Why would vibe coding be harmful? Nobody can know that. That's like saying compilers are harmful for kids in the 90s, they have to learn assembly or NOTHING.
No one has lost anything though. AI is useful, but it's mostly just a shortcut. It removes the need to learn and to spend time and effort doing something. That's great, but you can still do the same work without it, especially if a creative pursuit that's something you're doing for fun.
My kid very much enjoys building things with claude. Things he could never have built without it. He learns a lot about technology as he does this. What right do you have (or Anthropic) to take that away from him? Because of vibes? You could have easily banned everything from TV to PCs and video games completely with this kind of attitude.
Access to AI isn't a right (yet). Anthropic can choose who to sell it to, and if that's not you then bad luck. They don't need a right to do that; they can just do it because it's their product and they get to say who can buy it.
This is a reason why local open weights models are important. No one is taking Gemma 4B away from me, because I run it on my own hardware.
The "new ideas are fragile" is certainly true. I'm struggling with something I'm building which I think is extremely cool but technically difficult, but which if based on the reaction of friends and family I'd abandoned long ago. Only after having worked on it for 2 years and really got it working technically did I see a small spark in my dad's eyes as he said "oh, you can make MONEY off of this?". I feel like I have a strong internal compass but I have to admit external validation is needed at some point, but I noticed some people I just cannot share ideas with. They're in the habit of shooting down anything, and they would have found 100 reasons that any famous company or product would have failed. Unsurprisingly these people have not achieved much themselves, never taking any risk.
> I noticed some people I just cannot share ideas with. They're in the habit of shooting down anything, and they would have found 100 reasons that any famous company or product would have failed
I understand what you're saying but the last line is kind of weird no? Why do you need to villify them if they didn't give you good feedback? Why do you care so much that you have to mention they "have not acheived much themselves, never taken any risk" etc.
The entire point of feedback is to see it as impersonal and not a value judgement on you (the creator) vrs the project.
Like okay, what if someone was extremely successful and taken a lot of risks and repeats the same feedback you've gotten. Would that make the feedback magically true?
Instead of judging the people who give you feedback, judge the feedback itself and let it go. In the end, you disagreed with them because you knew what was right to do. There is no point thinking about them as good or bad people but just whose feedback was objectively wrong.
Again this is a bit of a ramble but my point is that "i will prove them stupid people wrong" can turn into internal resentment as well where you judge your victory by how much you "showed them" rather than how much you showed yourself. It is very likely you can get all the success in the world and those people will still think you are a loser. You cannot win that battle and if you actually believe them thinking that of you matters, you will not be happy even in success.
I don't mean to vilify them, I think it's just a matter of fact that if you habitually poke 100 holes in any idea, both your own and others, you will do the very safe thing.
If someone had taken risks, had ideas, seen some fail some work and they said my idea is bad, I would listen to them more for sure. Maybe my idea is bad, only time will tell. I'm not saying these people are stupid, many of them are smart. I think if you are smart it actually gets easier to poke holes in an idea.
> I don't mean to vilify them, I think it's just a matter of fact that if you habitually poke 100 holes in any idea, both your own and others, you will do the very safe thing.
I always find it so interesting that the same principle can lead to many conclusions. Based on the people I know and my own life, I would have argued the opposite. The people who do not attempt to poke holes in every idea are those that just go with the "default", "safe" option. They have not meaningfully evaluated any options and simply taken face value where the default seems less complex and therefore the lowest risk/highest value (I.e, safe) option.
Exactly and that was sort of my point but I didn't want to push since its a bit of a personal thing but yes if you feel like someone poking a hole in your idea is a "bad thing" and equate it to "they don't believe in me", that creates a very toxic and resentment-based mindset. Whereas in your example, the feedback is just feedback, you don't treat it as something that is personal or has any moral implications. And if you have people willing to go deep and provide feedback (poke holes), it is likely logical to assume at some level they care deeply to at least engage even if its negative feedback. Ego is hard.
