Software 1, 2, 3

The previous issue of Cue was seriously, freshly lacking GenAI content, I guess we need to make up for it :)

Andrej Karpathy, the person who coined the term vibe coding, gave an excellent talk at a Y Combinator event in June. I watched it as soon as it came out because he knows what he is talking about. I didn't share or comment on it widely, partially because he was affiliated with Tesla, but also partially because some of the metaphors he used in his presentation didn't quite hold up for me.

I saw the presentation shared widely last week, so I thought I would add my comments about his narrative. Here is the video, I recommend watching it before reading my comments, so that you are not swayed. 39 minutes, this is a normal length video:

Mandatory note: I am in no capacity to criticize his contributions to AI; I am not even remotely in the same academic league as Dr. Andrej Karpathy (look here). So this is not a full-on critique of his presentation, these are my notes about the things that make me go "umm but..." during his presentation.

Software 1.0, 2.0, 3.0: He makes an excellent observation about how software is changing (timestamp). I loved the distinction between Software 1.0 and 2.0, but I am having difficulty accepting Software 3.0 as a new category. He claims that the software created through LLMs using everyday language constitutes a different set. However, those prompts that are being used today aren't producing a new kind of software; most of that output is Software 1.o, maaaybe some of it may work towards a Software 2.0.