Comment by Xirdus
1 day ago
If it costs $0.10 to do the task once, then you can be sure as hell it costs orders of magnitude more than $1 to vibe code a whole damn app that does that thing, especially if you want good user experience which is the whole point of custom vibe coded apps. Whereas the App Store will have an inferior, mass-market version of what you want actually priced $1.
That's not necessarily true. Vibecoding a simple JSON -> YAML converter to translate a 2MB JSON is going to be much cheaper than including that JSON in a prompt and burning hundreds of thousands of tokens. Besides, there's lots of cases where the math simply favors a bigger one-time cost rather than paying fees in perpetuity.
Even today, an advanced AI model will realize exactly what you said, and generate a script and run it behind your back to save the costs and ensure correctness. To me, that's still using the agent directly, not vibe coding. No app gets developed in the process, and if the agent doesn't tell you, you won't even know any coding took place.
With the caveat that literal today's models are not allowed to run code themselves but instead give you the code in the chat window and ask you to run it yourself for security and safety reasons. But the capability is there.
Right, which makes the one-shot task cost the same as the permanent solution in that case. So if you wanted to do this task even twice, you would still be better off creating the tool once and just using it. Imagine if proof assistants like Lean didn't exist. Research with AI would get a whole lot more expensive if it had to re-create Lean every single time you asked it to prove something.
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