The difference is that 3D printing still requires someone, somewhere to do the mechanical design work. It democratises printing but it doesn't democratise invention. I can't use words to ask a 3d printer to make something. You can't really do that with claude code yet either. But every few months it gets better at this.
The question is: How good will claude get at turning open-ended problem statements into useful software? Right now a skilled human + computer combo is the most efficient way to write a lot of software. Left on its own, claude will make mistakes and suffer from a slow accumulation of bad architectural decisions. But, will that remain the case indefinitely? I'm not convinced.
This pattern has already played out in chess and go. For a few years, a skilled Go player working in collaboration with a go AI could outcompete both computers and humans at go. But that era didn't last. Now computers can play Go at superhuman levels. Our skills are no longer required. I predict programming will follow the same trajectory.
There are already some companies using fine tuned AI models for "red team" infosec audits. Apparently they're already pretty good at finding a lot of creative bugs that humans miss. (And apparently they find an extraordinary number of security bugs in code written by AI models). It seems like a pretty obvious leap to imagine claude code implementing something similar before long. Then claude will be able to do security audits on its own output. Throw that in a reinforcement learning loop, and claude will probably become better at producing secure code than I am.
The first part is making sure you built to your specification, the second thing is making sure you built specification was correct.
The second part is going to be the hard part for complex software and systems.
I don't know about you, but I'd much rather be shown a demo made by claude (and our end users) than get sent a 100 page spec that - if we built to it - wouldn't actually solve anyone's real problems.
Demo, don't memo.
You can: the words are in the G-code language.
I mean: you are used to learn foreign languages in school, so you are already used to formulate your request in a different language to make yourself understood. In this case, this language is G-code.
The walls and plateaus that have been consistently pulled out from "comments of reassurance" have not materialized. If this pace holds for another year and a half, things are going to be very different. And the pipeline is absolutely overflowing with specialized compute coming online by the gigawatt for the foreseeable future.
So far the most accurate predictions in the AI space have been from the most optimistic forecasters.
No such thing as trajectory when it comes to mass behavior because it can turn on a dime if people find reason to. Thats what makes civilization so fun.
Im really tired, and exhausted of reading simple takes.
Grok is a very capable LLM that can produce decent videos. Why are most garbage? Because NOT EVERYONE HAS THE SKILL NOR THE WILL TO DO IT WELL!
I don't know if they will ever get there, but LLMs are a long ways away from having decent creative taste.
Which means they are just another tool in the artist's toolbox, not a tool that will replace the artist. Same as every other tool before it: amazing in capable hands, boring in the hands of the average person.
This matters less for text (including code) because you can always directly edit what the AI outputs. I think it's a lot harder for video.
I wonder if it would be possible to fine train an AI model on my own code. I've probably got about 100k lines of code on github. If I fed all that code into a model, it would probably get much better at programming like me. Including matching my commenting style and all of my little obsessions.
Talking about a "taste gap" sounds good. But LLMs seem like they'd be spectacularly good at learning to mimic someone's "taste" in a fine train.
How can I proclaim what I said in the comment above? Because Ive spent the past week producing something very high quality with Grok. Has it been easy? Hell no. Could anyone just pick up and do what Ive done? Hell no. It requires things like patience, artistry, taste etc etc.
The current tech is soul-less in most people hands and it should remain used in a narrow range in this context. The last thing I want to see is low quality slop infesting the web. But hey that is not what the model producers want - they want to maximize tokens.
With Opus 4.6 I'm seeing that it copies my code style, which makes code review incredibly easy, too.
At this point, I've come around to seeing that writing code is really just for education so that you can learn the gotchas of architecture and support. And maybe just to set up the beginnings of an app, so that the LLM can mimic something that makes sense to you, for easy reading.
And all that does mean fewer jobs, to me. Two guys instead of six or more.
All that said, there's still plenty to do in infrastructure and distributed systems, optimizations, network engineering, etc. For now, anyway.
How long before those lines cross? Intuitively it feels like we have about 2-3 years before claude is better at writing code than most - or all - humans.
And, pray tell, how people are going to come up with such design?
The other day I tested an AI by giving it a folder of images, each named to describe the content/use/proportions (e.g., drone-overview-hero-landscape.jpg), told it the site it was redesigning, and it did a very serviceable job that would match at least a cheap designer. On the first run, in a few seconds and with a very basic prompt. Obviously with a different AI, it could understand the image contents and skip that step easily enough.
I think exceptional work, AI tools or not, still takes exceptional people with experience and skill. But I do feel like a certain level of access to technology has been unlocked for people smart enough, but without the time or tools to dive into the real industry's tools (figma, code, data tools etc).
I think the idea that LLM's will usher in some new era where everyone and their mom are building software is a fantasy.
I am usually a bit of an AI skeptic but I can already see that this is within the realm of possibility, even if models stopped improving today. I think we underestimate how technical things like WIX or Squarespace are, to a non-technical person, but many are skilled business people who could probably work with an LLM agent to get a simple product together.
People keep saying code was never the real skill of an engineer, but rather solving business logic issues and codifying them. Well people running a business can probably do that too, and it would be interesting to see them work with an LLM to produce a product.
They wouldn’t even know where to begin!
Even if all sandboxing is done right, programs will be depended on to store data correctly and to show correct outputs.
Agreed. Honestly, and I hate to use the tired phrase, but some people are literally just built different. Those who'd be entrepreneurs would have been so in any time period with any technology.
HN is a echo chamber of a very small sub group. The majority of people can’t utilize it and needs to have this further dumbed down and specialized.
That’s why marketing and conversion rate optimization works, its not all about the technical stuff, its about knowing what people need.
For funded VC companies often the game was not much different, it was just part of the expenses, sometimes a lot sometimes a smaller part. But eventually you could just buy the software you need, but that didn’t guarantee success. Their were dramatic failures and outstanding successes, and I wish it wouldn’t but most of the time the codebase was not the deciding factor. (Sometimes it was, airtable, twitch etc, bless the engineers, but I don’t believe AI would have solved these problems)
Tbh, depending on the field, even this crowd will need further dumbing down. Just look at the blog illustration slops - 99% of them are just terrible, even when the text is actually valuable. That's because people's judgement of value, outside their field of expertise, is typically really bad. A trained cook can look at some chatgpt recipe and go "this is stupid and it will taste horrible", whereas the average HN techbro/nerd (like yours truly) will think it's great -- until they actually taste it, that is.
1) I don’t disagree with the spirit of your argument
2) 3D printing has higher startup costs than code (you need to buy the damn printer)
3) YOU are making a distinction when it comes to vibe coding from non-tech people. The way these tools are being sold, the way investments are being made, is based on non-domain people developing domain specific taste.
This last part “reasonable” argument ends up serving as a bait and switch, shielding these investments. I might be wrong, but your comment doesn’t indicate that you believe the hype.