A 50-year-old doctor who wants to build a specialized medical tool, a teacher who sees exactly what educational software should look like, a small business owner who knows their industry's pain points better than any developer. These people have been sitting on the sidelines because the barrier to entry was so high.
The "vibe coding" revolution isn't really about kids (though that's cute) - it's about unleashing all the pent-up innovation from people who understand problems deeply but couldn't translate that understanding into software.
It's like the web democratized publishing, or smartphones democratized photography. Suddenly expertise in the domain matters more than expertise in the tools.
> it's about unleashing all the pent-up innovation from people who understand problems deeply but couldn't translate that understanding into software.
This is just a fantasy. People with "incredible ideas" and "pent-up innovation" also need incredible determination and motivation to make something happen. LLMs aren't going to magically help these people gain the energy and focus needed to pursue an idea to fruition. Coding is just a detail; it's not the key ingredient all these "locked out" people were missing.
A doctor has an idea. Great. Takes a lot more than a eureka moment to make it reality. Even if you had a magic machine that could turn it into the application you thought of. All of the iterations, testing with users, refining, telemetry, managing data, policies and compliance... it's a lot of work. Code is such a small part. Most doctors want to do doctor stuff.
We've had mind-blowing music production software available to the masses for decades now... not a significant shift in people lining up to be the musicians they always wanted to be but were held back by limited access to the tools to record their ideas.
This comment is wildly out of touch. The SMB owner can now generate some Python code. Great. Where do they deploy it? How do they deploy it? How do they update it? How do they handle disaster recovery? And so on and so forth.
LLMs accelerate only the easiest part of software engineering, writing greenfield code. The remaining 80% is left as an exercise to the reader.
No one, including Karpathy in this video, is advocating for "vibe coding". If nothing more, LLMs paired with configurable tool-usage, is basically a highly advanced and contextual search engine you can ask questions. Are you not using a search engine today?
Even without LLMs being able to produce code or act as agents they'd be useful, because of that.
But it sucks we cannot run competitive models locally, I agree, it is somewhat of a "rich people" tool today. Going by the talk and theme, I'd agree it's a phase, like computing itself had phases. But you're gonna have to actually watch and listen to the talk itself, right now you're basically agreeing with the video yet wrote your comment like you disagree.
Also the disconnect for me here is I think back on the cost of electronics, prices for the level of compute have generally gone down significantly over time. The c64 launched around the $5-600 price level, not adjusted for inflation. You can go and buy a Mac mini for that price today.
For the general public, these increasing costs will besubsidized by advertising. I cant wait for ads to start appearring in chatGPT- it will be very insidious as the advertising will be comingled with the output so there will be no way to avoid it.
As for advertising, it’s possible, but with so many competitors and few defensible moats, there’s real pressure to stay ad-free. These tools are also positioned to command pricing power in a way search never was, given search has been free for decades.
The hardware vs. software angle seems like a distraction. My original point was in response to the claim that LLMs are “toys for the rich.” The C64 was a rich kid’s toy too—and far less capable.
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I think you are referring to what those kids in the vibe coding event produced. Wasn't their output available in the video itself?
GitHub copilot has a free tier.
Google gives you thousands of free LLM API calls per day.
There are other free providers too.
You should consider how much it actually costs, not how much they charge.
How do people fail to consider this?
You are correct that some providers might reduce prices for market capture, but the alternatives are still cheap, and some are close to being competitive in quality to the API providers.
It going to get wild when the tech bro investors demand ads be the included in responses.
It will be trivial for a version of AdWords where someone pays for response words be replaced. “Car” replaced by “Honda”, variable names like “index” by “this_index_variable_is_sponsered_by_coinbase” etc.
I’m trying to be funny with the last one but something like this will be coming sooner than later. Remember, google search used to be good and was ruined by bonus seeking executives.
Sure, nobody can predict the long-term economics with certainty but companies like OpenAI already have compelling business fundamentals today. This isn’t some scooter startup praying for margins to appear; it’s a platform with real, scaled revenue and enterprise traction.
But yeah, tell me more about how my $200/mo plan is bankrupting them.
Not everyone has to paid that cost, as some companies are releasing weights for download and local use (like Llama) and then some other companies are going even further and releasing open source models+weights (like OLMo). If you're a provider hosting those, I don't think it makes sense to take the training cost into account when planning your own infrastructure.
Although I don't it makes much sense personally, seemingly it makes sense for other companies.
What would be interesting to see is what those kids produced with their vibe coding.