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Vibe coding could be as transformative as steam power, and it's unleashing a gold rush where the space of prospecting is ideas.

Let's talk about idea men. An "idea man" is a pejorative, implying someone who only has ideas, they never get off the ground, they're stuck dreaming, and even living in those dreams without caring enough to bring them to fruition. Imagine you're someone in the 1800s who dreams of running a large textile factory but there just isn't the power nearby to run the mill. No powerful rivers, no steady winds. Steam power comes in to the picture and turns a power problem into a much smaller more manageable people problem.

Vibe coding lowers the cost of coding which is a lot like increasing humanity's coding power. Now idea men who couldn't see coding their own prototype from scratch or hiring a bunch of devs and pitching the venture capital can literally type their idea into a tool like Shakespeare. They can go through revisions in hours rather than weeks and months. They now have the power to address market needs in a day..

Often I've felt like an idea man. I keep a lot of them around and always come up with new ones, but I've had too many interests to give each idea the time it needed in the pre-vibe-coding era. A few days with Shakespeare is like installing a big new steam power plant. Now each idea isn't a burden, it's an opportunity. Which leads me to ask the community....

What do you want to see? If idea people are now empowered, bring out your best armchair coding ideas and let's talk about them. Doesn't take more than a motion and a second to try an idea out. Everyone has used better and worse apps. What is something in an app, any app that you use now that could take a better form that you saw before?

I'm posting this on Nostr and Nostr only but if this is such a transformative force then we should think bigger. There are billions out there dying to use what we come up with here, and by instilling out values of decentralization, freedom, and self-sovereignty we can do more with our apps than 1,000 protests and campaigns. What do you say? #vibestr

Jeroen Ubbink 5mo ago

I think it's a bit early to call this as transformative as a steam engine. For starters a steam engine is, compared to vibe coding a significantly simpler concept, where you only need few parts that are available plenty.

You can explain the steam engine concept in a school and students can easily grasp this, building this yourself requires mediocre knowledge, materials and resources (money).

I think the comparison here should be the output required by the end product of the steam engine (kinetic energy) vs vibecoding. Yes most people can use the kinetic energy just like they can use the output of llm's (one of them being vibecoding), but building a steam engine is significantly easier, simpler and more scalable then producing an infrastructure that enables vibecoding.

Building a vibecoding infrastructure from scratch requires massive amounts of resources, only available to big companies. Building your own is too expensive and complex, so since there are only a handful of people (large companies) able to do this i see much less innovation on that end and much faster stagnation.

I don't disagree that it is great to quickly churn out apps (or PoC's at least) but it will mostly benefit the companies offering the infrastructure and much less humanity as a whole.

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Discussion

STERRY 5mo ago

Thank you for bringing up the points of simplicity and buildability for oneself. As someone who values their own infrastructure, self-reliance and free software, I'll have to think more about that.

Admittedly I shot this article from the hip yesterday morning but I still like the comparison. Steam engines made it possible to put a ton of cheap energy to use in ways that were straightforward to think about. Vibe coding (Shakespeare at least) does this with ideas. It unlocks all software ideas in the straightforward way of chat-plus-web-link.

Maybe the next thing to vibe code is an easy way to get it running wholly on my laptop.