Show HN: I quit coding years ago. AI brought me back
19 days 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?
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.
100% this, too. I am an IT professional - CTO for a large-ish enterprise (25-30bn yearly revenue). I am finding myself waking up at 4am every single day for the last 2 months to vibe code stuff i always wanted to build for myself, my family and friends, and never quite had the time for it. My sleep habits are definitely suffering but my happines is through the roof.
100% this. This is the new age of software - but it will be tiny little apps like this for each little user. They don't need to be mega apps, etc. Bespoke little apps that help your own little business or corner of the world.
I'm teaching my kid what I consider the AI dev stack: AI IDE (Antigravity for us), database (Supabase for us with a nice MCP server), and deployment (Github and Vercel for us). You can make wonderful little integrated apps with this in hours.
Out of all the apps you've worked on, what's one or two that you think came out really well?
The fleet task app has been really useful. I have my hired hands using it, tasks are shared and can be deferred so they don't show up until spring or midsummer when we have weather or time to work on them, or we're going to need that piece of equipment readied.
Honestly, I have so many features in it now it's hard to describe it, shared work calendar, parts shopping list, recurring maintenance, blah blah blah. It's very bespoke and I doubt anyone else would want to use it the way we do.
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Did you start farming from scratch?
Did you take over a farm?
Family farm I came back to after working out for years and sold my IT company.
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?
That's all blown way out of proportion. I have a stack of 10k page manuals for diagnosing and repairing every piece of green iron on the place. Honestly, I've been considering training an LLM so I can make better use of the manuals, they're so incredibly detailed it's hard to find the thing you're looking for.
The only thing Deere "locks down" is that some of the parts have a CANbus address that you need to get a tech over to program the controller to recognize the part, and do the same if you replace a controller.
It's not some nefarious anti-farmer thing, it's because of the way the controller network works. In fact, I've used a CANbus sniffer on the bus and everything on there is in the clear, they don't even encrypt the messages.
The only things I've sent to town to get fixed was because I didn't have time to diagnose it, or it was an insurance claim and I wanted warranty. Blowing $80,000 worth of innards out the back of a combine wasn't a job I wanted to tackle right then (but I probably should have, I wasn't happy with the attention to detail in the repair).
So the upshot is, don't believe every terrible story about Deere you hear. Just the one where they charge too goddamn much for parts.
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One of my mechanics friends saved up like 15-20k just to be able to service these things. He just goes farm-to-farm and works on their tractors. The work is local, but you got to be able to get the tools and knowledge to use them.
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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.
You and OP are talking about two different things. OP is talking about being able to build things that do things. You're talking about building things that make money.
It's not technology that is the problem. It never was. It's Capitalism, always was the problem and always will. It's insane how Capitalism curtails innovation.
> It's insane how Capitalism curtails innovation.
There is an incredible irony in your typing that out on a device so advanced that it was beyond science fiction when I was growing up 40 years ago.
The problem is that we are still in the pre-history of civilization. We make some basic mistakes, still. Some of them quite costly, others quite dangerous. As history advances we'll learn to fix it, as long as we don't fixate on just one thing. It's never just one thing.
Capitalism is the worst economic framework, except all the others.
I've been think about these broad critiques of Capitalism, and while I sometimes find myself nodding in at least partial agreement, I worry that it's far too blunt a critique.
If you look at Soviet or Chinese Communism, they also stifled innovation, and they also destroyed entire ecosystems. They also had extreme concentrations of power, which allowed psychopathic leaders to commit atrocities.
If we want to come up with real long-term solutions, maybe we need to be honest about underlying human traits, and address those via systematic controls. Otherwise, it feels like we are going to keep bouncing from extreme to extreme. That tendency towards extremes seems like another easily exploited human trait that needs to be identified and addressed.
I guess my point here is that maybe it's not entirely specific systems at fault here, as much as it is universal human traits and group dynamics.
Disclaimer: I thought we had already found the beginnings of an answer, and it was Social Democracy with a regulated market economy. However, this system appears not to be extreme enough for many people to get excited about it.
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.
> How confident is the OP that every single one of these 60 calculators work all the time, with all edge cases?
The compound interest calculator, which is their 'favorite page', already shows an incorrect value in the graph. So my faith in the other calculators isn't great. I also kinda doubt OP's story of them using that page all the time, since it took me about 20 seconds to find this issue.
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I built one of the top 3 results on Google when you search “compound interest calculator” and a dozen other similarly popular calculator pages.
The value isn’t the interface, it’s the trust that its calculations are accurate. I can’t tell you how many meetings I had with accountants and finance people to validate all the calculations.
> How confident is the OP that every single one of these 60 calculators work all the time, with all edge cases
Would you be asking the same question if it's written without AI? How can any software be always working will all edge cases?
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I've been thinking a bit about vibe coding with trust-critical apps. My solution has been hand-code and test the parts where bugs would mislead users, and vibe code the rest. In my case that's been hand-coding backend calculation logic and vibe coding the UI and server (this is also the part I am least expert in). In practice this does wind up including a lot of little judgment calls at the interfaces.
In the end, my feeling is there needs to be transparency in how bulletproof-tested a product is. IMO even a calculator that might be wrong can be useful if it's the most convenient option and the user knows the risks (though to be clear, that is not the philosophy I am employing in my personal project).
There's a weird conflict going on here and I've experienced it myself. Essentially we hear 2 claims:
- You all should build your own software. AI is so good!
- You all should use the software I built with AI. It's so good!
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.
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You can still test it for accuracy?
ah, the thing every person does when searching for a calculator: verify that it can actually do the math, a thing computers were historically good at from about the 1960s until within the past few years.
do you understand how bad it is when you search for software and you cannot trust it to do what you ask of it? it's bad!
Imagine saying this for medicine.
Did you miss the part where they generated tests too?! I mean what do you want, for him to actually review the code or something? That's what kills the love of coding, man.
I, on the other hand, am getting gradually, but strongly, disillusioned, and importantly also feeling disenfrenchised, from coding and the world around it.
Commercial coding or building the tools for yourself?
AI is perfect for building those little tools for you and maybe your family, ones you have no intention of making unicorn startups, but help in your day to day.
You get a bespoke solution and don't need to worry about that free app you found moving to a subscription model when the author wants to profit off it or sells it to a VC company.
It doesn't have to be perfect code, secure or anything else. If it does what it should, it's good.
