Show HN: I quit coding years ago. AI brought me back
10 hours ago (calquio.com)
Quick background: I used to code. Studied it in school, wrote some projects, but eventually convinced myself I wasn't cut out for it. Too slow, too many bugs, imposter syndrome — the usual story. So I pivoted, ended up as an investment associate at an early-stage angel fund, and haven't written real code in years.
Fast forward to now. I'm a Buffett nerd — big believer in compound interest as a mental model for life. I run compound interest calculations constantly. Not because I need to, but because watching numbers grow over 30-40 years keeps me patient when markets get wild. It's basically meditation for long-term investors.
The problem? Every compound interest calculator online is terrible. Ugly interfaces, ads covering half the screen, can't customize compounding frequency properly, no year-by-year breakdowns. I've tried so many. They all suck.
When vibe coding started blowing up, something clicked. Maybe I could actually build the calculators I wanted? I don't have to be a "real developer" anymore — I just need to describe what I want clearly.
So I tried it.
Two weeks and ~$100（Opus 4.5 thinking model） in API costs later: I somehow have 60+ calculators. Started with compound interest, naturally. Then thought "well, while I'm here..." and added mortgage, loan amortization, savings goals, retirement projections. Then it spiraled — BMI calculator, timezone converter, regex tester. Oops.
The AI (I'm using Claude via Windsurf) handled the grunt work beautifully. I'd describe exactly what I wanted — "compound interest calculator with monthly/quarterly/yearly options, year-by-year breakdown table, recurring contribution support" — and it delivered. With validation, nice components, even tests.
What I realized: my years away from coding weren't wasted. I still understood architecture, I still knew what good UX looked like, I still had domain expertise (financial math). I just couldn't type it all out efficiently. AI filled that gap perfectly.
Vibe coding didn't make me a 10x engineer. But it gave me permission to build again. Ideas I've had for years suddenly feel achievable. That's honestly the bigger win for me.
Stack: Next.js, React, TailwindCSS, shadcn/ui, four languages (EN/DE/FR/JA). The AI picked most of this when I said "modern and clean."
Site's live at https://calquio.com . The compound interest calculator is still my favorite page — finally exactly what I wanted.
Curious if others have similar stories. Anyone else come back to building after stepping away?
I'm at the opposite end. I feel AI is sucking all the joy out of the profession. Might pivot away and perhaps live a simpler life. Only problem is that I really need the paycheck :(
Yup. I worked very hard, and for many years to acquire a skill in designing and writing systems. It is an art. And it is very disheartening to see people without any skills to behave the way they do. For now, the work I do cannot be replicated by these people, but I do not such high hopes for the distant future. Though at the point it can truly be automated I think it will be automating a large majority of non physical jobs (and those too will likely be likely getting automated by then too)
Hear hear. It too shall pass. They'll get tired, they'll grind the same apps 500 times and leave.
Just like SEO experts, marketing experts, trade bots and crypto experts; the vibe coders will weed out.
The vibe coders will weed out, but programming with AI is never going away.
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I quit my job over AI. Just felt like my job was approving pull requests where both the PR and the code itself was just slop. In all fairness, it was mainly CRUD applications so not a big deal but in the end I didn't feel like I had any control over the application anymore with hundreds of lines of slop being added every day.
One day I might start a consultancy business that only does artisanal code. You can hire me and my future apprentices to replace AI code with handcrafted code. I will use my company to teach the younger generation how to write code without AI tooling.
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yup. the things i disliked most about programming were hyped up bullshit and losing autonomy.
These existed before but the culture surrounding AI delivered a double dose of both.
I have no problems with LLMs themselves or even how they are used but it has developed its own religion filled with dogma, faith based reasoning and priests which is utterly toxic.
The tools are shoved down our throats (thanks to the priesthood, AI use is now a job performance criteria) and when they fail we are not met with curiosity and a desire to understand but with hostility and gaslighting.
Happy for everyone who enjoys it. For me it's the opposite: AI everywhere sucks the joy out of it and I'm seriously starting to consider a career shift after roughly 10 years of writing code for a living.
