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Comment by wg0

4 hours ago

Wait a minute - and who is going to buy that software exactly?

Because someone was so sick of expensive Adobe Photoshop they created their own vibe coded PhotoShop for $2000 worth of tokens and then selling it on for way cheaper. [0]

Some YouTuber got so sick of Adobe Premier they literally vibe coded their own full fledge video editor exactly to their needs with everything else that they don't need stripped out. [1]

I know of a case where a totally non technical person sitting in an south asian city wrote his own financial management software for his business in just three weeks. Vibe coded and now his daily driver tracking accounts, payables, receivables, contracts, parses PDFs from his inbox, populates forms and full workflow that HE needs for his specific commission/resale/distribution business.

So what this company is going to sell with that Harness? Or would it be selling just that Harness to other companies like those Rails bootstrap SaaS boilerplate businesses that used to charge $300 for that junk with lifetime update promise?

EDIT: Formatting

[0]. https://www.reddit.com/r/vibecoding/comments/1wpaies/my_vibe...

[1]. https://youtu.be/qOQ3MEx6czY

4 comments

wg0

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written-beyond  4 hours ago

You're right but also very wrong.

You can never prove that there aren't any bugs. The definition can also change according to time and expectations.

I've made tens of internal developer tools because I couldn't gaf about using some third party vendor, all before vibe coding. Even then we purchased software from vendors, and we still do it now.

You can't cherry pick 2-3 pieces of problematic software, imply that it's how everything works. You're vibe coded Photoshop will never be used seriously, unfortunately. Same goes for the video editor, if you're fine with an autonomous AI agents listening to some internal github repo for issues that get auto or human reported and attempting to provide live fixes and feature enrichment, you aren't going to get that.

The problem really does stem from the fact that these agents, no matter how good you keep making them are still limited by a time horizon. AI companies have gotten really good at extending that horizon. The contexts get longer, prompts get less specific but theres a deadline to all of this. Take that LLM point it to a specific problem let it run, pull it out start new. The LLM will inevitably accumulate technical debt in it's own context, that starts to create a rot. You can try to improve this problem by making sub agents, etc. but you will 100% run into context rot after a period of time for the lead agent.

xGrill  4 hours ago

I think you hit it spot on. Developers and software companies have inherently thought the goal is delivery of features, because that is what wins new business, but in reality, it is utilization of those features showing impact that actually matters.