Comment by vegadw

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Comment by vegadw

> In 99% of software it does not matter

and

> Models will become so fast that UI will be generated on the fly

Tells me this author is a bit, uh, disconnected from the real world. Your time to UI being populated and the UI's familiarity are the product.

I'm working on a huge vibe coded app in Rust rn, but it's entire purpose in existence is to be way, way faster to open and use than the software it competes with. The difference in feeling of something that opens and is usable within ~10ms (so under 1 frame at 60Hz) compared to one that's 100ms or 1s is HUGE. Getting it to be fast, good UI isn't a single prompt, it's a huge amount of refinement, over many weeks.

The difference between software with very straight forward keyboard shortcuts and intuitive UI, guided and crafted for a human, is huge.

Right now, models particularly struggle to make good UI, because it's a human problem. It doesn't care how big text is, because it's reading HTML, not visually looking at the page. Even if you feedback loop it image processing, it's a long ways from making good UI, especially good UI 1-shot. Even if you assume this makes leaps and bounds AND that "frameworks" that make the UI share common design language across on-the-fly prompts AND that it caches UI's that the user likes, etc. etc. I think this is incredibly far off base.

Then there's the missing points of software not being all basic tools that the end goal is to make a SAAS for. Embeded software exists. We're a long way from it being smart enough to figure out when something is a hardware issue. Hardware harness that connect it every test point are ungodly expensive, and so will continue to need a human in the loop for the foreseeable future.

Or, to pick on different points

> Code review will die. [...] Unit tests might die too

Alright, but then you're first up to use the AI vibe-coded pacemaker, or large machinery, or medical diagnostic hardware, or car.

To quote Doctorow,

> There are no cars, only computers we sit in. There are no hearing aids, only computers we put in our ears. There are no 3D printers, only computers that drive peripherals.

I do think AI will change software development, but not everything, not universally, and not without consequence to quality that we'll have to learn the hard way.

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