I promise you if you had the experience I've had you would understand what I'm talking about. Especially one friend has gotten me down. I share what I'm doing with him because he's actually in the right industry, just not technical. I've been showing him my technical progress, which may sound delusional, but I'm building something very cool that hasn't been done before, and when generalized has a high potential value. But every time I share I just get negative feedback, not constructive. I don't think he realizes he's doing it, and we're childhood friends. Anyway, I'm convinced this has value so I'm not giving up (I do get good feedback when showing it to potential users), but I would kill for even a "wow, that looks really cool".
I'd consider yourself blessed to be surrounded by cynics. I've always found myself with the opposite scenario where people are overly kind even when I specifically ask them not to be. If you're reasonably objective, I think you can tell if a criticism is garbage or warranted. But if whatever you're making is just the greatest thing since sliced bread then the feedback is completely useless.
I’ve known about the “new ideas are fragile” concept for a while and it’s why I generally will never criticize someone’s early work or ideas, but rather try to hype them up. Because of this, technical people with new ideas and projects have been more likely to come to me early on when they wanna show what they’ve been working on. Admittedly, I actually do think a lot of the ideas I’m presented with are bad, but a smart person starting with a seemingly bad idea may still end up somewhere very interesting. Never be the shooter down of new ideas.
I'm similar to you in that encouragement and external valuation goes a long way for me, but I've found that all successful business-minded entrepreneurial types really love playing the game where they bounce ideas off each other and try to shoot each other's ideas down.
When they pitch a new idea to family and friends they get pats on the head and it doesn't materially help them at all, but when someone says "that'll never work" they get excited and their ears perk up, because that new perspective could save them a ton of money going down a wrong path.
People will sometimes wish you to follow their footsteps. That is because they wish you succeed and they have a framework that lead to their own success. And by success I mean something as simple as just surviving so far.
That means they may try to tell you to give up on any idea that does not fit their framework, simply because having no experience with means it’s riskier than things that do fit.
I don’t mean to defend this behavior, neither to say this is definitely what is happening here, but if it applies, I think it’s a good idea to frame this as people wishing you well, in their own twisted way.
I have a vague recollection of a point someone made before that most ideas are usually wrong or incorrect at the start. For example, Nvidia was built on the thesis that non-triangular polygons would dominate, which was 100% wrong (today all polygons are triangular). But they often develop into something true.
Sure, but to find what works you need to take action first. The problem is if you have no support network that encourages you to take action you are more likely not to start or to give up when you face headwinds. That's one reason startups tend to happen in a few hubs. Yes, it's also where VC is, but to get started you need likeminded people who don't reflexively shoot down anything new.
Salaries are a product of supply AND demand. Supply of good programmers and EE/MechE is low because it requires above average intelligence and a lot of education, while demand for software has been much higher than demand for EE/MechE. Now that the demand side might invert.
While you are directionally accurate, the flaw in your thinking is revealed by the fact that bad programmers also have high salaries, and plenty of five year olds have no problem being bad programmers, so there is clearly no need for above average intelligence or education to be a bad programmer.
As hard as it might be for this audience to comprehend, supply is limited simply because it is an undesirable profession. The majority of the population couldn't think of anything worse to spend their time doing. Much as the same reason why they don't want to go work on oil rigs and other such work that is high paying but what most people are unwilling to do.
High compensation is actually not as strong as a motivator as you might think. It can tip the scales if someone is already on the fence, but it doesn't suddenly make someone who absolutely can't stand something to change their mind.
Cheap toys? You seem stuck in the 90s, and you're quoting a 10 year old article. Since then China has taken over the car industry with EVs, solar industry, building more new energy every than the us has installed total, leading in humanoid robotics and drones. WTF are you talking about?
