Comment by hollowturtle
2 days ago
I'm tired of constantly debating the same thing again and again. Where are the products? Where is some great performing software all LLM/agent crafted? All I see is software bloatness and decline. Where is Discord that uses just a bunch of hundreds megs of ram? Where is unbloated faster Slack? Where is the Excel killer? Fast mobile apps? Browsers and the web platform improved? Why Cursor team don't use Cursor to get rid of vscode base and code its super duper code editor? I see tons of talking and almost zero products.
This deserves more upvotes.
Even if there is a "fully vibe-coded" product that has real customers, the fact that it's vibe-coded means that others can do the same. Unless you have a secret LLM or some magical prompts that make the code better/more efficient than your competitions, your vibe coded product has no advantage over competition and no moat. What actually matters is everything else -- user experience (which requires hours of meetings and usability studies), integration with own/other people's products, business, marketing, sales etc, much of which you can't vibe code your way to success.
I'm not sure what point you're making here. Tech is rarely the moat, you even get to that point at the end of your post. The "vibe coding" advantage is faster time to market, faster iterations, etc. These things will help you get that user experience, integrations, etc.
Faster, faster, faster. All to release something that is slower, by people that now know lesser, with bloat that explodes. All for a yet another useless saas that nobody or fee people wants and a chance to virtue signaling your vibe coded product on HN. Real world successfull products are orthogonal to this approach, it doesnt work anymore in today's world
> Even if there is a "fully vibe-coded" product that has real customers, the fact that it's vibe-coded means that others can do the same.
I think you are strawmanning what "vibe coders" do when they build stuff. It's not simple one-shot generation of eg twitter clones, it's really just iterative product development through an inconsistently capable/spotty LLM developer. It's not really that different from a product manager hiring some cheap developer and feeding them tasks/feature requests. By the way, competitors can hire those and chip away at your moat too!
> Unless you have a secret LLM or some magical prompts that make the code better/more efficient than your competitions, your vibe coded product has no advantage over competition and no moat
This is just not true, and you kind of make my point in the next sentence: many companies competitive advantages come from distribution, trust, integration, regulatory, marketing/sales, network effects. But also, vibe coding is not really about prompts so much as it is product iteration. Anybody product can be copied already, yet people still make way more new products than direct product clones anyway, because it's usually more valuable to go to market with stronger, more focused, or more specialized/differentiated software than a copy.
Friendly reminder: the comment is under a post that is hyping the capability of LLMs.
>> Even if there is a "fully vibe-coded" product that has real customers, the fact that it's vibe-coded means that others can do the same.
But that's precisely why you don't hear about these products: the creators don't disclose that they were vibe-coded, because if they do, that invites competition.
I personally know of four vibe-coded products that generate over $10k/mo. Two of them were made by one friend, one was made by another, and the last one by my cousin. None of these people are developers. But they are making real money.
We all have a cousin that makes $10k/mo and has super powers
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And I know 100 such products that are making $100k/month, do you believe me or not?
I'm afraid your numbers are not any more informative or useful than mine.
With all due respect somebody could launch a version of Discord that's 10x faster tomorrow and nobody would know about it
It's very difficult to unseat those incumbents, especially those with strong network effects.
Plus the people that work in those larger companies are not at the edge of AI coding at all and not motivated to rock the boat
you can build it and simply use it in your own office? There is no need to shout about it if the cost of writing software goes to zero (but the value remains non-zero!).
Get the feeling with the pending IPO, there might be some challengers to discord that get more traction due to the protracted enshittification of the platform (cf. bluesky)
Totally disagree. One example is Zed which is very well known and it's faster than any other editor, wasn't built with AI though.
> People on larger companies are not at the edge of AI coding
False Microsoft is all in with Copilot, and I can't believe the company that created Copilot doesn't use it internally, I'd rather say they should be the ones that would know how to master it! Yet no better vscode, still bloated teams etc etc
> One example is Zed which is very well known and it's faster than any other editor, wasn't built with AI though.
Not according to a Zed team member, in these very comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46522437
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Do you mean to say Zed wasn't vibe coded? There's actually another comment on this post describing how someone is using Opus 4.5 to work on Zed. Given how forward the AI features are in Zed I'd be surprised if the team wasn't also embracing it internally.