I too am feeling this way. I liked the deep engagement and flow state that came at least to me through actually typing out my program and having to deeply think about things.
I’m sure programmers who wrote their code on punch cards felt the same. Then programmers who wrote in assembler felt the same about high-level languages and optimising compilers.
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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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> 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’m not an AI hater but I do see this as evidence of LLMs being susceptible to chasing trends as much as people.
Next.js with server rendered React is not a stack that an experienced web developer would have recommended for a “clean” solution to a collection of financial calculators. It’s the answer you’d get if you asked for the stack that’s trending the most lately.
> Next.js with server rendered React is not a stack that an experienced web developer would have recommended for a “clean” solution to a collection of financial calculators
Do you speak with web developers on a daily basis? It seems to be the default stack for everyone to build from from a Saas to a TODO app for the last 5 years or so.
Could be, but that stack happens to also solve for a lot of problems totally unexperienced people will struggle with (such as, to not look too far, CORS issues). Good reco for a non-tech person to build a frontend. And besides, who cares which stack is used as long as its used. Its not like this will ever be maintained. If anything, if a need for a new feature emerges 5 months down the road the whole thing can be re-done from scratch in one sitting without writing a single line of code.
TBH, that's pretty much the stack I'd pick if I were building anything new by hand. If you look at the site, there's a lot going on and Next + React + Tailwind does not seem so crazy.
These are all quite reliable well-understood components, and far from "chasing trends" IMO.
Next.js is 9 years, React 12 years old.
vibe coding so far has really homogenized the tech stacks by the self promoters. Vercel is printing money off this phenomenon that's a self fulfilling snowball. But stack diversity is good, not everything needs to be js/ts
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.
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?
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> 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.
This is coming across as the "hobby police" here telling everyone what they can and can't do... I'm sure it wasn't meant that way but it reads that way.
The airplane company wont let you vibe code their systems anyway, and rightly so. the rest of us can just do whatever we like.
> 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.
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>> so much of it isn't fun at all
thats why it was valuable.
All things worth doing are hard.
There are plenty of things that are hard that are not valuable. At least not valuable enough to matter.
This is why we have compilers rather than writing assembly by hand.
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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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.
Honestly, I feel as though LLMs have actually changed the way we write posts, especially if a person uses them a lot. For instance, I cannot imagine why someone would use an LLM to reply to a random post, and that sentence does read more like a mix of LLM and human writing.
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.
Robot, experience this tragic irony for me!
True, as a threat to PM. Product management can't vibe their way out from a lack of domain expertise.
>> 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.
While you can't do anything about (other peoples') interfaces, you can absolutely do something for ads. You can install an ad-blocker on your browser. This is not just for you, OP, it's for everyone: get an ad blocker. Your experience of the internet will be radically changed.
I am reminded of this anytime I sit at someone else's computer who doesn't have an ad blocker, or whenever I see internet conversations complaining about ads; I wonder "what ads"? Then I remember: the ads I'm blocking.
So do yourself a big, warm, fuzzy favour and make the internet better for you. Block ads today.
Choose your own ad blocker, obviously.
What, you thought this was an ad for a specific ad blocker, didn't you? Nah, any one will do. Just block bloody ads.
Using an ad blocker just shifts the cost of creating/providing content onto people not using ad blockers.
The enshitification of the internet is largely driven by people ad blocking, as is incentivizes more click bait, more ads, and sloppier cheap content.
For engineering/software related content, the impact is immense since the audience is largely people ad blocking. I won't name names, because they fear backlash from their "ad block is awesome" audience, but some well known youtubers in the hard nerdy tech space report 40-50% of views they receive no compensation for.
So you can evangelize how great it is to not have to compensate for content, but don't think it's some kind of everyone wins victory. It's just a cost shift onto someone else, which largely manifests as bad content being needed to cover costs.
The correct approach is paying for what you use, and avoiding ad-supported content to send the message that you want a paid option.
I 100% don't care, and I'm more than happy to move to a different model of internet that has explicit channels of free vs paid vs subsidized content.
The current landscape is so hostile that I feel it's my moral duty to block everything.
> The enshitification of the internet is largely driven by people ad blocking
This is unfairly putting the blame on only one rational actor in a prisoner's dilemma.
Content providers are free to put their content behind a paywall with no ads, but they choose not to.
They choose not to because people don't pay for content when they can get it from other providers who don't use a paywall.
Consumers then are left without the option to pay for an ad-free experience.
But ads are run on hardware the consumer owns, consuming their resources and harvesting personal information on the consumer, which is a security concern.
So even if they want to support content creators by viewing the ads they run, they need to also accept the security trade-off, which many reasonably do not
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>> The enshitification of the internet is largely driven by people ad blocking, as is incentivizes more click bait, more ads, and sloppier cheap content.
In Bizarro World. In our world, enshitification of the internet is driven predominantly by ads. For example, click bait, more ads and sloppier cheap content are all motivated by the need to create ever more content in order to serve ever more ads.
In the same way, spam blockers don't cause more spam, vaccines don't cause more disease, eating fish deosn't cause more fires, etc.
Correlation is not causation.
The internet is shitty in many ways and ads are one reason. You can pay for ad-free streaming but still get low bitrate although you paid enough to cover traffic costs for higher bitrate. You can pay to have ad-free instagram but still see all this shitty AI-generated crap and bot posts. You can pay for Youtube Premium but Google will still massively invade your privacy.
Do you really think that if everybody turned off their ad blockers and paid for premium services, the internet would become better? The way I see it, corporate greed would milk consumers even more.
Instead of surrendering to ads, we should promote directly donating to (or supporting) YouTubers or websites that provide value to us.
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
One doesn't exclude the other. To fix something you first have to validate it and figure out exactly what the AI got wrong.
But yeah, you're basically right
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Worst engineer's nightmare would be if you're hired, delivered the "working website with 100 of different calculators", and someone like myself needs "just to code review it" and "make sure all corner cases are covered and stuff like that", and "provide constructive feedback" (that would be copy-pasted later on to AI), but mostly "this work is 99.9% complete". And you "can't understand why such a simple code review takes so much time, because everything just works for me".
Is it that much worse than reverse engineering poorly designed business processes that hang together with Excel spreadsheets and VBA macros?
Yes, since at least that was written by a human with some semblance of cognitive familiarity.