(Not American, need to preface with this) I think the US military has shown itself to be extremely competent in the last war. Reading about Desert Storm and later the invasion of Iraq it's just insane. It's still possible they miscalculated how rapidly warfare would change, but to call them morons... As far as I can see, there are only three proven militaries in the world, the US, Israel and Ukraine, and the US is orders of magnitude larger than the rest. Have we already forgotten what happened to Maduro? What other country in the history of the world could pull something like that off? Russia tried at Hostomel, didn't go so well.
I think their point is that it doesn't really matter how competent the lower levels of the command structure are if the ones at the very top are bumbling fools unwilling to listen.
If you don’t have an objective, no amount of military might is going to get you there. This was the USA’s biggest mistake in Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Iran.
> Have we already forgotten what happened to Maduro? What other country in the history of the world could pull something like that off?
Venezuela was a raid, not a full on war. And it was so lopsided it was like putting Michael Jordan against a 10-year-old and based on that performance determining that Jordan is the GOAT. It demonstrated that against a remarkably unprepared and unready opponent the US can do well, which tells you nothing about the US's capabilities in actual warfare against a peer, near peer, or just damned determined opponents.
> Russia tried at Hostomel, didn't go so well.
That was not a comparable action to the Maduro raid. The raid was an in-and-out operation, with no need to control any territory for a significant period. Hostomel was a battle over control of territory.
As a note, while there was no war Russia has already acquired Crimea a few years before and it was only a matter of time before invasion itself was to happen, so Ukraine was preparing for that attack more or less.
It's not a tactical failure of the US; it's a strategic one. The US operates a tremendously powerful military, but that doesn't change the fact that the war with Iran was a tremendous strategic blunder. "Moronic" is a pretty fair characterization.
Is executing a strategy that you (should) know to be impossible to implement because of logistical limitations really a logistics failure?
It’s not as if the US, a few years ago, said it needed way more long-range precision weapons in 2026, and didn’t get them, despite promises to the contrary.
You have tactics and strategy mixed up. Killing Iran leadership was a tactical success. Continually shooting long range missiles into a giant country is a strategic failure.
You think the US has shown itself as to be extremely competent in the Iran war? If you were talking about Iraq, that was completely different leadership.
Not only leadership, war looked different back then. The Ukraine war made everyone throw away the classic war playbook.
At the time of the Iraq war the US was holding all the cards. It had a perfected playbook, the optimal technology, and support from the population. In the Iran war the old playbook is ineffective, the technology is too expensive to keep it up, and the popular support for a war demanded by another country isn't there.
And yes... you have the current crop of leaders who couldn't lead their way out of a wet paper bag.
The son of the elderly Iranian ruler, aligned politically with his father, took over. The war prompted Iran to operate one of the world's largest economic pressure levers, to great effect. The U.S.'s unilateralism, leadership rhetoric, and war crimes (like bombing a school) have lost it a significant amount of global goodwill.
None of that seems like it jibes with your description.
It does. The initial strike, while effective, has proven to achieve absolutely nothing, or less than nothing. Neither Iran's military nor logistic nor even administrative capability was impacted to any serious extent. The population, of which a large proportion was against the regime and potentially on the brink of a revolt, quickly fell in line and became supporters, faced with the external opposition. And Iran has proven its ability to unilaterally close the straight of Hormuz, a crippling blow to the entire world's economy that the USA is simply unable to stop.
So again - the execution shows significant tactical competence. But the strategic direction is absolutely disastrous.
Success or failure isn’t judged by how many explosions or dead bodies each side racks up. Def Sec McNamara admits he made that mistake during the Vietnam war when he repeatedly asserted the US was winning with all sorts of statistics and charts with steep lines pointing up.
The real question is whether political objectives are achieved. In Iran, those were vaguely defined to begin with, but depending on the moment and mood of the President they were:
1. Prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon now or in the foreseeable future (Not Achieved)
3. Maintain international access to key shipping routes (Negative Achieved, much worse than pre-war status quo)
So after spending billions of dollars, depleting stockpiles of our most modern precision weapons against a vastly inferior military technologically, losing 18 American lives and resulting in both global economic disruption and to our Gulf allies, the war has failed to accomplish any objectives and left everyone in a worse position than before the war except the IRGC.
