Fwiw I honestly think it was a mistake to turn our back on vb.
Yes there were a lot of crappy barely functioning programs made in it. But they were programs that wouldn’t have existed otherwise. Eg. For small businesses automating things vb was amazing and even if the program was barely functional it was better than nothing.
When the Derecho hit Iowa and large parts of my area were without power for over a week we got to discover just how many of our very large enterprise processes were dependent to some degree on "toy" apps built in "toy" technologies running on PCs under people's desks. Some of it clever but all of it fragile. It's easy to be a strong technical person and scoff at their efforts. Look how easily it failed! But it also ran for years with so few issues it never rose to IT's attention before a major event literally took the entire regional company offices offline. It caused us some pain as we had to relocate PCs to buildings with sufficient backup power. But overall the effort was far smaller than building all of those apps with the "proper" tools and processes in the first place.
Large companies can be a red tape nightmare for getting anything built. The process overload will kill simple non-strategic initiatives. I can understand and appreciate less technical people who grab whatever tool they can to solve their own problems when they run into blockers like that. Even if they don't solve it in the best way possible according to experts in the field. That feels like the hacker spirit to me.
Please don’t stop at building “toy” prototypes, it’s a great start, but take some time to iterate, rebuild, bring it to production standards, make it resilient and scalable.
You’d be surprised how little effort it is compared to having to deal a massive outage. E.g. You did eventually had to think about backup power.
I think we will need to find a way to communicate “this code is the result of serious engineering work and all tradeoffs have been thought about extensively” and “this code has been vibecoded and no one really cares”. Both sides of that spectrum have their place and absolutely will exist. But it’s dangerous to confuse the two
There's a simple way to communicate it. Just leave in the emoticons added in comments by the LLM.
Wrote it initially as a joke, but maybe it's not that dumb? I already do it on LinkedIn. I'm job hunting and post slop from time to time to game LinkedIn algorithms to get better positioning among other potential candidates.
And not to waste anybody's time, I leave in the emotes at beginning of sentences just so people in the know know it's just slop (so as not to waste their time).
Interesting thought. Yeah.. the whole LLM-generated thing might end up being a boon. It is (reasonably) distinctive. At least for now. And rightly or wrongly it triggers defensive reflexes
Drag and drop GUI builders were awesome. Responsive layouts ruined GUI programming for me. It made it too much of a fuss to make anything "professional".
Yes there were a lot of crappy barely functioning programs made in it. But they were programs that wouldn’t have existed otherwise. Eg. For small businesses automating things vb was amazing and even if the program was barely functional it was better than nothing.