I recommend you get Claude proper subscription. You can spend $100 a month for Max and get way more API usage out of it, or for $17 if you are patient about hitting limits its still way cheaper than using the API directly.
I have a similar experience but its moreso AI lets me build my side projects I only have time to research on, not much time or energy to actually code. I get to review the code and have Claude inspect it (most people I feel dont have Claude do code audits) and tell me where theres bugs, security issues, etc. I do this routinely enough.
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 :-)
Your linked site has an AI-generated blog.
If this were about grammar, it would be appropriate to translate something you wrote, not use generative AI to create it.
This whole thing is an ad. All the post's sentiments that people are engaging with ("imposter syndrome" etc.) were spit out by a clanker.
What a disheartening start to my morning.
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Good luck, and welcome back.
For myself, I’ve always enjoyed “getting my hands dirty” with code, and the advent of LLMs have been a boon. I’m retired from 34 years of coding (and managing), and never skipped a beat. I’ve released a few apps, since retiring. I’m currently working on the first app that incorporates a significant amount of LLM assistance. It’s a backend admin tool, but I’ll probably consider using the same methodology for more public-facing stuff, in the future.
I am not one to just let an LLM write a whole app or server, unsupervised (I have control issues), but have allowed them to write whole functions, and help me to find the causes of bugs.
What LLMs have given me, is a decreased hesitance to trying new things. I’ve been learning new stuff at a furious rate. My experience makes learning very fast. Having a place to ask questions, and get [mostly] good answers (experience helps me to evaluate the answers), is a game-changer.
> “A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.” –John A. Shedd
[0] https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/thats-not-what-ships...
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 be likely getting automated by then)
On the plus side, vibe coding disaster remediation looks to be a promising revenue stream in the near future, and I am rubbing my hands together eagerly as I ponder the filthy lucre.
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> And it is very disheartening to see people without any skills to behave the way they do.
The way the do, which is? I've skimmed comments and a lot of them is hate, hostility towards OP's project and coders "without skill" in general, also denial because there's no way anything vibe-coded worked. At best, there is strong tribalism on both ends.
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> It is an art.
I agree what we do requires a lot of creative thinking. When AI supporters attempt to use an argument comparing to factory workers being freed from dull laborious work by robots, the analogy falls flat on two fronts. First, there's nothing creative about that sort of work and second, because robots are highly accurate; while AI can often be just high.
feel the same, but I moved up. create full products and profit from them. you have a great taste if you know what's behind
I feel it's nice to use AI coding for side-projects, especially after work when I am kind of tired. Although the one issue is that if it gets stuck in a loop or just does not get the what is wrong and does the wrong thing no matter how you twist it, then you have to go into the weeds to fix it yourself and it feels so tiresome, at that point I think what if I had just done everything myself so my mental model would be better.
Also we are still designing systems and have to be able to define the problem properly, at least in my company when we look at the velocity in delivering projects it is barely up since AI because the bottlenecks are elsewhere..
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>It is an art. And it is very disheartening to see people without any skills to behave the way they do
They've even got their own slogan: "you're probably just not prompting it properly"
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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.
Vibecoder here. I don't think so. I am a PE investor, and we are using it in our small portfolio companies to great effect. We can make small little mini-apps that do one thing right and help automate away extra work.
It's a miracle. Simply wouldn't have been done before. I think we'll see an explosion of software in small and midsize companies.
I admit it may be crappy software, but as long as the scope is small - who cares? It certainly is better than the janky manual paper processes, excel sheets, or just stuff in someone's head!
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The vibe coders will weed out, but programming with AI is never going away.
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Still waiting for the 100% vibe coded trading bot.
Im in this field and my system was heavily built with Claude, though not per vibe coding, more like a junior supporting me: I do not see any person connecting a vibe coded bot to a real account soon, since if its about real money, people will hesitate. And if you have blown up one account with your vibe coded bot while you are not a professional dev, you will loose interest very quickly - such systems do not contain "just a few thousand lines of code": Sure you could speed up development massivly and "hit the rock sooner than later" when going vibe coded here :-D
Agree 100%; and the analogy with SEO is spot on! Those were everywhere 20 years ago. They're mostly gone, and so are their secret recipes and special tags and whatnot. AI gurus are the same! Not the same people but the same profile. It's so obvious.
"Comment NEAT to receive the link, and don't forget to connect so I can email you" -- this is the most infuriating line ever.
I'd recommend a pivot to hardware. I'm in the FPGA sector, and vibe coding isn't a thing for the most part, simply because the determinism required doesn't lend itself well to LLMs. It's so incredibly easy to introduce a bug at every single step, and the margin for error depending on volumes is near zero. You're often playing with a single clock cycle of headroom. I've yet to play with a single LLM (Claude Opus 4.5 is my latest trial) that doesn't introduce a massive amount of timing errors. Most semiconductor IP is proprietary, top-level secret, code never leaves the building. The data to build good models just isn't there like it is for software and the open-source ecosystem.
In comms, they have something like a 1:4 ratio of design to validation engineers. Defence is slightly different, as it depends on the company, but generally the tolerance for bugs is zero. Lets not get started on the HF trading folks and their risk appetite!
There's a lot of room for software engineers. Most FPGAs are SoC devices now, running some form of embedded linux doing high-level task management networking. Provided you know enough Verilog to know your way around, you'll be fine. You're also in a space where most engineers I know are preparing to retire in the next 5-10 years, so there will be a panic which will ripple across industries.
How do I get started with FPGAs? Coming from backend/ops/sysadmin
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While my projects have not touched agentic AI yet and the type of code I have been writing is produced like back in the day (read documentation, write code, read documentation, write code ...) I expect that my next project will tether me to agentic AI systems more. I still have my hobby projects, which I code the old-fashioned way. Hey! at least it costs me much less that $100/month to tinker on projects ... more like the cost and wear on running my laptop!
There are people here "I can finally get all my ideas done!" Sure, if they are really important enough, I guess. But high technology is much, much less important to me than my employer or probably others here on HN. I can only be concerned with the paycheck at this point. And at this point, they are happy that I can read documentation, write code, read documentation, write code, and don't care how it gets done. (For what I am working in though, I'd just skip the AI training step.)
With that in mind, I like to use PLs as tools to clarify thinking. There are others that think using PLs and their accompanying tools as friction to their goals, but my friction is understanding the problems I am trying to solve. So, while taking the adventure into automated tooling might be interesting, it doesn't replace the friction (just the feeling I have to read more potential garbage code.)