Minimal cost? We’re at about a billion dollars per primary target and rising. Not to mention north of 250 US casualties. I’d hardly call that minimal cost.
Our ability to defend our allies in the region is non existent, and we lost almost all of our radar capabilities which will take a decade minimum to rebuild. That’s assuming hostilities end tomorrow.
Congrats, now even more hardline leadership got power. And it was conclusively proven that US trears accomodating or measured responses as weakness, so the new leadership wont makr the same mistake.
Iran gained straight of hormuz. It gained chuckpaz and confidence too. It is now itching to play major regional power
Yes, but the military exists for the nation, not the other way around, so a military success that turns into a national disaster is not a military success at all.
That's why even in the nuclear Navy, as crazy as they are about reactor safety, they would train and preach continuously that "safety of ship" is more important than reactor safety, because the reactor is not safe if the ship is not safe.
From a military standpoint, yes. You have to have your head buried in the sand to think we didn’t have significant loss of military assets in the region.
A very cursory investigation suggests the Iran war has cost the US approximately 100 billion dollars.
About half in hardware and half in increased costs for citizens.
These costs are continuing since there is no end in sight and it seems the US is running out of some of the equipment it has used.
What were the stated goals and did the US achieve them? The same family still runs Iran in the same way, nothing has changed in a material way as of now.
How many lives has the US lost? What has Iran lost so far in the conflict with the US and Israel (a conflict which is not over)? The propaganda attempting to spin this as setting up as a strategic defeat for the US, is almost comical.
As is, the US can stand-off and torment Iran for a very, very long time.
$31 trillion economy. $94,000 GDP per capita (nearly 3x Japan for reference). The US can spend $100 billion annually on bombing Iran for the next decade entirely without harming its economy in a meaningful way.
The US doesn't have to let off. Iran is pinned, massively eroded, and the US is only losing money. Iran has lost all of its proxies, its military is entirely broken (and fully capable of waging a guerrilla conflict), its navy is gone, its airforce is gone, its military manufacturing is substantially eroded, and Russia is boiling. The reason the US is going back and forth on peace, is for the same exact same reason it's in the US interest to bleed Russia. It's this: let's pretend we want peace, while we endlessly grind Iran down.
One of these things is not like the other. Russia is a threat to Europe, and is in the midst of invading a country with a lot of agricultural, industrial, and cultural upside that should be on the road to EU integration. Bombing the snot out of Russian trenches in eastern Ukraine might even be a good idea.
Perhaps letting Iran, a country ruled by fanatics, build enough military infrastructure to the point that they're able to hold a significant part of the world's energy hostage was the original blunder?
You could argue they'd never use their power unless attacked, but I don't think you can be certain of that. It comes down to if you can accept that a non-rational actor can be allowed to have this power (or nuclear weapons for that matter).
Now that the cat is out of the bag it would be a terrible idea not to finish the job and make sure Iran doesn't have this power ever again.
If you tried, could you make a more vague and abstract example of the sunk cost fallacy? Iran would do what with what to whom? There is literally no better example of a case where we could just stop being stupid and injuring ourselves by being stupid than fighting Iran.
I mean it doesn't, it's just that Iran is ruled by fanatics who'd rather see their country cease to exist than to give up power. If your definition of winning is just infinite willingness to die then Iran definitely won.
I was left scratching my head why Ukraine would be there, but not Iran, on the basis that it too has stood its ground in what the superpower aggressor planned to be short and decisive conflict.
Iran has survived this war so far because the aggressor hasn't made any attempt to actually defeat them. It's very different from Ukraine, which is holding its own against an all-out invasion. Iran might well be able to withstand an all-out invasion by the US, but it hasn't had to yet.
Right now, the US is half-heartedly trying to bomb Iran into submission, something that in the entire history of aerial warfare has worked exactly once (and even that one time is debatable).
