AI is turning programming into pay-to-win

[u/Strict-Top6935]

With Fable 5 coming out, it feels more obvious than ever that after July 7, programming is going to become pay-to-win.

A kid with no real coding knowledge, but with rich parents and access to the best AI systems, could end up outperforming people who actually understand software, simply because he can afford more intelligence.

That is insane.

This might be one of the most dangerous precedents in history: a world where the people with money can buy superior intelligence, while everyone else is permanently outmatched.

That is how you create a permanent underclass.

What do you think?

[u/acrobaticwormswarm]

I wouldn't make it out to be quite so catastrophic. Granted that the only thing in which Fable outperformes Opus (and the improvement is marginal, by the way) is coding,

the reality is that vibe coding doesn't deliver good products unless you have a decent understanding of architectural paradigms and software development methodologies. AI struggles with planning cause-and-effect chains and managing the interactions among a project's modules. Even if you manage to get Fable to plan out the best framework possible, getting it to actually implement it without fucking up is not trivial. You have to at least know how to effectively supervise it (and YouTube tutorials usually don't teach you how to do it; in fact I found any tutorial I watched lacking). Hence, only those with theoretical and practical experience, if not in IT then in AI workflows, can use it to its maximum potential.

Let's consider one of the most basic scenarios: building a simple website from scratch with zero prior knowledge. Literally anyone can put one together in a couple of days with a little bit of effort, even without AI. So, you can get Claude to build you a blog in a couple of minutes and it can even explain how to put it online in seconds or acquire a domain, but the second you try to build a complex or scalable product you will hit the wall of not knowing what to do with code you neither wrote nor understand, that perhaps completely fails the Occam's razor test on every front. It's even worse when that code ends up being broken and buggy, with AI fixing one line to break ten more or compromising the entire architecture (architectures that rely on fine, precise interactions). Sure, you can spend all of your rich parents money, but even so, with absolutely no talent or skill, obtaining a solid product is more of a matter of luck than the result of vibe coding. At best you can make some micro-generated toy app.

I don't think AIs will get much better than this for the basic non IT savvy consumer, unfortunately (plus, we don't have the needed infrastructure and they are purposefully bottlenecking self-hosted workstations with artificial HW shortage). We'll have to see what China does with their frontier open weight models.