications
| running. Most companies are _terrible_ at technical operations.
| I predict we 'll see a new wave of IaaS startups that sell to
| those enterprise vibe coders and undercut the legacy SaaS
| vendors.
| hparadiz wrote:
| I've been confronting this truth personally. For years I had
| a backlog of projects that I always put off because I didn't
| have the capacity. Now I have the capacity but without the
| know how to sell it. It turns out that everything comes back
| to sales and building human relationships. Sort of a
| prerequisite to having operations.
| tayo42 wrote:
| Are the infrastructure tools available already not easy
| enough to build on? We have all these serverless options
| already.
| ben_w wrote:
| Sensible people would do that (asking for just the features
| they need), but look at us, are we sensible?
|
| Most of us* are working for places whose analytics software
| transitively asks the user for permission to be tracked by more
| "trusted" partners than the number of people in a typical high
| school, which transitively includes more bytes of code than the
| total size of DOOM including assets, with a performance hit so
| bad that it would be an improvement for everyone if the visitor
| remote desktop-ed into a VM running Win95 on the server.
|
| And people were complaining about how wasteful software was
| when Win95 was new.
|
| * Possibly an exaggeration, I don't know what business software
| is like; but websites and, in my experience at least, mobile
| apps do this.
| thenaturalist wrote:
| I highly doubt that, and its in OPs article.
|
| First, a vendor will have the best context on the inner
| workings and best practices of extending the current state of
| their software. The pressure on vendors to make this accessible
| and digestable to agents/ LLMs will increase, though.
|
| Secondly, if you have coded with LLM assistance (not vibe
| coding), you will have experienced the limited ability of one
| shot stochastic approaches to build out well architected
| solutions that go beyond immediate functionality encapsulated
| in a prompt.
|
| Thirdly, as the article mentions, opportunity cost will never
| make this a favorable term - unless the SaaS vendor was
| extorting prices before. The direct cost of mental overhead and
| time of an internal team member to hand-hold an agent/ write
| specs/ debug/ firefight some LLM assisted/ vibe coded solution
| will not outweigh the upside potential of expanding your core
| business unless you're a stagnant enterprise product on life
| support.
| manoDev wrote:
| People are overestimating the value on having AI create something
| given loose instructions, and underestimating the value of using
| AI as a tool for a human to learn and explore a problem space.
| The bias shows on the terminology ("agents").
|
| We finally made the computer able to speak "our" language - but
| we still see computers as just automation. There's a lot of
| untapped potential in the other direction, in encoding and
| compressing knowledge IMO.
| fsddd wrote:
| Problem space is rich. The thing doesnt actually know what a
| problem is.
|
| The thing is incredibly good at searching through large spaces
| of information.
| consumer451 wrote:
| 42
| themafia wrote:
| > AI create something
|
| To have AI recreate something that was already in it's training
| set.
|
| > in encoding and compressing knowledge IMO.
|
| I'd rather have the knowledge encoded in a way that doesn't
| generate hallucinations.
| rsrsrs86 wrote:
| I hear and read so much shit by VCs. Both in LinkedIn and in
| private meetings. Specially Menlo says a lot of shit (check
| LinkedIn). Deloitte and McKinsey, also full of crap. Really.
|
| Vcs are choke full of companies that can be cloned over night,
| SaaS companies that will face ridiculously fast substitution, and
| a whoooole lotta capital deployed on lousy RAGs and OpenAI
| Wrappers.
| NinjaTrance wrote:
| The possibility that anyone can easily replicate any startup
| scares A16Z.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| This is what always confused me about VC AI enthusiasm. Their
| moat is the capital. As AI improves, it destroys their moat.
| And yet, they are stoked to invest in it, the architects of
| their own demise.
| ironhaven wrote:
| Don't you have that backwards? If AI gets so good that it can
| replace all human labor, will capital like money and data
| centers be the only moat left?
| georgemcbay wrote:
| > If AI gets so good that it can replace all human labor,
| will capital like money and data centers be the only moat
| left?
|
| If AI gets good enough to replace all human labor then
| actual physical moats to keep the hungry, rioting replaced
| humans away will be the most important moats.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Which is bought by money in the first place, see
| billionaire doomsday bunkers. The poor will not have such
| a bunker.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| How powerful is the device you wrote this comment from? On
| prem or self hosted affordable inference is inevitable.
| fullshark wrote:
| There's no alternative, they can't collectively freeze out
| all AI investment and force it to die.
| themafia wrote:
| The incompetent have always pantomimed the competent. It never
| works. Although the incompetent will always pay a huge amount
| to try to achieve this fantasy.
| upmind wrote:
| A16Zs opinion is worthless to me, they know very little about the
| market. Furthermore, they're notorious for having a lot of
| "partners".
| mountainriver wrote:
| Their whole game is just pump and dump
| SilverElfin wrote:
| Has everyone forgotten about when they pumped absurd crypto
| scams like NFTs
| neom wrote:
| Depends on the partner, Peter Levine is a pretty damn good
| picker (supported us series A to IPO).
