Spend a few days on Threads or on Instagram and you'll see the majority of viral posts on Threads are generated by AI, and the majority of descriptions on Instagram are generated by AI. It makes me incredibly sad, because I've used the internet for human connection my entire life. I always loved meeting new people, or reading other's perspectives. But it all just feels so ... empty ... now. I hope the pendulum swings the other way soon.
I'm not sure I agree with the doom and gloom here, but I do understand the sentiment. Especially after spending a few days writing something that I feel should've taken me 3 weeks. I do struggle with having a knee-jerk reaction to that change. I mean I just told my wife a couple nights ago that the future of programming feels shaky, even though I know that's not the reality right now. But she was in my office, so I showed her a bug, and then I asked Claude to fix it, and the bug was gone in 30 seconds, with regression tests.
So yes, AI writes code faster than I can, but it usually doesn't write better code. And you still need to know how to program to produce good code; it's very easy for Claude to write unmaintainable code, especially as it continues to write more code. You really have to put time into refactoring, using prior programming experience to know how to do so.
My current workflow is to prototype with Claude, and then refactor with Claude by giving clear instructions on what needs to be refactored and why. This works relatively well. But even then, at the end of the session, even the refactorings don't quite meet my high bar. So I hand-code towards the end. Maybe that last bit will go away? But it hasn't.
To be honest, code is too personal and artistic for me to fully give up control. I enjoy stressing the details, like doing a squint test on the code as I would with any art to check composition, or rewriting variables and classes and methods to hit the spot where I say "now that's beautiful code." Passing tests doesn't mean code good, or tests.
Thankfully my job allows me to spend time doing that. I think it's human to spend time doing that.
> ... margin pressure that dilute SaaS from 70% margin in the era where building great software was hard, to ~0%, if building great software suddenly becomes trivial.
People keep saying that, but I honestly don't see it. The problem is that this idea ignores the fundamentals of build vs buy. And it ignores the cost of time. If you have a real business and you put an engineer onto vibe-coding a replacement for a CRM that costs you $500/mo, the economics just don't work out even if they could do it in a week. You'd spend more on paying that engineer -- whose core-competency is likely not CRMs but rather your product -- to build and maintain the internal tool than you would offloading it to a vendor.
Maybe this will happen with indies, but real businesses will continue to buy, for the same reasons they opt for managed open source products that are "free" -- because real businesses understand the cost of time. And real businesses usually don't want to sell to indies anyways, for the same reason: they value their time at near-zero.
And this isn't even factoring in cost of tokens, the cost of storage, and the cost of servers! I don't see a world where building/running/maintaining software costs nothing.
It really irks me that the de facto rate limiting headers mix camel case with the more standard dashes, i.e. RateLimit-Remaining instead of Rate-Limit-Remaining.
Http headers are case insensitive by spec (but not always as implemented, yay). I'm a fan of ratelimit as a single word, but then they capsed in the middle to hedge, I guess?
I sincerely hope that's not the takeaway. I would hope the takeaway would be that determination + skill can replace luck entirely, and that luck itself is not something that should be sought after at all.
Misappropriating success as good luck is dangerous, because it also misappropriates failure as bad luck.
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