Yep. After 40+ years in the business I chose to retire rather than madly pump out code using a robot. Sucked all the joy right out of the craft.
It's also a depressing wakeup call to realize that programming has evolved from a craft in which you used to write 90% of the instructions but with the rise of libraries, and now codebots, 99% of the instructions are written by others. Coding became cut-and-paste decades ago but now it's degenerated into talk-and-walk. Soon there'll be no need for any skill from the code creator at all. The writing is on the wall. Frankensteinian LLMs surely will drive all the engineers from the building.
It was great while it lasted, but... sayonara hackerdom.
Consider security engineering. It requires constantly thinking about unconventional ways to attack systems, and taking advantage of common coding mistakes LLMs produce as often is humans because it learned from humans.
Security engineers will have jobs until software is perfectly secure... and that is going to be a while.
I do not use LLMs at all to do my job, and it is unlikely I ever would. Clients pay me -after- they had all their favorite LLMs take a pass.
> Security engineers will have jobs until software is perfectly secure... and that is going to be a while.
Might be never or if the software is not used at all.
The perfect and secure software is none.
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have friends in Security Audits and the business model is great. The clients need external companies to give stamp of approval for their cyber insurance. Also its hard to find security holes but rather easy to validate, and it doesn't matter how ugly they are its just if you can get in or not .
And indeed the vibe coders will just create a lot more security issues
> Security engineers will have jobs until software is perfectly secure... and that is going to be a while.
Not as long as you think.
https://cybernews.com/security/standord-artemis-system-beats...
I agree, the profession is dying and will soon be dead. There is no need to understand code. LLM coding agents make all sorts of suboptimal decisions but it doesn't matter; they just keep churning until it works. Staying in the loop to read and evaluate the program line-by-line only slows the process down.
I think the coding tools are not good enough yet so we can kinda-sorta hang on, but they will be within a few years.
I don't get this sentiment, regressions still exist, you can't just prompt them away and a programmer will spend 10x more time fixing regressions, bug fixing and improvements than scaffolding in most projects that people pay for. If most of your time at work is not doing this, then you are already living a simple life.
I feel the same way. The only way I found that lets me cope with this is by having 1-2 personal projects, closed source, with me as the only user, where I slowly build things the way I enjoy, and where the outcome is useful software that doesn't try to monetise at the expense of the end user.
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.
I'm in a similar position. At some point in the past few months I just stopped coding in my hobby time altogether. I'm almost 45 and not sure what else I could do, though. Hope you figure something out!
I basically took the last year off from creative projects and just played solo board games in the evenings for most of the year, on nights when I didn't have other plans.
Marvel Champions in particular is a lot of fun, although may be a bit overwhelming at first if you don't play a lot of board games already.
I also got into Legendary deckbuilding games recently, and those are a bit more approachable, although not all of them play solo unless you manage two hands of cards (which isn't a big deal for me, but I've played hundreds of different board games).
They have those based on various IPs (Game of Thrones, James Bond, X-Files, Matrix, Alien movies, Buffy, Marvel, and in a few months DC comics) and play somewhat similarly, so if you learn one it would be easy to learn another one.
I also picked up a solitaire variant called Hoki just last week and really enjoyed it. You upgrade your cards over multiple games (that are each about five minutes to play), and then once you've completely upgraded all the cards you can play the game daily and then consult a book that will give you a fortune based on the final state of your game.
It took me 53 games to unlock the final state, and I did all of them in just a couple of days, I enjoyed it so much. Now I'm playing a game or two a day to see what the fortune is and then writing a journal to reflect on what that could mean, for fun.
Slowly getting back into my creative hobbies this year (which include board game design and writing), although coding I still feel is hard to do in my off time (even when it's making games, which I've historically really enjoyed doing).
I've messed around with A.I. agent coding a bit, and I'm a bit more impressed with it than I anticipated, but I'm not sure how deep down that rabbit hole I want to go and not code myself. But I really don't feel like I have much energy left in the tank for coding more after doing it for my day job lately.
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> I'm almost 45 and not sure what else I could do, though.
I am of the same age. I have some good ideas on where to go, but dread the grind to get things moving. When I was in my teens and 20s the grind that got me to where am now was fun, but doing it again looks far less appealing now.
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Once you out NOW, it's impossible to go back to entry/mod level programing jobs. :( Downshifting to some shitty minimum wage job is BRUTAL
Came here to say this. I've been programming since I was 9, and it always had a strong aesthetic, artistic and creative dimension. That dimension has always been in tension with the economic demands of adult life, but I was good at finding the quiet corners in which to resolve it.
A lot of work was tedious, painstaking grind, but the reward at the end was considerable.
AI has completely annihilated all of the joy I got out of the process, and everything that attracted me to it with such abandon as an adolescent and a teenager. If someone had told me it was mostly slop curation, I would have stayed in school, stuck to my philosophy major, and who knows -- anything but this. I'm sure I'd have got reasonably far in law, too, despite the unpropitious time to be a JD.
I'm very much in a similar boat to you - I'm also considering a pivot away from SWE if this is what it's going to become. Luckily I'm still young and don't have anyone depending on me (other than myself).
I'm still working on my own small closed source projects, building them the way I want to, like a gameboy emulator - and I've gotten a lot of joy from those.
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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.
> artisanal code
That's an interesting perspective. I guess it depends on what you want and how low the stakes are. Artisanal coffee, sure. Artisanal clothing, why not? Would you want an artisanal MRI machine? Not sure. I wouldn't really want it "hand crafted", I just want it to do it's job.
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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.
Relatable story. Stepped away from "proper" development for a few years to focus on other work, and AI assistants have genuinely changed how quickly you can go from idea to something that works.
The key shift for me: I used to spend hours stuck on syntax, fighting with build systems, or searching StackOverflow for obscure errors. Now that friction is mostly gone. The actual thinking - what to build, how the pieces fit together, what edge cases matter - is still entirely human. But the translation from "I know what I want this to do" to "working code" is dramatically faster.
The compound interest calculator is a good example of something that would've felt like a weekend project a few years ago but probably took you a couple of hours. That's the unlock - not that AI writes code for you, but that the tedious parts stop blocking the interesting parts.
What surprised me most was how much architectural intuition I'd retained even after years away. The fundamentals don't decay as fast as the syntax knowledge.
