The speed at which companies ripped out their human employees for AI substitutes will be studied in psychology classes. It’s alarming to say the least, and has incited global panic more realistically. No one feels safe, heads of companies are living in AI delusion, seeing green as they threaten to replace 30-80% of their employees with bots. It’s gross, and honestly feels like a moment where we should all reflect on how we treat each other. People are turning on one another once again, just as we did in the pandemic that preceded AI, and it’s disappointing to see.
But the glimmer of hope I see within all of this is humans replacing the AI which was so quick to replace humans. What I’ve observed that people love about AI is the seemingly instant results it gives you and the ability to have it make whatever you think up. These things haven’t been possible in the building world before. It’s always taken a long time and much effort to build things. And if you bought a solution from someone else it was limited in scope.
I know this because for 14 years the constant drone beat from Interact customers is “why can’t it do this” “what if it could just do that” and people loath the idea that their ideas have to be stymied by using a software solution. So when AI came out, they flocked to it, understandably so, a decade of frustration about not being able to build what you want, let loose like a dam bursting.
But AI has serious drawbacks, and frankly I’m surprised at the level to which people want their freedom to build, and are willing to put up with the extra effort it takes to vibe code their own solutions. GitHub, Hosting, Debugging, these are things people absolutely do not want to do, but they are doing them when they vibe code. The promise of having something completely your own is so powerful people are willing to endure work they do not like in order to gain that outcome.
We’ve reached a bit of a tipping point at the moment where you don’t hear much about vibe coding anymore. The hype has worn off and reality is setting in. People don’t want to spend hours creating every solution if there is an easy way to do it in minutes. But they do want their freedom to build what they want and customize it how they want.
Which is where humans come back into the picture. Humans who build specific software solutions for specific use-cases, and add all the customizations and functionality people have been desiring for so long. Then charge a reasonable price for it. At Interact, we added more features last week than we did in all of 2023. And our pace will double in the next month, then double again. We can finally deliver on what people want us to build.
And when people use our product, either directly through the UI, or through ChatGPT or Claude with our MCP, they can build whatever they dream up, and customize how they want it to look, which gets us to the original goal. Vibe coding was just a stepping stone to get us to this outcome. In terms of how AI fits into this, it enables us to move fast enough to build what customers want. Because when a request comes in, we now simply have to design it, scope it, plan it, make it scalable, and then have the AI fill in the code to write it up. That process has collapsed from months to days, sometimes hours. But it’s because we have the system, the design, the 14 years of expertise running the company that we can guide the AI to do what it needs to do to build in this very specific are.
Experts using AI will replace AI acting like its an expert when it is not.
