Comment by leoedin
19 days ago
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.
Can you provide details on the bug?
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?
Yes of course. These are calculators - they are meant to reliably calculate things.
I think the difference is that building 60 interactive calculators manually would force you to do a lot of manual testing. If someone built up that many interactive calculators I would imagine a lot of attention has gone on each one. Why would they spend so much time on something and not test it?
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!