It's a shame to find an AI-written ad so highly upvoted here.
The author even insists that AI was used because of their poor English, which is the standard excuse on Reddit as well. But clearly, this is not a translation:
> Curious if others have similar stories. Anyone else come back to building after stepping away?
This is bog-standard AI slop to increase engagement.
Look at the blog on their linked site as well. AI-generated posts.
This has been posted here for SEO. This is a business venture.
It's times like this when I think HN needs a post downvote button. Flagging might not be quite appropriate here, but I hate to see this content cluttering up the front page.
Why would flagging be inappropriate?
By contrast, the moment I am no longer able to compete with AI users, is the moment I quit the industry. I have no interest in outsourcing my thinking.
Thankfully LLMs are still very stupid. Especially when it comes to security engineering, my specialty, so looks like I have a while yet.
They are stupid when it comes to everyone’s specialty. Some level of ignorance around what you’re doing is a prerequisite of feeling like AI is a good tool (and is usually the exact wrong scenario to use AI as well, to boot).
It’s like using a poorly made steel adjustable wrench. People who know how to use it will low-key hate it (but still maybe find it better than no tool at all), whereas people just using it to smash things because heavy will think it’s pretty much the perfect tool.
Related: https://old.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1qfjwpe/ralph_l...
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.
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?
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Huh? What about all the open source software you use, did you build all of it?
What about the phone in your hand, did you design that?
HN loves to believe they are the noble few - men and women of math and science, driven by nothing but the pure joy of their craft
But this whole AI thing has been super revealing. Almost everyone here is just the same old same old, only that now that the change is hitting close to home, you’re clutching your pearls and lamenting the days when devs were devs
The younger generation born into the AI world is going to leave you in the dust because they aren’t scared of it
My math teacher used to say that people felt this was about…calculators, imagine that
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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.
Vibe coding will eventually come for that.
The cost of hallucinations though - you potentially have a stronger point there. It wouldn’t surprise me if that fails to sway some decision makers but it doesn’t give the average dev a bit more ground to work with.
It helped me finish my webRTC client for a esp32 microcontroller. Thats fairly low level. It did it without breaking a sweat - 2hrs, and we had a model which works with my pipecat-based based server.
I loaded the lowest level piece of software I wrote in the last 15 years - a memory spoofing aimbot poc exploiting architectural issues in x86 (things like memory breakpoints set on logical memory - not hw addresses - allowing to read memory without tripping kernel-level detection tools, ability to trigger PFs on pages where the POC was hiding to escape detection, low level gnarly stuff like this). I asked it to clean up the code base and propose why it would not work under current version of windows. It did that pretty well.
Lower level stuff does of course exist, but not a whole lot IMHO. I would not assume claude will struggle with kernel level stuff at all. If anything, this is better documented than the over-abstraced mainstream stuff.
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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
And this is exactly the problem. Developers are happily passing off their biggest valuable asset to, essentially, their replacements while, at the same time, convincing themselves that them playing the "ideas guy" or "conductor" roles is the real value they bring to the table.
Like, get real!
I feel like I'm rapidly going insane. It wasn't that long ago when many people in this forum would boldly exclaim that their software development skills were their capital and take pride in their ability to build stuff. It also wasn't that long ago when the "ideas guys" were a meme here.
We're ceding almost all of our bargaining power because programming "was never valuable." And we're doing it with smiles from ear to ear.
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I'm thinking back to my contracting days when a typical customer might have a team of ten people but only one or two did the bulk of the work. Now the whole team can be productive for whatever measure you use for productivity.
It's not so great for the one or two but fantastic for everybody else.
Well yeah! This is objectively a great process for getting a lot of work done.
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I feel the same way. LLMs automate aspects that I enjoy and amplify those that I hate.
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.
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.
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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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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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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
> 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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polished product, and LLM generated code should not be put in the same conversation.
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> ...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...
Can't the customer now just skip you and generate a product for himself via AI?
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I just work here, man. What's all this 'love' stuff? :) I propose a third camp: skilled employee seeking compensation.
edit: to stay on the larger topic, I haven't been swayed much one way or the other. ~90% of the code I need existed a decade ago in the form of reusable modules. Anything new is closer to pseudo-code, an amplifier or sandbox isn't something I'm that interested in.
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And yet, there's still room for people who love to code to do great work. Look at bun for instance https://bun.com/. It's a JavaScript runtime that dramatically improves on the performance of node.js to the point where it will likely completely deprecate it in the coming years. It does so many things right out of the box, but it's essentially just an incremental improvement in the development world.
I think AI-augmented development will lead to faster and vastly improved software over the years. This isn't just a space that's being disrupted on the maker/creator side of developing software. And from a makers/creators point of view, you wouldn't even need to keep up with the latest trends like performance, AI should just know which libraries are the best to use to develop your solutions.
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.
Some love to paint, while many just want a picture.
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.
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 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...
>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...
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.
This is great, but it misses one thing:
The software paradigm is changing.
People don't need a calculator website anymore. They can just prompt their own AI account to generate whatever calculator they need in the moment. I already have a few pinned in my favorites that I use often.
That is the real promise of AI driven software. Bespoke tiny apps available to anyone whenever they simply just ask for it.
This is only partially true.
For the foreseeable future until maybe we systems that can predict what someone will need/want for an app at any given time (a prospect as horrifying as it is awesome imo), there’ll be plenty of people, maybe even a majority, that don’t know what they want or need until it’s shown to them.
There will be many more niche applications vibe-coded by people with lots of knowledge and no coding experience/desire that people will use rather than thinking of an app themselves to create.
Then there will be people like you, me, OP and 99% of the other HN community that have a million ideas they want to create, use, and sometimes share.
There are a lot of things I don’t know about and even more I don’t know I don’t know about and in those cases, there’s still a wide open door for people to create applications and experiences that share their knowledge/vision.
I could ask Claude Code or some other future platform to build be a financial calculator every time I need it but why would I do that when someone with the benefit of prior knowledge and experience has already done that for me?
They probably included calculators I didn’t even know I needed.
The graph on the BMI calculator is incorrect. While it is a pretty minor bug how many other "minor" bugs are in these tools.
It's great to produce something for free but if it wouldn't have been more then a couple of hours work to verify each of these tools, write tests etc. Even better would have been to produce a open source library
Look, do what works for you obviously but this just reinforces my view that the people who see "AI Code agents" as a useful thing, are the people who don't know how to write code themselves.
