150 years ago was the invention of the telephone, and I think that articles like this seem to assume that prior to this, police just never caught any criminals.

Just the other day I was trying to find out "What american tree species have the deepest roots". And all the AI responses were giving me back generic lists of big trees and claiming that roots going 20ft deep were the deepest. I know for a fact the mesquite trees behind my house can easily grow roots > 100 ft deep.

If I had clicked on the articles with generic lists of big trees, I would have realized they were all low quality clickbait sources and moved on. But the AI presentation makes you think that the information comes well-researched.

Also I realized the other day how hard it is to find song lyrics for anything other than quite mainstream songs.

Its like making a jig in woodworking. The measure of the jig's success is not whether it gets re-used or widespread adoption, its whether it made it easier to achieve some actual objective. Because the jig is a means to some other end.

Lots of these "we wouldn't have done it otherwise" applications are means, not ends.

Here's an example: my office has a few cars for employees to use as rentals. The number is small enough that it would never be worth any serious software dev to build a tool to manage, but large enough that its a moderate amount of work for someone to manage the requests/getting supervisor approvals/schedule changes due to breakdowns.

AI one-shot that guy a tool. Its now dead simple, he's got a calendar, automatic emails going to people's supervisors with click-here-to-approve links, rescheduling options, fleet management. It doesn't even look bad.

Who cares if its using some un-backed-up sqlite database in the backend, has some placeholder tab for a feature he changed his mind about, or violates the DRY principles a bunch or uses some inferior authentication mechanism. Its an in house tool, isn't mission critical, and it makes his life significantly easier.

Basically everyone is now a few prompts away from their own bespoke tools, and only they will be able to judge the benefit thereof.

Edit: to tie this more directly to the article, I would argue that this is an example of "infinity-x" coding, because the user was in fact not capable of coding a solution on their own without AI.

https://mcfunley.com/whom-the-gods-would-destroy-they-first-...

But in reality, a lot of corporate software exists just because there are plenty of companies who are afraid of owning code. They don't want to maintain any in-house coding skills, and therefore are willing to buy literally any vaguely-relevant CRUD app that the manager heard about at the conference. I don't think replacing that class of software with vibe coded alternatives will be any worse, because the bar is starting on the floor.

There are entire software categories that consist entirely of code that is only one or two evolutionary steps away from some engineer's spreadsheet originally written in 1995. One fine example I work with has changed its backend database 3 times in the past 4 years. Their most recent decision to use mongodb came with the questionable decision to store json as a raw string literals complete with bizarre escaping inside a database literally designed to store json-shaped-objects.

I don't think Opus could store data that poorly, even if the end user prompting it didn't know what they were doing.

In my workplace, we're going to decline to renew some software subscriptions because a non-programmer vibe-coded their replacement in a week.

The impacts are here, they're just not evenly distributed yet.

I think the history of children's literature may be shorter than you think.

https://www.12000.org/my_notes/CAS_ode_tests/index.htm

He does a few other side-by-side comparisons but doesn't include open source engines in them.