I feel you. There's a massive difference between crafting and assembling. AI turns us from artisans carving a detail into assembly line operators. If your joy came from solving algorithmic puzzles and optimizing loops, then yes, AI kills that It might be worth looking into low-level dev (embedded, kernel, drivers) or complex R&D. Vibe coding doesn't work there yet, and the cost of error is too high for hallucinations. Real manual craftsmanship is still required there.
I'm starting to think that people don't want to be programmers anymore, they want to be managers who delegate their work to someone or something else, and then come back, critique the work, and do another loop
Well yeah! This is objectively a great process for getting a lot of work done.
It sucks the joy out of it because to the extent that you build something with AI, (Obama voice) you didn't build that. I am allergic to the concept of developing with AI, especially for personal work, because AI-authored code isn't something I built, it's something I commissioned. It's like if I went onto Fiverr or Upwork with a spec and paid money and said "Here, build this" to a freelancer and then went back and forth with that person to correct and refine the result. I might get a halfway decent result in the end, but I don't get the experience of solving the problem myself. Experience solving problems yields new insights. It's why math textbooks have exercises: the only way to grasp the concepts is to solve problems with them.
With AI, you are no longer a developer, you're a product manager, analyst, or architect. What's neat about this, from a business perspective, is that you can in effect cut out all your developers and have a far smaller development workforce consisting of only product managers, analysts, and architects whom you call "developers" and pay developer salaries to. So you save money twice: once on dev workforce downsizing, and again on the pay grade demotion.
The problems I've been working on are at a much higher level than the nuts and bolts.
I'm currently exploring domain-specific languages aimed at writing web applications. I've been particularly interested in, much like bash, data flowing through pipelines. I have spent quite a bit of time and I'm definitely not vibe coding but I've probably only writen 1-2% of the code in these projects.
It is so much work to build out a new language with a surrounding ecosystem of tooling. Not even five years ago this would have necessarily been a full time multi-year endeavor or at least required a team of researchers. Now I can tinker away in my off hours.
This is what I am exploring:
https://williamcotton.com/articles/the-evolution-of-a-dsl
Did I not craft the syntax and semantics of these languages?
There seems to be two camps of people: those who love the coding and those who love delivering value/solutions. I am in the latter camp. The happy consumer and the polished product is what gives me satisfaction, the code is just really a vehicle from A to B. It’s a shame for anyone in the first camp who wants a career.
> those who love delivering value/solutions.
This is such marketing speak. The words mean nothing, they’re just a vague amalgamation of feelings. “Vibes”, if you will.
If you “love delivering value and solutions”, go donate and volunteer at a food bank, there’s no need for code at any point.
> The happy consumer and the polished product
More marketing speak. If you are using LLMs to write your code, by definition your product isn’t “polished”. Polishing means pouring over every detail with care to ensure perfection. Letting an LLM spit out code you just accept is not it.
The word you’re looking for is “shiny”, meaning that it looks good at a glance but may or may not be worth anything.
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You’re forcing a binary choice here.
I think for a lot of minor things, having AI generate stuff is okay, but it’s rather astounding how verbose and sometimes bizarre the code is. It mostly works, but it can be hard to read. What I’m reading from a lot of people is that they’re enjoying coding again because they don’t have to deal with the stuff they don’t want to do, which...I mean, that’s just it isn’t it? Everyone wants to work on what they enjoy, but that’s not how most things work.
Another problem is that if you just let the AI do a lot of the foundational stuff and only focus on the stuff that you’re interested in, you sometimes just miss giant pieces of important context. I’ve tried reading AI driven code, sometimes it makes sense, sometimes it’s just unextensible nonsense that superficially works.
This isn’t tech that should replace anything and needs to be monitored judiciously. It can have value, but what I suspect is going to happen is we are going to have a field day with people fixing and dealing with ridiculous security holes for the next decade after this irrational exuberance goes away. It should be used in the same way that any other ML technique should be. Judiciously and in a specific use case.
Said another way, if these models are the future of general programming, where are the apps already? We’re years into this and where are they? We have no actual case studies, just a bunch of marketing copy and personal anecdotes. I went hunting for some business case studies a while ago and I found a Deloitte “case study” which was just pages of “AI may help” without any actual concrete cases. Where are the actual academic studies showing that this works?
