So, Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase, published a letter on X about his companies future and his planned layoffs.
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@lerg in all seriousness, I do wonder what this change will drive. Cloud led to consolidation of compute into datacenters and gave rise to SaaS. Blockchain gave rise to, well, bad example but whatever. There will be a time of peak horror show resulting from vibe coded apps, and then a reduction and it settles in and there will be a long tail of little horrors. Just like we still have with SaaS and cloud today.
But it makes me wonder: what becomes of IT when all the infrastructure is in the cloud and all the apps are bespoke stuff running in some sort of safety container in the cloud? I think there will be a coming resurgence of business analysts who figure out how to focus vibe coding into actually useful apps and not a bunch of distracting science experiments.
@jerry @lerg I think, in part, the answer to this heavily depends on how many cloud (or otherwise centralized service providers) decide to adopt a Broadcom-esque, value-extraction focused business model. The ultimate business goal of so many service providers is to either become a monopoly or part of a limited cabal that controls markets. The short-term incentives are lined up so that if they ever catch that proverbial car, it seems likely they'll pull on the thread ala Cory Doctrow's Enshittification model.
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@Viss @lerg I think that’s a good point. I leads me to another idea in a round about way: most companies probably won’t vibe code anything. Even if it’s easy. Which means there will still be a market for apps and SaaS, but it seems like we are going to run into a paradox of choice situation when everyone and their dog can create niche industry vertical apps with little investment.
I retract my comment about IT - we will always be needed to find the any key, to reimage hosed up computers, fix the WiFi, etc.
