alt Hacker NewsWe should be more ambitious, but we need to learn how we can be ambitious with AI, and what value we can create.
AI can take us from 0 to MVP in a prompt. It can fill in gaps of knowledge and allows someone who knows half of the stack to build the whole thing nearly seamlessly. These are superpowers but don't by themselves lead to new products.
What AI cannot do is remove the world of complications that happen after the MVP - product feature tradeoffs and choices, how to handle integrations and customizations, how to serve multiple types of users, how to communicate and market the app, how to handle security and data storage, how to deal with customers and bugs, etc. All of these need to be considered and acted on by a human in some fashion. AI can help with each concern but can't solve them without understanding the concern and determining how to frame it in a prompt.
This is why we have a glut of amazing demos that go nowhere while we figure out how to build software differently. This will take some time and I imagine the result will be software heavily-structured with a bit of AI reasoning woven throughout, not an army of agents and sub-agents burning infinite tokens.
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I haven't yet seen any significant products made with AI that are at least used long-term. All these browser demos, from the Adobe killers to Star Citizen, are just bells and whistles that I close after 30 seconds of use.
Agreed. Been experiencing this firsthand with an app I've been building myself. Vibecoded a working prototype ridiculously fast but then came the optimization issues. Since mine is very hardware dependent every different brand, oem stack, processor, video card, and every little thing changes how my app functions and a lot of it isnt even documented properly. Now AI is still very useful here, but you actually need to know what even to ask and fix in the first place
There have been a few vibecoded projects I've considered hosting on my home server, but it seems as if each of them doesn't understand when to stop adding new features.
They keep adding features that are outside the scope of the original project, without refining or polishing the original concept.
My interpretation of "be more ambitious" is not only give it harder problems, but be more creative about what you ask. The problem is that most of the MVPs that people ask for a boring and lame. AI can help us make things that blow your mind, things that we would never build because they don't make sense, but the cost models for code generation have changed.
> AI can take us from 0 to MVP in a prompt.
If you're being ambitious enough, you shouldn't be able to there in one prompt. Ambitious work with AI is done 24/7 for months and guiding it continuously, because it's not good enough to work autonomously for that long without going off the rails.
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Right, but this is the most hopeful imaginable prediction: AI accelerates everything, but everything good is still mediated through taste and expertise, so being a (say) skilled systems engineer is important and rewarding, just with all the tedium distilled out of it.
There's a less hopeful outcome, where no skill is needed at all, because every conceivable thing is one-shot-able from a SOTA model. But then, at that point, you're saying something pretty profound about computer science (roughly: that there was no meaningfully more sophisticated and complex place to go from where we are today).