People claiming AI makes them code faster reminds me that Apple years ago demonstrated in multiple human interaction studies that the mouse is faster, but test subjects all thought keyboard shortcuts were faster [1]. Sometimes objective data doesn’t matter, but it’s amusing that the whole pitch for agentic AI is that it is faster and evidence is murky for this at best.
[1] https://www.asktog.com/TOI/toi06KeyboardVMouse1.html
Agree with those 2 camps. The latter camp is all cheered up which is nice, but they should be asking the question if their solution is valuable enough to be maintained. If so, you should make all generated code your code, exactly in the form it needs to be according to your deep expertise. If not, congratulations, you have invented throw-away code. Code of conduct: don't throw this code at people from the former camp.
Or to phrase it more succinctly: if you are in camp 2 but don't have the passion of camp 1, you are a threat for the long term. The reverse is dangerous too, but can be offset to a certain extent with good product management.
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If you really want to deliver polished products, you still have to manually review the code. When I tried actually "vibecoding" something, I got exhausted so fast by trying to keep up with the metric tons of code output by the AI. I think most developers agree that reviewing other people's code is more exhausting mentally than writing your own. So I doubt those who see coding as too mentally straining will take the time to fully review AI written code.
More likely that step is just skipped and replaced with thoughts and prayers.
This false dichotomy comes up from time to time, that you either like dicking around with code in your basement or you like being a big boy with your business pants on delivering the world's 8000th online PDF tools site. It's tired. Please let it die.
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polished product, and LLM generated code should not be put in the same conversation.
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I've also noticed a kind of grouping like this. I've described them as the "Builders" and the "Solvers". Where the former enjoys the construction aspect of the code more, and the latter enjoys the problem/puzzle-solving aspect of code more. I guess it's more of a scale than a binary, since everyone's got a bit of both, but I think I agree that AI is more fun for the builders.
As a professional, your job is to deliver value and solutions. It used to be that you could do this by writing code. AI changes this calculus because if the machine can write the code instead, the value you deliver by writing it yourself is greatly diminished.
They're not that binary.
I like using my software engineering skills to solve people's problems. I don't do coding for it's own sake - there's always a thing I'm trying to implement for someone.
Same here. Farmer now, former network engineer and software project lead, but I stopped programming almost 20 years ago.
Now I build all sorts of apps for my farm and organizations I volunteer for. I can pound out an app for tracking sample locations for our forage associations soil sample truck, another for moisture monitoring, a fleet task/calendar/maintenance app in hours and iterate on them when I think of features.
And git was brand new when I left the industry, so I only started using it recently to any extent, and holy hell, is it ever awesome!
I'm finally able to build all the ideas I come up with when I'm sitting in a tractor and the GPS is steering.
Seriously exciting. I have a hard time getting enough sleep because I hammer away on new ideas I can't tear myself away from.
love to hear about what tech is like on farms today. do you run into the problems with fixing tractors and equipment and its all locked down with drm and you cant fix it without hacking the software?
Did you start farming from scratch?
Did you take over a farm?
Out of all the apps you've worked on, what's one or two that you think came out really well?
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> not spend all our time studying the techniques for solving them.
What a stupid sentiment on top of trying to generate views for the most low hanging slop ever.
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Slightly moving into the other direction, after 17 years of science and tech optimism I see myself turning into a Luddite more and more. First observation was that communication and social aspects of software seems crucial for success and proliferation. And next came: that technology seems inept to solve any socio-econimic problems, but rather aggravates them.
Same here.
Creating a polished, usable app is just so much work, and so much of it isn't fun at all (to me). There are a few key parts that are fun, but building an intuitive UI, logging, error handling, documentation, packaging, versioning, containerization, etc. is so tedious.
I'm bewildered when I read posts by the naysayers, because I'm sitting here building polished apps in a fraction of the time, and they work. At least much better than what I was able to build over a couple of weekends. They provide real value to me. And I'm still having fun building them.
I now vibe coded three apps, two of them web apps, in Rust, and I couldn't write a "Hello World" in Rust if you held a gun to my head. They look beautiful, are snappy, and it being Rust gives me a lot of confidence in its correctness (feel free to disagree here).
Of course I wouldn't vibe code in a serious production project, but I'd still use an AI agent, except I'd make sure I understand every line it puts out.
