Comment by niemandhier
9 hours ago
With sufficiently advanced vibe coding the need for certain type of product just vanishes.
I needed it, I quickly build it myself for myself, and for myself only.
9 hours ago
With sufficiently advanced vibe coding the need for certain type of product just vanishes.
I needed it, I quickly build it myself for myself, and for myself only.
Related anecdote: My 12yo son didn't like the speed cubing online timer he was using because it kept crashing the browser and interrupted him with ads. Instead of googling a better alternative we sat down with claude code and put together the version of the website that behaved and looked exactly as he wanted. He got it working all by himself in under an hour with less than 10 prompts, I only helped a bit putting it online with github pages so he can use it from anywhere.
I don't think people are grasping yet that this is the future of software, if by no metric other than "most software used is created by the user".
The average user doesn't even know what a file is
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Wont happen.
The average user just has no interest in building things.
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So... The future is like the past?
That would be good news, but I doubt most people will do things like that.
>most software used is created by the user
You really believe that?
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> I don't think people are grasping yet that this is the future of software
What about this is new?
Sitting down with a child to teach them the very basics of javascript in an hour? Trivial.
Needing Claude to do it is kind of embarassing, if anything.
Out of curiosity, did you also implement scramble support? Or just the timing stuff?
yes. claude added a suggested random scramble (if that's what you mean?), also running average of 5/12/100, local storage of past times on first iteration, my son told it to also add a button for +2s penalties and touch screen support.
... So at no point in this did anyone even question why it should be a website?
Because now that website is fully cross-platform and sandboxed with no practical downside
"use it from anywhere" was important, and I don't think there's an easier way than a freely hosted static website.
I dont want that though, I want someone to spend much more time than I can afford thinking about and perfecting a product that I can pay for and dont worry about it
In the next few years it's going to be quicker to tell an AI to make something than it will take to hunt down software which fits all your uses perfectly. If you're honest, all software is imperfect for you. It's not customised exactly how you like it. Imagine if it could be exactly what you want with zero effort.
The metaphor that’s popped into my head recently is baking bread.
You can learn to bake good bread. It’s not _that_ hard. And it’ll probably taste better than store bought bread.
But it almost certainly won’t be cheaper. And it’ll take a more more time and effort.
Still, sometimes you might bake your own bread for kicks. But most of the time, you’ll just buy the bread someone else has already perfected.
Baking bread also takes hours of waiting.
I can have fresh bread anytime I want from a handful of nearby stores.
And some people do, both things can be true. I'd rather make a tool just for me that breaks when I introduce a new requirement and I just add into it and keep going.
The statement wasn't: "no one ever vibe codes an alternative to product X"
It was: "With sufficiently advanced vibe coding the need for certain type of product just vanishes."
If a product has 100 thousand users and 1% of them vibe codes an alternative for themselves, the product / business doesn't vanish. They still have 99 thousand of users.
That was the rebuttal, even if not presented as persuasively and intelligently as I just did.
So no, it's not the case of "both things being true". It's a case of: he was wrong.
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If we could return to one-off payments without dark patterns I would agree. Hopefully at least the software that rely on grift will start to vanish.
I built a jira with attachments and all sorts of bells and whistles. Purrs like a kitten. Saas are going extinct. At least the jobs that charged $1000 a day to write jira plugins.
Some minor UX enhancement SaaS of the most recent VC-funded wave will do. Maybe those who forgot how to invest in R&D and spent last 20 years just fixing bugs. There’s plenty of SaaS on the market that offers added value beyond the code. Data brokers. Domain experts, etc. Even if homemade solution is sometimes possible, initial development costs are going to be just one of several important factors in choosing whether to build or to buy.
SaaS are not going exctinct. This reminds me of the LinkedIn posts saying they clone Slack in two hours, copying the UI, etc. Yeah, if you think Slack is private chat rooms then you should use IRC for your company.
One of the most valuable things about Slack is the ecosystem: apps, API support, etc. If you need to receive notifications from external apps (like PageDuty or Incident.io or something like that), good luck expecting them having a setup for your own version of the app. Yeah, some of them provide webhooks (not all of them), but in the end you have to maintain that too...
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jira is a perfect example of an abysmal product that was marketed well.
Yes, it seems like it got to some tipping point around 2013 where so many product and management people were familiar with it, and from there it became this “industry standard” that management always wanted everyone to use.
Also though, I feel like being attached to Confluence helped it because there is a lot less competition in the world of documentation wikis than there is in task management.
Products where the only value was the code are definitely under pressure. But, how many products are really like that? I suggest everyone look up HALO that’s so popular in investing right now, and start looking at companies with the assumption that the value of the code is zero so what other value is there. There’s often a lot more there than people realize.
This is a pipe dream and “sufficiently advanced” is doing a lot of heavy lifting. You really think people would rather spin up and debug their own self-made software rather than pay for something that has been tested, debugged, and proven by thousands of users? Why would anyone do that for anything more than a very simple script? It makes zero sense unless the LLM outputs literally perfect one-shot software reliably.
In which case, if LLMs can perfectly one shot simple programs, creating and maintaining a really advanced program would presumably be very cheap since it could just one shot every feature. So instead of generating new image editing programs for every task, why not pay $10/month for the guy who spent a week guiding an LLM into making ultra photoshop with every feature Ill ever need?
Perplexity just launched a tool that builds and hosts small bespoke tools.
I tried it works wells. I can do the same thing in my Linux machine, but even my 12 year old now can get perplexity to build him a tool to compare ram prices at different chinease vendors.
Yes, LLMs can be a better search tool.
It makes sense if you want bespoke software to do a specific job in a way best suited to your workflow.
Could you do the same in eg. Photoshop? Maybe, but even if, you would need to learn how.
Photoshop is a good example -- not that I agree with everything in the app, but just to design all the interactions properly in photoshop would take hundreds of hours (not to mention testing and figuring out the edges). If your goal is a 1-to-1 clone why not use Krita or photoshop? With LLM you'll get "mostly there" with many many hours of work, and lots of sharp edges. If all you need is paint bucket, basic brush / pencil, and save/load, ok maybe you can one-shot it in a few hours... or just use paint / aesprite...
How many products are actually like that? If I could easily replace github, datadog/sentry/whatever, cloudflare, aws, tailscale that would be great. In my view building and owning is better than buying or renting. Especially when it comes to data--it would be much better for me to own my telemetry data for example than to ship it off to another company. But I don't think you (or anyone) will be vibecoding replacements for these services anytime soon. They solve big, hard, difficult problems.
Github is on the chopping block as a tool (it's sticky as a social network). The other stuff not so much.
The things that are going away are tools that provide convenience on top of a workflow that's commoditized. Anything where the commercial offering provides convenience rather than capabilities over the open source offerings is gonna get toasted.
Even at recent levels of uptime I think it would be very difficult to build a competing product that could function at the scale of even a small company (10 engineers). How would you implement Actions? Code review comments/history? Pull requests? Issues? Permalinks? All of these things have serious operational requirements. If you just want some place to store a git repository any filesystem you like will do it but when you start talking about replacing github that's a different story altogether and TBH I don't think building something that appears to function the same is even the hard part, it's the scaling challenges you run into very quickly.
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https://xkcd.com/1205/ (is it worth the time matrix)
LLM's change the calculus of the above chart dramatically.