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Comment by platinumrad

20 hours ago

Is anyone actually oneshotting a whole app or even vibecoding one in multiple steps without it being "guided work"? I really wish announcements (like DeepSeek's recent one) would stop focusing on the ability of the model to spit out Minecraft clones on demand.

Some people are trying to one shot entire companies

  • And failing.

    • Someone at work vibe coded a replacement for a entire third party SaaS that we were using in a week. Their version is better.

      It wasn't one-shotted of course but I don't think there's much difference in the outcome between one-shot and like 100-shot over a week. That company is still doomed.

      Think of something like Trello. Who is going to pay for that when you can easily vibe code something superior (yes you really can now).

      5 replies →

OP didn’t mention one-shotting.

There are plenty of use cases for the ability to quickly through together and refine an application without reviewing the code though.

I have one-shotted the two most recent relatively complex apps I've tried:

1. a puzzle game with complex interplay, pieces to place, design vs. play mode, storing multiple solutions with the puzzle, and more. I've since iterated something like 200 times as I worked out the design etc., but the first iteration was 99% correct and what I asked for

2. a learn-to-read application with built-in stories (that the LLM wrote) the ability to import epub, text, and HTML, that uses the built-in speech libraries as a default, but also supports an open-source TTS library that I gave in the first prompt, tracks progress and problem workds, has multiple games to reinforce learning, and has a parental mode for tracking progress and configuring the tool overall.

Frankly I was stunned that Claude one-shotted that second app, there was a lot in the prompt, and it did it all. I fully expected to have to iterate on the first draft multiple times. But it worked out of the box.

With Opus 5.5 you can vibe code a whole app without reading the code at all. Obviously you still have to tell it what to make.

With earlier models that doesn't really work. You really have to read the code and watch it like a hawk or it will make a big mess.

To put it another way, with lesser models you have to guide them at a code level. With Opus 5.5 you only have to guide it at an architectural / feature level.

  • People said the same for 5.0, 4.8, 4.7, and...

    I am not disputing that the models are getting better for vibe coding. But I think people have very different standards of what a 'big mess' or 'maintainable software' is.

    • The only meaningful improvements were opus 4.5 and now opus 5.5, people claiming otherwise are delusional. The gap between opus 4.5 and the next big thing was massive, now the same is true for opus 5.5 as much as I hate to admit it anthropic is running the show right now.

    • They did but IMO they had very low standards. I have very high standards and Opus 5.5 pretty much meets them (at least for Rust).

      "People said it before and it wasn't true then" isn't really an argument about it being true now. There are plenty of things that happened where the zealots jumped the gun with the hype. Bitcoin for example. "People said bitcoin was going to succeed in 2005, 2006, 2007...". Or even the web. It was mega hyped in the dot com boom and then crashed and of course loaaads of stupid people thought that was the end of it.