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Comment by Flere-Imsaho

8 hours ago

> Like, what's the point, if the next AI can do it in 5 seconds?

I built a phone app recently, not released to the public, just an idea I had for ages but could never spend the time actually building. Its 100% vibe coded, and took me a few weekends to build... I'm talking a few hours in total.

The point I'm making is that you now have the power to create stuff you would never have had the time to build. You can think big, wild stuff. Experimentation. Throw-away code.

What a time to be alive!

Me too! (although I am hoping to release it, but it was primarily for me)

I was thinking about writing something and hopefully starting a community/resource area around hyper-personalized software, it's so easy to make now. I was thinking about how it'd be useful to have a place to share these, for ideation, sharing techniques and the ability for LLMs to riff on something already existing. It's not quite like open source's advantage of having many people contribute to the same project, but rather something that is closer to evolution, giving the next generation a place to start modifying.

Would you have any interest in sharing what you've made?

My car has offline maps and navigation. I don't really care for navigation, but I find the maps pretty handy. VW releases updates very infrequently, and I don't know for how long they'll keep doing that. Recently I wondered whether I could convert OpenStreetMaps into the format used by the car. Codex took around a week to do that for me, with some light steering. That project would no doubt have taken me months - maybe a whole year to do on my own, and I'm not fully confident I could pull it off as well as Codex did. I can pull the most up to date maps from OSM, edit them as much as I want, and they look great on the car. It's mind boggling to me that we have this tech.

Yes, that's cool and useful. Creating stuff for ourselves, for our own use. But we are social animals, we like sharing.

Before it was cool to share an app you made, but now? What's the point of sharing an app, if the other person can make their own, even better suited for their needs, in a few seconds?

  • indie hacking seems dead-ish because everything can just be cloned instantly, and if you don't have a serious go to market plan with a latent user base you're SOL.