I can understand you don't want to spend effort for throwaway code.
That isn't going to cut it. You need to understand the problem domain, have a deep design taste to weigh current and future demands, form a conceptually coherent solution, formalize it to code, then feed back from the beginning. There is no prompt giving your AI those capabilities. You end up with mediocre solutions if you settle for understanding every line it spits out. To be fair, many programmers don't have those capabilities either, so it also a question of quality expectations.
I believe you can use LLMs as advanced search and as a generator for boilerplate. People liking it easy are also being easy with quality attributes, so anyone should be self aware where they are on that spectrum.
> Creating a polished, usable app is just so much work, and so much of it isn't fun at all (to me).
Then don’t do it. No one is forcing you. Are you also going to complain that building airplanes and ensuring food safety are too much work and not fun for you? Not everything needs to be or should be dumbed down to appeal to lowest common denominator.
Alternatively, go work at a company where you’re part of a team and other people do what you do not enjoy.
> I'm sitting here building polished apps in a fraction of the time
No, no you are not, guaranteed. “Polishing” means caring about every detail to make it perfect. If you’re letting the LLM make most of it, by definition it’s not polished.
> Then don’t do it. No one is forcing you.
No one is also keeping me from doing what I want to spend my time with on my days off.
> Are you also going to complain that building airplanes and ensuring food safety are too much work and not fun for you?
No, because this isn't remotely comparable to weekend hobby projects. What a weird question.
> No, no you are not, guaranteed. “Polishing” means caring about every detail to make it perfect. If you’re letting the LLM make most of it, by definition it’s not polished.
I guess we have different definitions of "polished" then.
>> so much of it isn't fun at all
thats why it was valuable.
All things worth doing are hard.
He said fun, not easy. Sometimes it's precisely doing brainless stuff over and over again that becomes hard, like writing a template displaying a table of your results or implementing filter and pagination on a web app. I don't feel like I'm growing anymore when doing those things. Or even for some tests. Or when you need a Bash script automating menial stuff. (Still you could find new perspective on things.)
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So you value your ability to churn out insignificant dreck over the ability of others to use the internet? Because that's the choice you're making. All of the sites that churn your browser for a few seconds because they're trying to block AI DDoS bots, that's worth your convenience on meaningless projects? The increased blast radius of Cloudflare outages, that's a cost with foisting on to the rest of the internet for your convenience?
Thanks.
This is such a... unique angle. Of all the things to get angry at AI for, web crawlers and the impact on cloudflare outages are the ones that really grinds your gears?
The key phrase here is "I still had domain expertise". Many miss that AI is a multiplier. If you multiply 0 by AI, you get 0 (or hallucinated garbage). You multiplied your knowledge of compound interest and UX by AI's speed. Without your background, the AI would have generated a beautiful interface that calculates mortgages using a savings account formula. Your role shifted from "code writer" to "logic validator" - this is the future of development for domain specialists
> Your role shifted from "code writer" to "logic validator"
No it didn't, in fact, your job shifted from code writer to code fixer
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I never stopped developing but I find myself taking on a lot more side projects than I used to. The cost for doing those just dropped significantly. This enables me to prototype and pursue things that I previously wouldn't have.
I'm also now dealing with things that previously would have taken me too long to deal with. For example, I'm actually making a dent in the amount of technical debt I have to deal with. The type of things where previously I maybe wouldn't have taken a week out of my schedule to deal with something that was annoying me. A lot of tedious things that would take me hours/days now can get done in a few prompts. With my bigger projects, I still do most stuff manually. But that's probably going to change over the next months/year.
I'm mainly using codex. I know a lot of people seem to prefer Claude Code. But I've been a happy ChatGPT Plus user for a while and codex is included with that and seems to do the job. Amazing value for 20$/month. I've had to buy extra credit once now.
The flip side of all this is that waiting for AI to do it's thing isn't fun. It's slow enough that it slows me down and fast enough that I can't really multi task. It's like dealing with a very slow build that you have to run over and over again. A necessary evil. But not necessarily fun. I can see why a lot of developers feel like the joy is being sucked out of their lives.