For the same reason things like Image Playground/etc seem magical/appealing to non-artists (myself included): we don't know how to do it ourselves, so it feels empowering.
Or more close to home: it's the same reason that developers are so in love with clicking some buttons in the <insert cloud mega provider> dashboard in spite of the costs, lock-in, more costs, yet more costs, and of course the extra costs.
As with those choosing "cloud" services they don't need, here too there will no doubt be a lucrative market to fix the shit once people realise that there's a reason experts charge the way they do.
I am still an "Engineer" but for years have been mostly meetings and Architecture, so I had same experience as you with Vibe Coding, I can get some of my ideas down quickly with my limited time available, but still apply my Engineering knowledge to drive the agents. it has been really enjoyable to get actual ideas out without hitting walls of blockers of getting things running. I know many people enjoy those problems, but I am one of those that after a day of solving hard problems, want to enjoy getting my personal ideas out. I wrote about one I built over Christmas: https://michaeldugmore.com/p/family-planner-vibe-coding-rule...
Does the "iv" in your name stand for "implied volatility" by chance? : - )
Ha, you got me!
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.
I didn't quit coding but I also vibe coded something similar despite having found thousands of similar utilities (retirement calculators) so I vibe coded (with base44) https://boringretirementcalculator.com
What can I say... If you used a calculator to get an answer for sqrt(2) are you back to doing mathematics? It's simpler and more fun instead of using Newton method. But it's debatable if you are actually working on mathematics problems.
> Too slow, too many bugs ... the usual
You improve over time. I've been programming for 6 years and I still feel like I'm nowhere near others. That's a completely fine and valid thing to feel.
Yeah enjoying it too, though it’s a different type of joy than hand rolling it. More getting things done fast which is neat but less proud of what one crafted
Can definitely understand the reluctance people feel around it. Especially when they’ve invested years into it and have their livelihood on the line
I’m also quite reluctant to publish any of it. Doesn’t feel right to push code I don’t fully understand so mostly personal projects for now
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.
Sorry for yucking into everyone's yum here but... did we miss an opportunity here as programmers to provide simpler tools for people to build simple applications for themselves?
Since when did "average" people have time to set up a CI pipeline, agents, MCPs, and all the rest needed to get vibe coded apps to work become the "simple" way for non-programmers to use computers to mush some data together for their small businesses and neighbors and stuff?
Did spreadsheets, embedded databases, and visual form builders stop working or are lacking in some way?
Or are posts like this astro-turfing LLM posts from companies selling rent to build apps for non-tech folks?
Again, apologize for sounding cynical but it's so hard telling what is genuine these days and I'm genuinely curious how farmers found the time to set up this stuff instead of just using a spreadsheet and a few macros.
If LLMs are covering a gap here maybe there's an opportunity for better, local, lower-tech tooling that doesn't require such a huge tech stack (and subscriptions/rent) to solve simple, tractable problems?
LLMs are far more flexible in what you can create, opening up many niche use cases for non programmers (or those with very limited programming experience).
For example, I use LLMs for one specific thing, making plugins for an app I use (which need to be written in javascript/typescript). No code tools wouldn't be of any use to me here.
No code tools put you in a box that limits what you can create, whereas LLMs allow you to code pretty much anything (though of course how far you can get does depend on having at least some technical ability/knowledge).
The OP and the farmer are people who coded in the past. There can be a big difference between someone who understands how computers and code work generally, and someone who doesn't.
I was a software engineer up till about 8 years ago. I still dabbled in scripts here and there for things I needed since then. LLMs have proved hugely useful for me to do a wide variety of things that wouldn't have been worth bothering with before. The biggest barrier that LLMs overcome for me is being able to quickly find and adapt to different tools, libraries, languages, etc. But it does help immensely to understand how software works to some degree for being able to approach the problem in the first place. I think the two factors multiply together.
I imagine if I want to I could get back into real software engineering much easier and faster than I could have a few years ago, because I still understand how things work fundamentally, I'm just out of date on what's changed in libraries and systems and languages in the last 8 years.
It's also useful for working with spreadsheets and databases.
Anyway I don't mean to shill for LLMs, I hate where this all is taking civilization in general but I'll still use it where it helps me accomplish things I do value.
> Sorry for yucking into everyone's yum here but... did we miss an opportunity here as programmers to provide simpler tools for people to build simple applications for themselves?
It's not that programmers should've made tools with training wheels, but that the regular programmer tools exploded in complexity. Microservices, Kubernetes, etc. Not saying those don't have their places, but they've made programming less approachable.
A lot of these complex tools exists for the sake of their own complexity--to allow engineers to keep building their resumes by continually increasing the depth of their development stacks. Regular programming CAN often use one CPU and fit into one machine's RAM, but we've all collectively decided to add 12 layers of abstraction, virtualization, and orchestration on top of them so they can be run on clusters full of machines instead. We're making our own profession less approachable for the sake of our resumes and careers.
As someone who was part of the "everyone should learn to code" movement, no, we didn't. We tried all kinds of stuff for a decade and none of it was actually any good, only the people who would have learned to make stuff anyway learned to make stuff. LLMs are radically different: despite their results being terrible, and only just starting to show that maybe that can be a little better than terrible with opus 4.5, they actually meet people who want to make something where they are: skilled folks can make highly complex things (with code quality that's just as good as before because they know how to take what the LLM gives them and make it better), and unskilled folks can make "that one thing they want to" (and the code quality if irrelevant because it's a one-off that's not going to be maintained).
> If LLMs are covering a gap here maybe there's an opportunity for better, local, lower-tech tooling that doesn't require such a huge tech stack (and subscriptions/rent) to solve simple, tractable problems?
I see this with every new technology stack. Way back, we had folks putting out browser "applets" to do the same things that could be done in excel. And then, we had these apps built in the cloud, in mobile, on ios/android, in react, on raspberry pi, on a gpu etc..etc.. ie, Simple apps reinvented with some new tooling. It is almost the equivalent of 'printf("hello world")' when you are learning a new language. This is not to undermine the OPs efforts, but I see it in the spirit of "learning" rather than that of solving a hard problem.
Visual Basic scratched this itch for anyone who was willing to spend roughly the time learning it as, say, becoming basically proficient at Excel. But the ship appears to have sailed for that kind of RAD development.
