> Elsewhere on HN right now is a post about a dermatologist vibecoding an app for skin stuff. I view the “need/use ai for coding” as an indictment against how complex software development has become
One other way to look at it is that software is realizing enough of the dreams of reusability that cobbling together scripts at such a high level with only the smallest understanding is finally becoming possible. I'm not going full Pangloss here, development is still a massive clusterfuck in many places and probably always will be by its nature, but the frontiers have pushed waaaaay back since I got started.
Reusability is a big part of it, but I also think languages are just a lot more abstract and expressive these days, so fewer lines of code goes further. Empirically, error count is correlated with lines of code, as are hallucinations, so the ideal language for AI coding is the most abstract and expressive language that will get you there.
> so the ideal language for AI coding is the most abstract and expressive language that will get you there
...JavaScript? (half joking)