Dealing with this pain is urgent. Part of that is investing in robust and fast builds. Build time competes with model inference in the time stuff takes. And another part is working on the UX of this. Being able to fork multiple tasks at once is hugely empowering. And switching between editing code and generating code needs to get more seamless. It feels too much like I'm sitting on my hands sometimes.
Similar path here - studied physics, worked in accounting/finance for years, hadn't shipped code in forever. The thing that clicked for me wasn't the AI itself but realising my domain knowledge had actually been compounding the whole time I wasn't coding.
The years "away" gave me an unusually clear picture of what problems actually need solving vs what's technically interesting to build. Most devs early in their careers build solutions looking for problems. Coming back after working in a specific domain, I had the opposite - years of watching people struggle with the same friction points, knowing exactly what the output needed to look like.
What I'd add to the "two camps" discussion below: I think there's a third camp that's been locked out until now. People who understand problems deeply but couldn't justify the time investment to become fluent enough to ship. Domain experts who'd be great product people if they could prototype. AI tools lower the floor enough that this group can participate again.
The $100 spent on Opus to build 60 calculators is genuinely good ROI compared to what that would have cost in dev hours, even for someone proficient. That's not about AI replacing developers - it's about unlocking latent capability in people who already understand the problem space.
>That's not about AI replacing developers - it's about unlocking latent capability in people who already understand the problem space.
Feel like forums have turned into a grand Turing Test.
Turing Test is not really science (an infallible test, measurable outcome). An AI might never be able to pass TT for all humans. Just gets to be a high-def AI. Makes TT a technology.
True, as a threat to PM. Product management can't vibe their way out from a lack of domain expertise.
Made with care for accuracy.
I'm not sure how you can claim this on the footer of every page when you're vibe coding these calculators.
This is more than just a bad side project - it's borderline malicious.
How confident is the OP that every single one of these 60 calculators work all the time, with all edge cases? Because if someone is on your website using your calculator, they are putting trust in you. If it's wrong, it could have downstream impacts on them. I hope every single one has a comprehensive set of tests with good edge cases. But realistically will they?
I'm actually pretty pro-AI development. But if you're going to use AI to help develop a website, at least focus on quality rather than quantity. AI makes quantity easy, but quality is still hard.
As an aside, the website doesn't even work for me. My clicks don't don anything.
You can still test it for accuracy?
Because it's better for marketing. Doesn't matter if it's true.
what marketing? this must have been done 1000 times just in last month. There is nothing new here. At best its for personal use.
I’m glad to see people finding coding accessible again. To me this kind of common “AI made coding fun and accessible again” message signals something deeper. As a field, we allowed our systems to get so complex that we lost people: and AI tools are bringing them back. Maybe we should look at how we have chosen to design systems and say “can these be made simpler and more accessible”? Even before AI systems I looked at my field with sadness: there is complexity growing everywhere and few people looking to address that. Instead, we seem to have incentivized creating complexity because new complicated systems that are hard to use lead to career advancement if you can point at something and say “I am one of the few who can deal with that” or “I created that complex thing”. The ability to handle the complexity makes an individual valuable even though the effect is it excludes many others.
Perhaps if we didn’t have deep layer cakes of frameworks and libraries, people would feel like they can code with or without AI. Feels like AI is going to hinder any efforts to address complexity and justify us living with unnecessary complexity simply because a machine can write the complex, hard to understand, brittle code for us.
Same here. I’m an AI professor, but every time I wanted to try out an idea in my very limited time, I’d spend it all setting things up rather than focusing on the research. It has enabled me to do my own research again rather than relying solely on PhD students. I’ve been able to unblock my students and pursue my own projects, whereas before there were not enough hours in the day.
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This is a bot
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I think people would have reacted a lot more positively if you'd said right up front in the first line "hey look guys, yes I wrote this with ChatGPT but I am not a native English speaker so I've used AI to translate"
Otherwise it feels deceptive. Which is surprising given we should judge off intentions and not augmentation (like come on guys this is HN FFS).
This guy's not running any ads on the site, hasn't spammed with multiple posts that I've seen. I still think investment funds/modern stock exchanges are needless parasites upon society but that's just my opinion.
Thank you for the beautiful story. I work as a developer and have experienced the same in my personal projects, linux setup and - in general - all the collaterals.