That's a great take. The duality between hobby code and employable skills is striking. For a very long time you could transition into it, but I don't think so anymore. The job market demands X+Y+Z, so you need to know and follow X+Y+Z or you're not doing anything productive (hobby coding). Insane.
This is what Ruby, Rails and DHH personally tried to do for a long time. The concept of "One Person Framework" where one engineer could work on frontend/backend/devops/mobile stuff is kinda cool, and works to some degree. With questionable tools like Stimulus, but it's there. However, when you're one sentence away from 500-line react component, it's not relevant anymore.
There was never any money in making tools that allow people to make their own applications. There is only money in walling people into your garden, forcing them to use all of the decaying or enshittified tools in your ecosystem.
There actually still isn't any money in LLM, but we're in the "cheap ubers" era where everything is subsidized by capital that has congealed thanks to economic deregulation in the 80s. Yay, capitalism.
> did we miss an opportunity here as programmers to provide simpler tools for people to build simple applications for themselves?
Not really? To someone who doesn't care about software, software is a means to an end of actually doing something, and everything between idea <> execution of value is basically overhead. This has always been true and the overhead is getting carved further and further down over time.
> Since when did "average" people have time to set up a CI pipeline, agents, MCPs, and all the rest needed to get vibe coded apps to work become the "simple" way for non-programmers to use computers to mush some data together for their small businesses and neighbors and stuff?
You don't need all of this. You can basically just download Cursor, the Claude app, Claude code, opencode, whatever today and run something locally. I do think "deployment and productionization" is a bit of a gap but stuff like Replit or even Vercel + Supabase is pretty far along towards agents just being able to do most of infra for you for anything small scale, or at least tell you the buttons to press to hook things up.
> Did spreadsheets, embedded databases, and visual form builders stop working or are lacking in some way?
Pretty much all the LLM/agent products are obviously way ahead of form builders at this point. Take Retool for example, you could spend minutes to hours plugging together "programming-lite" concepts. A single prompt and a few minutes, and maybe 1-2 back and forths can basically get you to the same place with probably less overall jank in a lot of situations. Form-builder stuff is totally dead outside of maybe being an escape-hatch for some LLM situations, or letting users do higher-level scaffolding, but even then I think stuff like Cursor's "select the part of the app you want to change and prompt" is going to be a better UX.
> maybe there's an opportunity for better, local, lower-tech tooling that doesn't require such a huge tech stack
I think you are viewing this from the "tech" angle rather than the deliver value to the end user angle. The tech stack can be arbitrarily complex as long as it works to reduce end user friction and provide value with as much ease as possible. This might as well be the core idea of all consumer tech.
I think your core theses are basically "people care about the underlying tech" and "people want to learn programming or programming-adjacent" and those are both wrong for the vast vast majority of people.
Happy compunding! Wish I had started younger but catching up. 25% of your salary into a pension in global indexes I think is the way. You never get to touch it, no decisions to make and just forget it. Live life. Have a lot of money later. (Maybe go down to 5% for when needed e.g. buying a house. Having a baby)
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.
If you don't use Excel (or Google Sheets in my case) it's my favorite way to do financial calculations because you can easily customize contribution amounts or withdrawals in certain years by having different columns.
Nice site though!
One thing that’s always missing from these compound interest calculators is multiple assets with different rates, and different rates over time (e.g between X date and Y date use Z rate, etc). I didn’t quite figure out the right UI for the second one.
I recently vibe coded a stock options vesting tracker for myself. I did a single HTML file with vanilla JS/CSS. Somehow, the design came out looking vaguely similar to what the OP is showing. The AI seems to like these oblong rounded divs.
I built a fun colour hunt game that I play with my friends. Never knew that there are lots of purple objects in plain sight
https://colorhunt.lol/
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...
Looks nice!
Nit: it seems like the graph for the compound interest calculator should start at year 0 rather than year 1.
Also, it might be nice to have a way to change the starting year to the actual year you want to start (such as the current year).
Nice man, good for you. I was feeling burned out as well, but LLMs have allowed me to focus on solving and creating rather than the low level issues that constantly were the focus.
I searched for "simple interest" and found nothing. What on earth is this searching? I would not put your name next to this.
Edit: I appreciate the quick turnaround. Apologies.
Added https://calquio.com/finance/simple-interest
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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So true. I sometimes wonder how many ai bots there really are. I often see the telltale signs but often miss.
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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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.
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.
Thank you for sharing this. Made my night. Now I'm finishing up a wicked cool app build with this keeping me going!
Though, I'm also reading the comments and losing faith in the future of society.
LLMs have sucked all of the joy out of software engineering for me, and I've been doing it for 12 years.
As others have pointed out, I'm looking at a career shift now. I'm essentially burning out on doing the whole LLM-assisted coding stuff while I still can, earning money on contracts, and then going to step away from the field. I'm lucky that I'm in a position to do so, but I really don't know what the rest of my career looks like.
18 years here (more if I can count my non professional years). Agreed, coding isn't as much fun as it used to be but AI has only increased my enthusiasm for tech. Its a lot more easier to learn and understand new stuff, build things (especially personal tools) and tinker in any programming language.
For me, it was the craft that was fun, less the building. It was nice to have a really good result that customers were happy about, that other engineers were happy about, but it was also nice to have such intimate knowledge of a codebase because I and my team built it.
I miss that level of mastery. I feel that in the LLM-assisted coding age, that's now gone. You can read every section of code that an LLM generates, but there's no comparison to writing it by hand to me in terms of really internalizing and mastering a codebase.
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Why don't you just not use LLM's if it sucks the joy out of the process for you?
Many reasons
Everyone else is using LLMs to assist their development, which makes it a lot harder to work without them, especially in just building enterprise apps. It doesn't feel like I'm creating something anymore. Rather, it feels like a fuzzy amalgamation of all developers in the training data are. Working with LLMs sometimes feels like information overload. When I see so much code scrolling past as the agent makes its changes, this can be exhausting. Reading this massive volume of code is exhausting. I don't like that the new "power tools" of software engineering mean that my career, our career, is now monetizable. I liked feeling like a craftsman, and that is lost.
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No the OP, but I feel like using LLMs to code is much more like management than coding. And the "person" you're managing is a not very smart coder with severe memory issues.