It's a fair question how much AI is accelerating the development of Zed, but I can say that I've been impressed with the speed they are shipping at.
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> Yet no better vscode, still bloated teams etc etc
Why do you assume that Microsoft would focus on building a better (to you) VSCode or less bloated Teams?
I assume they'd use Github Copilot to make a more profitable VSCode and Teams, which doesn't require focusing on speed and bloat.
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I don't recall if it was an AGENT.md or CLAUDE.md but one of those was definitely in the Zed repo last time I looked at it. Someone is using AI to work on it.
Zed fast? No way as I've mentioned last year https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42819817
This argument falls a little flat when you consider how much software may or may not be written inside one's own personal work flow, or to scale that up, inside a small business. The idea that a small business doing >1mil revenue can now hire a dev or two, and build out a fairly functional domain-driven system should not be understated. The democratization of software, and the lowering of the barriers to entry to basic CRUD apps, may not necessarily show up in a TAM report... Do you need a killer app that treads into unicorn territory to prove it's impact? What about a million apps that displace said unicorn potentials by removing the need for a COTS?
Oh, and remember, the iPhone was revolutionary but it was diffused so slowly into the greater economy, the impact on global GDP was basically negligent. Actually, almost all the perceived grandiose tech jumps did not magically produce huge GDP gains overnight.
Your argument falls a little flat considering that you mention "hire a dev or two" while the whole narrative is "we don't need software engineers anymore" and Anthropic alone declares that "Although engineers use Claude frequently, more than half said they can “fully delegate” only between 0-20% of their work to Claude" https://www.anthropic.com/research/how-ai-is-transforming-wo...
When was I arguing about job displacement or the replacing of engineers? You are projecting hard, and reaching. If anything, I am in the camp that accessibility to custom tooling equals a net positive of devs down the line. In the short term, it may be a bumpy road as the tools progress (even if incrementally), but my long term take is that you may see engineering teams blossom in smaller market operations.
When it comes to objectivity, people with your line of thinking is what I try to avoid, as it is clear you feel threatened by the progress of coding tools. That link doesn't change much about what I said, or for that matter, what you said. You were commenting on the lack of a killer app, and I just said it may be diffusing slowly in different ways.
You are fixating on the "whole narrative" because you feel threatened - rightfully so, but again, that type of hyperbole doesn't belong in a constructive and grounded conversation about the impact AI may or may not have.
https://www.anthropic.com/research/how-ai-is-transforming-wo...
see "How much work can be fully delegated to Claude?": "Although engineers use Claude frequently, more than half said they can “fully delegate” only between 0-20% of their work to Claude"
There won't be anything like you're asking for, even the vendors themselves (they'll be the most positive and most enthousiastic about using it) can't do this with them.
I'm not asking for it, i'm asking to stop bulshitting about ai
My point is that you can ignore every article about ai being super good as long as you see the vendor research (that you read once a year or less) is still the same. It saves everyone a lot of frustration. As for why it keeps appearing here, people like being excited. It's not about the truth, so asking for it is missing the point.
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Thank you for linking this very useful and much more realistic / grounded stat.
I share similar feelings. I feel like I'm reading the same comments about LLM since a year, only model version changes.
Obviously there's improvement in the models and tooling, but the debate seems very artificial.
The bigger the product, the harder this is.
However, I think the biggest thing is the replacement of products. We are in a place where he talked about replacing two products his wife was using with custom software. I personally have used LLMs to build things that are valuable for me that I just don't have time for otherwise.
This is true. I think most people are mostly using AI at work to fix bugs in existing codebases. A smaller group of people are benchmarking AI by giving it ideas for apps that no one needs and seeing if it can get close. The smallest group of people is actually designing new software and asking the AI to iterate on it.
Except for maybe an "Excel killer", all those things you listed are not things people are willing to pay for. Also agents are bad at that kind of work (most devs are bad at that stuff, it's why it was something people whined about even before agents).