AI is eroding the entry barrier, the cognitive overload, and the hyper-specialization of software development. Once you step away from a black-and-white perspective, what remains is: tools, tools, tools. Feels great to me.
Reality: LLMs allow you to assemble shitty frustrating stacks quickly.
That's creating a new inefficient, socially destructive, environmentally damaging hammer because solving the real problem doesn't sell well.
I'll be happy when we solve THAT problem.
I use AI as a senior developer I ask questions to. It gives me an answer, which I can use on my work or not. Saved me days of work, but I couldn't be taken out (yet) of the loop because I'm still making the decisions...
I've lost the joy in programming, the only thing I'm good at, I now make horrible music, but at least I don't exist as the means to an end that I don't control.
I hear AI is better at music and poetry too. Go forth and prompt.
Let the guy makes his music, why do we have to put this shit AI stuff in everything. Had to delete spotify for this bs.
No Offense taken, but what's the point in using AI for anything unless you don't want to do it? I want live my life not consume information, is that really so bad?
That looks sweet. It would be great to adjust for inflation based on predicted inflation rates over the period.
Great feedback, I'll add to dev pipeline.
He also wrote this post with AI if I had to guess.
Yes, It was written by AI because I'm not a native English speaker, I don't want to make any grammer issues. ( this reply is not by AI :-)
Related: https://old.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1qfjwpe/ralph_l...
I don’t like AI for production code, but I love it for ideation and prototyping. I agree. It really allows you to quickly iterate on ideas without being blocked by implementation details.
The OP's code is in production though.
Not to be disrespectful, but OP's code is also a website that already exists literally thousands of times and could be done in any spreadsheet program without any programming at all...
It’s more like AI provides the development team, and you are the key user and product manager that comes with all the requirements and domain knowledge, the lead architect reviewing the architecture, and the lead UXer reviewing the UX.
Does the "iv" in your name stand for "implied volatility" by chance? : - )
Ha, you got me!
In this sense LLMs are another wave of "end-user programming" like excel formula. This has been the recurring experience of many in these waves.
Ironically, all I see in the website is easily replicable with existing spreadsheet apps. No programming needed.
The table doesn't work (scroll sideways) on my mobile just FWIW
But when will Larry Fink start vibecoding DeFi ?!!
Nice project! One small suggestion, adding a search or category filter would help simplify navigation given the number of calculators available.
Thanks! Honestly I've been feeling that too — finding stuff is getting annoying even for me. Search is coming soon. Good call.
For me it’s kinda the same. I always hated typing actual code, I love planing, reading, finding bugs etc. But writing code? Eh, I never enjoyed that. Now with agents I can kinda do exactly what I like, plan, write in natural langue and then do code review.
Congrats! I never stopped coding, but AI makes it way more productive and fun for sure.
$100 seems like a lot. I guess if you think about it compared to dev salaries, it's nothing. But for $10 per month copilot you can get some pretty great results too.
$100 did feel steep at first. I tried other models but Opus 4 with extended thinking just hits different — it actually gets what I'm trying to do and the code often works first try. Hard to go back after that.
Wait until you try Codex XHigh for $200 (with 5.2 Pro as oracle)
>The problem? Every compound interest calculator online is terrible. Ugly interfaces, ads covering half the screen, can't customize compounding frequency properly, no year-by-year breakdowns. I've tried so many. They all suck.
Have you tried this? https://www.investor.gov/financial-tools-calculators/calcula...
Well in my opinion there's nothing wrong with vibe-coding. You can completely use it to make your passion projects. I draw the line when people try to sell their vibe-coded project as something huge, putting people at the risk of potential security breaches while also taking money out of them.
Every other day I see ads of companies saying "use our AI and become a millionaire", this kind of marketing from agentic IDEs implies no need for developers who know their craft, which as said above, isn't the case.
Fair, but the threat model matters here. For a static mortgage calculator, the data leak risk is zero (if it's client-side). The risk here is different - logical. If the AI botches the formula and someone makes a financial decision based on that - that's the problem. For "serious" projects vibe coding must stop where testing and code audits begin
Yep including that too obviously, but OP isn't trying to market this I think, just sharing his passion project
Totally agree. I have my day job, and vibe-coding has simply brought back the joy of building things for me. It should be about passion and creativity, not about scamming people or overselling half-baked products. The "get rich quick with AI" narrative is toxic.