My guess is because it’s turning development into a Red Queen’s Race [0] where everyone has to run faster and faster just to stay in the same place. If everyone else is using LLMs, how can you stay competitive without using them?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen_hypothesis
Same for me... fortunately, I'm reaching the end of my career anyway. But let see how it goes. LLMs are a very recent development so it's too soon to take such drastic decisions.
On the positive side, I have some old personal projects I couldn't complete because it was too much work for me alone. I think LLMs will help for menial tasks, while I can still work on improving the design and adding features.
What are you looking of shifting to? I’ve thought about an actual engineering discipline, but going through the schooling just seems too big of a thing.
Honestly? I'm not sure. I've looked at a few different paths.
I'm lucky to live in the Research Triangle area of the United States, so I've got really good options for schooling around me. My sister graduated with an aerospace engineering degree, and I've always been interested in space. Thinking about hardware as a possible path as well.
But in a complete twist, I've also always wanted to be an educator. A high school math or computer science teacher would fit me well. I remember a lot of my male teachers very fondly in terms of the impact they had on my life, and I'd love to give that back.
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do you think shifting careers is gonna make us to avoid AIshitfication? I thought that was spreading on all areas.
Yes and no, I'm looking for something that's deeply people-oriented now. I mentioned it in a different comment, being a teacher. Also thinking about being a nurse. My wife was a nurse, maybe we could work together.
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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.
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.
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.
The tools he created speaks volumes about his interests and what is important to him in life.
I have seen code bases that are amazing. I have seen ones that look bad, but work. About a year and half ago I saw my first fairly large scale fully AI generated project and it filled me with dread. It looked like the figma, which is very impressive. But under the hood it was bizarre. It was like those sci-fi movie tropes of teleportation where one of the people teleport and the destination coordinates are wrong and the merge with a tree or rock or whatever. There was so much unused junk that had nothing to do with anything. Ugh. My task to was to figure out why the initial render took so long. (unsurprisingly it was loading all the data then rendering, so with toy dev loads it was fine, in production nightmare and getting worse). So I just got to it and made some progress. But the new grad (who thought I was a dinosaur (might be right)) who made it was working in parallel and reintroducing more slop. So it became this Sisyphean task where I am speeding things up (true dinosaur so measuring things) and they were cutting and pasting and erasing the gains.
I have always found management to be just silly exercise in day full of meetings. I like to make things. I could retrain, but, the salary drop would be very hard. Hope to find one last gig and have enough to retire. I still get that spark of joy when all the tests pass.
Very nice retirement calculater - clean, intuitive and rich in settings.
The table doesn't work (scroll sideways) on my mobile just FWIW
There is an interesting pattern emerging in this thread. There are a lot of 'same here' and 'opposite for me' comments, but both sides are converging on the same point: people developing software to solve a problem.
Many who are considering a career shift away from software due to 'AI disgust' devoted their lives to developing software because they loved the craft. But with AI churning out cheap, ugly, but passable code, it's clear that businesses never appreciated the craft. I hope these folks find an area outside of SWE that they love just as much.
But once these folks find this area, it would be naive to think they won't use software to scratch their itch. In the same way that people who didn't pursue a career in SWE (because they felt under-qualified) are using AI to solve their problems, these folks will now find their own problems to solve with software, even if at first that is not their intention. They probably won't use AI to write the code, but ultimately, AI is forcing everyone to become a product manager.
Some are saying "finally, AI does all the busywork and we focus on the business domain"
But what if the business is soulless? As in what if the business you're working on is just milking value out of people through negative patterns which... is ... well a lot of tech businesses these days. Maybe the busywork enabled engineers to be distracted from the actual impact of their work which makes people demotivated.
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)
What did you use for the graphs on the site? They look nice!
This shit is written with ChatGPT
But when will Larry Fink start vibecoding DeFi ?!!
Man I wish I was a few years away from retirement, instead of having to deal with AI slop the next 25 years of my "career". Computers used to be fun the last 20 years, and now shit like this exists and makes me want to shovel pig shit instead.
The site is down.
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.
LLMs are the best BI tool available.
Until they start hallucinating data
Tool doesn’t see data only schema. Data is hydrated post-hoc.
Huh.
https://youtu.be/JJz5D9txeGA
haha, you even have localisation for some languages! :-))
Cool project!
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.
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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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
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?
>> 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 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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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.
> 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.
Did fucking AI also write your article?
did you build it entirely using AI?
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.
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?
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.
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really appreciate your work sir, I too believe in compounding. But still I don't know why sometimes it feels hard continuing.. still learning coding the old way. I feel, someday it will give me some edge, I just love coding the old way. Sometimes I feel anxious and kind of unsure about my approach but I have decided to continue what I am doing as I am too young in my 20's so I think it's ok to explore till I enjoy doing it. Thank you for sharing your work sir. Hope you keep learning and growing.
Keep it up. The more you let AI do it for you, the less knowledge you retain.
Hey, it's very cool that you've gotten motivated to build again - and please don't take this personally, because this is more about the philosophical and cultural implications of AI and not just this particular post/project.
But these are the kinds of things that pretty much general purpose AI can just oneshot in a single prompt now.
For example, the other day I wanted to know how much caffeine I was taking in based on my coffee intake. So I asked Claude to just build me an app where it would show my current caffeine "load" in my system, and increase it when I pushed a button with the volume of the coffee, and even had real-time decay of the amount of caffeine in my system. One shot.
Anyone can just get these kinds of things made for themselves on-demand. We don't need nice apps anymore, because now software is completely disposable and customized per person. So what is the point of even building these kinds of "fun" tools anymore? Feels like we are essentially doomed to only churn out AI orchestration platforms and fast fashion throwaway b2b sass apps for our coporate overlords now. Lifestyle/small business software companies are basically going to go extinct long term. Just give Sam Altman money and GPT will make whatever you want and who cares if it's actually good or not because you'll just throw it away when you're done. Fast Fashion Software.
AI has taken everything I liked about developing software out of the equation and handed it over to a bot. Now I'm just doing the things that I find mostly annoying (code review, reviewing specs, triaging bugs) and not the things I actually enjoy - writing code and solving problems.
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.
You're not like us. "Angel investor" == "f u money". That is not most of us.
> 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 :)
The current trend made me realize I don't like coding so much as I like creating stuff. So I'm happy I can build the stuff faster in an increasingly tight schedule as I'm getting older. I have always done small projects at home, few of which would reach maturity, and I was doing less and less every year, until recently!