And funnily enough there are products and tools that are essentially less bloated slack/discord. Have you heard of https://stoat.chat/ (aka revolt) or https://pumble.com/ or https://meet.jit.si/? If not I would guess it's for one of two reasons: not caring enough about these problems to even go looking for them yourself, or their lack of "bloatedness" resulting in them not being a mature/fully featured enough product to be worth marketing or adopting.
If you'd like to see a product mostly made with agents/for agents you can check out mine at https://statue.dev/ - we're making a static site generator with a templating and component system paired with user-story driven "agentic workflows" (~blueprints/playbooks for common user actions like "I need to add a new page and list it on the navbar" or "create a site from the developer portfolio template personalized for my github").
I would guess most other projects are probably in a similar situation as we are: agentic developer tools have only really been good enough to heavily use/build products around for a few months, so it's a typical few-month-old project. But agents definitely made it easier to build.
Not willing to pay for? How can you be sure? For example explain then why many gamers are ditching Windows for Linux and buying hardware from Valve... There must be a reason. Every person I talked to that uses Excel hate how slow it is, same for teams and many other products. Finally, were the mentioned products built with vibe coding?
Generally if something is fast enough/efficient enough that a paying customer can use it without having to worry or actively think about performance and un-bloatedness, that's enough for them. The only people who might complain still are developers who are bothered by the inefficiency and are technically literate enough to notice it, and maybe the users with less powerful/capable devices than the ones the big paying customers use. Generally these groups of people are not the actual customers of these products.
The people who actually pay for slack and discord (eg enterprises that need workplace chat app and decided to go with the "gold standard", consumers with discord servers and such) need the features/tradeoffs choosing featuers over efficiency causing that bloat. They just don't all need the exact same set of those features as the other customers. So because customers are willing to pay for all these features the product tries to ship all of them and becomes bloated.
> Every person I talked to that uses Excel hate how slow it is
But do they make the purchasing decisions behind using Excel?
To be clear I am not really arguing that bloat/overly enterprisey products are good. What I mean that you don't see the world exploding with more elegant products now with agents for the same reason you didn't see the world exploding with them before agents either: the people who pay for those products and build them for a living are not incentivized or necessarily even rewarded for choosing to make them more efficient or elegant when there are other things that customers are asking for with more $$$ behind them.
I did a lot of analysis and biz dev work on the "Excel killer" and came to the conclusion that it would be hard to get people to pay for.
For one thing most enterprises and many individuals have an Office 365 subscription to access Office programs which are less offensive than Excel so they aren't going to save any money by dropping Excel.
On top of it the "killer" would probably not be one product aimed at one market but maybe a few different things. Some people could use "visual pandas" for instance, something that today would be LLM-infused. Other people could use a no-code builder for calculations. The kind of person who is doing muddled and confused work with Excel wouldn't know which "killer" they needed or understand why decimal math would mean they always cut checks in the right amount.
Wrt statue.dev good luck for sure with the project but I personally don't need yet another static site generator, nextjs like but with unpopular svelte, bloated with tons of node modules creating another black hole impossible to escape from. If agents works this well why would I need to use your library? I just tell an agent to maintain my static site who cares which tech stack
AI amplified development has the most impact on build-vs-buy decisions.
We should expect the decreased difficulty of creating software to drive down prices.
> decreased difficulty of creating software to drive down prices.
And here we go again, if difficulty has been decreased so much, where are the fixes or the products?
Anecdotally I had Gemini convert a simple react native app to swift in two prompts. If it's that simple then maybe we will see less of the chromium desktop apps
I'd argue the contrary, YOU KNOW you have the option, ease of entering doesn't mean they will know how to choose better, they will just vibe code more electron apps. In fact my prediction is not there will be less Electron apps but more
Hi, I’m building such one: https://minfx.ai/
Still early, but iterating really fast!
who told you that mb of ram is a definition of success?
Opus was out only few months, and it will take time to get this new wave to market. i can assure you my team become way more productive because of opus. not a single developer but an etnire team.
It's a definition of what runs and what not on consumer grade computers, Discord has a routine that now checks if memory goes over a certain threshold and eventually restart itselfs, this is a measure of engineering total failure imo
Could someone explain this to me? I have the same question: why Cursor team don't use Cursor to get rid of vscode base and code its super duper code editor?