Why is this getting downvoted? Genuinely curious.
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Why do you think vibe code isn’t good enough for real products? Just so long as you have tests that show it functions as expected, why does it matter?
I think once you are asking for people’s money you should know what is going on pretty thoroughly. But that’s just my two cents :)
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>> Just so long as you have tests that show ...
this by definition filters out all non-devs, even many junior devs as you need to understand deeply if those tests are correct and cover all important edge cases etc.
+ when you deploy it - you need to know it was properly deployed and your db creds are not on frontend.
But mostly no one cares as there is no consequences to leaking personal data of your users or whatnot.
I think vibe coding isn't quite good enough for real products because I usually have 4 AI agents going non-stop. And I do read the code (I read so, so much code), and I give the AI plenty of feedback.
If you just want to build a little web app, or a couple of screens for your phone, you'll probably be fine. (Unless there's money or personal data involved.) It's empowering! Have fun.
But if you're trying to build something that has a whole bunch of moving parts and which isn't allowed to be a trash fire? Someone needs to be paying attention.
The "knowledge base" at the bottom is 100% slop. Why? Why inflict this on people?
Yeah, you're right — that part is pretty rough. I wanted to help people actually understand compound interest (it's kind of life-changing once it clicks), but I got lazy and let AI do it without proper editing. Defeats the whole point.
I'll figure out a better way. Thanks for calling it out.
I think the words are "you're absolutely right".
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Just another AI generated website with 5000 calculators thrown together that looks like every other single one. From a brand new account with a post that looks like it was also written from ChatGPT. Somehow getting enough votes to show up on my homepage.
Things are definitely changing around HN compared to when it first started.
Fair call — it did kind of explode from one calculator to 60+ I’m a real person (long-time lurker, finally posting), but I get why it looks sus. Things are changing fast, and I’m just happy to be part of the messy early wave. Thanks for the honesty.
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What are you implying?. He would have had to hire a good developer at least for a full month salary to build something like this.
And if you are thinking enterprise, it would take 2-3 developers, 2 analysts, 2 testers, 1 lead and 1 manager 2-3 months to push something like this. (Otherwise why would lead banks spent billions and billions for IT development every year? What tangible difference you see in their website/services?)
5000 calculators may look excessive, but in this case it magnifies the AI capabilities in the future - both in terms of quality and quantity.
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So true. I sometimes wonder how many ai bots there really are. I often see the telltale signs but often miss.
Twitter/X incentivizes you to get engagements because with a blue checkmark you get paid for it, so people shill aggressively, post idiotic comments on purpose trying to ragebait you. It's like LinkedIn in for entrepreneurs. Reddit or it's power hungry moderators (shadow)bans people often. The amount of popular websites that people can shill their trash is dwindling, so it gets worse here as a result I assume too.
This shit is written with ChatGPT
LLMs are the best BI tool available.
Until they start hallucinating data
As I read this post I realized that a majority of my US colleagues _write exactly like that_ holy crap it’s gonna bug me all the time now.
Same. Fell out of love with programming after the first few years because the thought of spending my life staring at a screen and dealing with insignificant minutia suddenly seemed horrible. Spent a lot of years in management and LLMs gave me a way to build things I wanted again. Currently building a platformer.
This is tongue-in-cheek, but you spent years in management because "the thought of spending your life staring at a screen and dealing with insignificant minutia seemed horrible?" I need to read your management book!
It’s a lot of 1:1s and talking to people directly and strategy about setting up performant teams. I enjoy it way more and don’t spend a lot of time looking at screens.
> Stack: Next.js, React, TailwindCSS, shadcn/ui, four languages (EN/DE/FR/JA). The AI picked most of this when I said "modern and clean."
I guess this is what separates some people. But I always explicitly tell it to use only HTML/JS/CSS without any libraries that I've vetted myself. Generating code allows you now not having to deal with it a lot more.
Cool to hear nonetheless. Can we now also stop stigmatizing AI generated music and art? Looking at you Steam disclosures.
Genuine congratulations. Ignore the unconstructive comments you’ll get (I already flagged one.)
This is a revolution, welcome back to coding :)