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_J._Levine
| thenaturalist wrote:
| Pretty worthless take posting an ad-hominem attack instead of
| addressing the actual content of the article/ statement.
| dnautics wrote:
| you cant easily vibecode _everything_. in my startup this is what
| I am not buying (and vibecoding):
|
| - JIRA/trello/monday.com - benchling - obsidian
|
| this is what i buy and have no intent to replace:
|
| - carta - docusign - gusto/rippling - bank
|
| this is what _might_ be on the chopping block:
|
| - gsuite
| rogerrogerr wrote:
| Why not Docusign? Not challenging, just curious why that is
| specifically on your list. Reputation?
| dnautics wrote:
| the common factor was sort of left as an exercise to the
| reader... but basically anything that has touchpoints to the
| legal and financial systems im not gonna touch with a 20 ft
| vibecoded pole.
| levkk wrote:
| I'm curious about your reasoning. Jira/Trello etc. are like
| $10/mo/seat, why bother rewriting them from scratch? You'll
| spend more in tokens doing so. Same for gmail/google calendar,
| what's the ROI? Those tools are reliable and cheap, why bother
| creating your own?
| dnautics wrote:
| jira/trello: ergonomics. to set them up correctly _exactly
| thevway i want_ would take me 20 hours, i can vibecode for
| 20h and get the same result.
|
| plus, being able to crossref internal data types is chef's
| kiss.
|
| im paying for claude pro so it's use it or lose it. when i
| finish everything and have it battle tested i can end my
| claude code. and anyways when i have 10 employees, it's
| parity.
| Rastonbury wrote:
| Anyone who's seen an enterprise deal close or dealt with
| enterprise customer requests will know this, the build vs buy
| calculus has always been there yet companies still buy. Until you
| can get AI to the point where it equivalent to a 20 person
| engineering team, people are not going to build their own
| Snowflake, Salesforce, Slack or ATS. Maybe that day is 3 years
| away but when that happens the world will be very different
| designerarvid wrote:
| Companies do make/buy decisions on everything, it just
| software. Cleaning services are not expensive, yet companies
| contract them instead of hiring staff.
|
| This is called transaction cost economics, if anyone's
| interested.
| bensyverson wrote:
| I agree generally, but some of these enterprise contracts are
| eye-watering. If the choice is $2M/year with a 3-year minimum
| contract, or rolling your own, I think calculus really has
| shifted.
|
| With that said, the entire business world does not understand
| that software is more than just code. Even if you could write
| code instantly, making enterprise software would still take
| time, because there are simply _so many_ high-stakes decisions
| to make, and so much fractal detail.
| geraneum wrote:
| > Until you can get AI to the point where it equivalent to a 20
| person engineering team
|
| I think that's gonna happen when you don't need software and AI
| just does it all.
| random3 wrote:
| AI is eating the software https://a16z.com/why-software-is-
| eating-the-world/
| bhewes wrote:
| Why is it bad for AI to replace an enterprise software layer?
| Other than invalidating past investments.
| captainbland wrote:
| A few reasons, "AI" as used by non-experts often has
| correctness and security issues. Even when it doesn't, its
| outputs are often not reproducible/predictable because they're
| probabilistic systems.
|
| AI systems are also prone to writing code which they can't
| effectively refactor themselves, implying that many of these
| code bases are fiscal time bombs where human experts are
| required to come fix them. If the service being replaced has
| transactional behaviour, does the AI produced solution? Does
| the person using it know what that means?
|
| The other side is that AI as an industry still needs to recoup
| trillions in investment, and enterprise users are potential
| whales for that. Good prices in AI systems today are not
| guaranteed to last because even with hardware improvements
| these systems need to make money back that has been invested in
| them.
| ManuelKiessling wrote:
| There was a short moment in history where it seemed that the
| sentiment was: people will soon 3D-print 99% of their household
| items themselves instead of buying them.
|
| You absolutely could print things like cups, soap holders,
| picture frames, the small shovel you use for gardening, and so on
| an so on.
|
| 99% of people still just buy this stuff.
| obiefernandez wrote:
| I just recreated most of Linear for my company in a few days.
| Making it hyper specific to what we want (metrics driven, lean
| startup style).
|
| All state changes are made with MCP so it saved me from having to
| spend time on any forms and most interactions other than
| filtering searching sorting etc.
|
| Means we will be ditching Linear soon.
|
| I know I'm an outlier but this sort of thing will get more
| common.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| I don't understand this because who's gonna maintain it in the
| future? Surely that costs more to pay even one person to add
| features that Linear had than to pay Linear themselves. I'd do
| this for personal projects but never for my work company lest I
| be the one to maintain it indefinitely on top of my current
| work.
| thomasjudge wrote:
| "aol.com"?
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