> Right now, the US is half-heartedly trying to bomb Iran into submission
The title of TFA confirms the attempt is wholehearted: It's just not working as well as it did in Venezuela (where leadership was captured, rather than killed).
If it was wholehearted then the lack of long-range ground-to-ground precision munitions wouldn't be putting a damper on things, we'd be bombing round the clock from the air with way more sorties than are actually being flown.
Venezuela worked because it had much clearer and more limited goals (capture Maduro, vs regime change spark a revolution hammer out an agreement on nukes who knows what) and boots were put on the ground to accomplish those goals. Venezuela was not bombed into submission. Like I said, that has happened exactly once ever (or maybe not even), and that one time involved weapons that nobody is willing to use again (and rightfully so).
Have they? Obviously there have been a ton of issues due to the US’s strategy in Iran. But almost nobody in the US has any affect from this war. Gas prices are up a bit. Mildly inconvenient for the majority of people, and that’s the biggest failure people are mad about.
Zoom in on this year and you'll see it's below $3 a gallon in January and February, then by the end of March it's over $4 and mostly above after that. That's a 33% increase. That's a substantial and sustained hike in a short time.
Gas prices are up a bit? In my area it’s gone up at least $2 from before the war. Which is just another way that everything has gotten so much more expensive recently (not that all of that is caused by the war).
Agreed yes that’s not great. But really if that’s the worst thing you’re noticing in your daily life at home, things must be pretty ok?
You must see the difference between us being unhappy that gas is more expensive, versus somebody living in Iran worrying that their entire government and country is in chaos.
Obviously this war is bad for a bunch of reasons, but the US is completely fine at home relatively.
> Obviously this war is bad for a bunch of reasons, but the US is completely fine at home relatively.
With the exception of total wars, the domestic standard of living has very little to do with how well or not a foreign war is going.
How good Americans are living is a non-sequitur with regards to the war objectives set by the political and military leaders in Washington and Tehran. War, being politics by other means, has to be measured by political objectives. The average American didn't even notice when America relinquished control of Afghanistan to the Taliban, amd yet it was a clear-cut failure to achieve GW's stated goals.
Military competence has nothing to do with running low on munitions after months of war. There are four ways to address the issue: have larger stockpiles before the war, ramp up production during the war, end the war, or don't go to war in the first place. None of those can be done by the military. It's all up to the civilian leadership, and the current civilian leadership is catastrophically incompetent. The current commander in chief is a "fucking moron," to quote his former Secretary of State.
Desert Storm was 35 years ago. Almost everyone who fought in it is out of service or dead.
Iraqi invasion was 23 years ago. Again, almost everyone who was part of the initial invasion is out of service. I wouldn't call the occupation of either Afghanistan or Iraq "extremely competent." More like the exact opposite.
(Am an American, don't know if it matters that I preface with this)
The US military is quite powerful.
Donald Trump is a moron.
Pete Hegseth is also a moron whose only qualification is that he looks like what the moron Donald Trump imagines someone playing his role would look like in the movies/TV.
I mean, talk about circular investment and FOMO all you want, but if you use Fable every day you know what's coming. This is no bubble, we're just getting started.
I prefer working alone, and even more so now with AI. When I work alone and own the whole project, I make the judgment call when and where slop is fine and where it's not. When working on a team there is always this battle to get code through the tests and review, often for code that is temporary or simply does not matter that much. Reviews rarely result in any meaningful changes anyway, unless the changes are < 50 LoC, in which case it's nitpicked to death instead of the "LGTM" you get for larger PRs. It all reminds me of airport security theater. Similarly, a 2 hour flight is now a 4 hour time waste of time, and a simple change that should take 10 minutes now takes up most of your day.
Until lately I thought messaging apps like WhatsApp is ok, but this summer my eleven year old niece has been depressed, crying at the summer lake house with extended family because she can see her friends hanging out on WhatsApp. Incredibly toxic. Basically she can't enjoy the adventures we have here because of it. Even a simple thing like group chats completely destroy their brains.
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