← Back to context

Comment by ryandrake

7 hours ago

> I rarely read the LinkedIn social feed but when I check mine it’s now filled with claims from people about going from idea to shipped product in N days (with a note at the bottom that they’re looking for a new job or available to consult with your company).

This always seems to be the pattern. "I vibe coded my product and shipped it in 96 hours!" OK, what's the product? Why haven't I heard of it? Why can't it replace the current software I'm using? So, you're looking for work? Why is nobody buying it?

Where is the Quicken replacement that was vibecoded and shipping today? Where are the vibecoded AAA games that are going to kill Fortnite? Where is the vibecoded Photoshop alternative? Heck, where is the vibecoded replacement for exim3 that I can deploy on my self hosted E-mail server? Where are all of the actual shipping vibecoded products that millions of users are using?

I found one example of this going very wrong on reddit the other day -

https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1rckopd/huntarr...

One redditor security reviews a vibe coded project

  • The self hosted reddit has been inundated with slop and is trying to ban it. It's not a good idea to run anyone else's vibe code!

  • Wow, great example, and great example of what these fakers do when called out. Summary:

    The maintainer, instead of listening to the security researcher and accepting feedback about his development process, instead:

    1. Denied the problem

    2. Censored discussion of the problem

    3. Banned the people calling out the problem

    ...and then when the security issues were posted more publicly and got traction...

    4. Made the subreddit private

    5. Wiped and deleted his account

    6. Wiped and deleted the GitHub repo

    7. Took the project's web site off the web

    Absolutely wild and unhinged behavior.

I agree with your general point but ... "Where are the vibecoded AAA games". A game dev team is typically less than 15% programmers. Most of the team are artists, followed by game designers. Maybe someday those will be replaced too but at the moment, while you can get some interesting pictures from stable-diffusion techniques it's unlikely to make a cohesive game and even prompting to create all of it would still take many person years.

That said, I have had some good experiences getting a few features from zero to working via LLMs and it's helped me find lots of bugs far easier than my own looking.

I can imagine a vibe coded todo app. I can also kind of imagine a vibe coded gIMP/Photoshop though it would still take several person years, prompting through each and every feature.

> Where are all of the actual shipping vibecoded products that millions of users are using?

Claude Code and OpenClaw - they are vibecoded. And I believe more coming.

  • Claude Code is not vibecoded, it is made using Claude Code but it is not vibecoded using Claude Code.

  • But it's like crypto then, good for buying other crypto, or illegal stuff.

    Also people are using CC for the cheap access to the model, otherwise they'd be using opencode.

Yeah, I really wonder if someone would trust to do their taxes in a vibe-coded version of Turbotax...

  • Do you really need Turbotax? Just feed it the tax code, your financial data, and the relevant forms and it should be good to go. Now we have freed up the labor of accountants so they can go be productive in another segment of society. /s

I regret only having one upvote for this.

I note that games are mostly art assets and things like level design, and players are already happy to instantly consign such products to the slop bin.

The whole thing is "market for lemons": app stores filling with dozens of indistinguishable clones of each product category will simply scare users off all of them.

"I come from a state that raises corn and cotton and cockleburs and Democrats, and frothy eloquence neither convinces nor satisfies me. I am from Missouri. You have got to show me."