Generative AI Is Having Its Herbalife Moment

I guess im wondering where is the line that makes this evil but my made up frying pan ad just a harmless exageration.

Replit (formerly repl.it) has been around for a decade as an online IDE / runtime, productized from work from 2009 for editing environments on udemy and co.

But like many companies they pivoted their marketing schtick to AI because that's where the money is. Cursor and Zed are editors, but because they capitalize on the AI hype and investor money they're "worth" tens of billions.

I mean Zed is cool and all because they dared to start a new editor from scratch with performance in mind but that in itself isn't tens of billions.

If all you saw means that's all there is then that itself is incorrect, why? People are building better solutions and you just havent seen them yet.

I know so because I am building one, you didn't know about it, if you are interested in seeing a sample of what it produces, the architecture etc, though not perfect but it should cause you to rethink because some of us are building the solutions to the problem you saw, you just didn't know it yet.

It's who has funding support around them that you hear of and see often.

That is simply not true. It can be better or it can be worse - depends on who directed it.

I understand where the point comes from, but someone who has coded and architected a lot of applications for many years, does get the good side. But a user who see code as an alien language - they are ultimately going to get the bad side of it.

There was a theory floated around by an youtuber (and a tech geek), on how to vibe code better - and how to let agents run the show. I tried, more than once - it failed badly. Not failed at the output or the UI - failed at writing good and well architected code.

> What happens when things go wrong

- this is the most important question - can the human step in?

For me the answer is a unequivocal yes. I may not be able to fix it in 10 minutes, but I know I will fix it in 10 hours or 100 hours - whatever it takes. But when a user who "can't read code" comes in - and asks me to fix their problem, it is going to cost them a lot more than their total subsidized vibe coding tool cost. They're going to be like - the app cost me 100-200$ to vibe-build, but the dev is going to charge me 5-10x for a 2 line fix.

For some the decision will be like - better buy a new phone than repairing the old one, for others - they can't replace things easily.

What used to take 1.5 years to build 10 years ago, and 6-9 months to build 5 years ago, takes 1.5 months or faster to build today (if it is done with the same rigor).

> The GDPR example

How is it different from having a human dev team hired? The CEOs or founders are responsible - they can't go and say "that dev did the wrong thing, fine them" - will you work for such a person?

> the belief that AI can — and will — displace white-collar jobs is a lie

It already is displacing, unfortunately. It has been taking apart both jobs and businesses - one role at a time - within 6 months of AI coming out. Some are experiencing it now, some have experienced it earlier, some will experience it later.

For example - a good tech guy in finance domain and having good domain knowledge - gets fired. After a while, he will end up competing for jobs in the finance domain - because he needs to survive. The domino effect will be seen. And hope it does not become a race to the bottom.

And new roles are likely to come up and stabilize - but the bar will be high and you will need AI all the time. Otherwise you will be seen like ploughing the farm by hand instead of using a tractor.

    > I don't like LLMs because:
    >
    > [ ] They steal from artists
    > [ ] They're destroying the planet
    > etc

Of course it's all within legal limits (or at least pre-legal, as the AI people call it[0]), but it smells like MLM. They'll stretch it as far as they can until there is push-back.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20260515043739/https://www.revsw...

I would happily read an AI-critical blogpost if it weren't clearly motivated by a strange, specific hatred of the prominent AI figureheads.

At this point I automatically dismiss writing like this, the motivated reasoning is palpable. Their distaste for the character and general vibes of the AI industry trap them in blatant denials of reality, like claiming that AI is a completely worthless technology or surely the bubble will pop any minute now.

I am all for well-researched criticisms of these companies and their claims, but please start at the facts and use them to derive your conclusions, rather than the other way around.

When my neighbour decided to pack it all in, he paid me 50 quid to pull his car into my workshop and take all the branding vinyl-cut off. Less than an hour for me, he'd been at it for days.

Is all non-vibe-coded software "good"? Are so-called real companies (with professional software development and IT staff) impervious to these threats?

> Also, would the person who developed the app know that, under legislation like GDPR, they can be financially liable for data breaches? Because they would be! And the whole point of the financial penalty system (at least, with respect to GDPR) is to be dissuasive — to act as a deterrent to other people who would be cavalier with other people’s data.

> I can very easily imagine a national data protection authority — like the UK’s ICO — giving someone a massive, massive fine in order to dissuade other people from deploying their own AI-generated, unvetted slop code.

Thousands of companies have been hit with GDPR fines, including some of the biggest companies in the world. Why the apparent assumption that vibe-coders are any more cavalier about people's data than companies that in many cases exist solely to profit from it?

I think you can make a legitimate argument that companies selling vibe coding dreams to laypeople are selling something generally unrealistic but the tone of this person's article seems like gatekeeper bait. It feels like he just doesn't like the idea that non-engineers might try to use tools (oversold or not) that allow them to do things he thinks non-engineers shouldn't do.

It's very much a "keep out", "stay in your lane" vibe.

It doesn't fucking matter to the success of a business.

I spent much of my early career unfucking large codebases that had been thrown together by sysadmins or teenagers or HTML guys who knew a bit of Perl on which an enterprising person had built very, very successful businesses. The software got fixed by pros long after profitability when it started to matter.

There are very few businesses where the quality of the software makes any real difference. What matters is execution, marketing, commercialization, but programmers see every business problem as a technical problem requiring technical excellence, because they're gigantic hammers.

Problem found. NEXT!