This is why you should not install any of the vibe coded apps that get advertised in here regularly. You’re just creating a liability for yourself.
This is why you should not install any of the vibe coded apps that get advertised in here regularly. You’re just creating a liability for yourself.
I make all my own slop apps now. Bespoke crappy solutions for bespoke crappy problems. Abandmont rates are up, I can attest
I’ve found LLM’s to be pretty decent at writing one-off scripts for boring tasks. “Baby wipe scripts.” Use them to clean up the shit and throw them away.
I’ve rebuilt a few SaaS projects that I use so it’s under my control. Might not have all the bells and whistles, but it aligns with my needs better.
I rebuilt a simple Playstore task app into a multiuser fleet maintenance app for the farm. I’m not putting it in the wild, I don’t need that headache. I build it exactly for our needs and I don’t need to have to deal with users I can’t tell to fuck off to their faces when they get snotty about a bug.
But overall, this kneejerk “everything AI makes is broken” bullshit is starting to get to me. It’s pretty obvious these people either haven’t used it in the last year or so, or don’t know how to. Or they’re just performing for the internet, and actually use it all the time. I tend to think the latter.
Another person already wrote this itt, but the cost in time and money of building something that “works” is very low. That cost increases every time you need to fix something. It’s why I’ve switched to deepseek flash instead of the bigger, better coding models. For the same price as a million tokens of Claude for example I can get a hundred million tokens on flash. It takes three times as long and needs a little prodding but it’s thirty times cheaper.
Even if you’re not dealing with ballooning costs when it comes to upkeep, the present environment around ai programming is filled with perverse incentives that reduce the chance something is open sourced. Why preserve the old work and try to carry it into the future when you can just rewrite it? Why create standardized libraries and approaches to specific problems when it’s only gonna be used once? Why make it open when you don’t have time to deal with requests and bug reports you don’t care about? Why use gpl when you don’t intend to make it public anyway?
Those were all arguments against gpl and open sourcing parts of the Unix codebase too, btw.
Harnesses or agents try to address some of this by sharing improvements but that’s three layers removed from directly turning fossil fuels into cpu cycles to make the same program a thousand times slightly different for a thousand different people.
I tend to see the ai programming defense in the same way you described yourself and the “ai is bullshit” crowd. People defending this stuff generally either aren’t looking where they’re walking or haven’t had to use it long.
As a decently prolific user of ai programming, it’s turned computer code into disposable plastic wrappers. Even if they don’t persist and make a giant garbage raft in the ocean or calcify our pineal glands we still wasted a bunch of energy on them.
I don’t see that it increases the costs. I’ve written software and PMd other software builds in a previous life. Software has bugs and either I fix it slowly because I have to wait for winter to have time, or the AI does it while I drive a tractor for a couple bucks in tokens. AI can architect fine now and if you use your head, you can cross-check the codebase to ease maintenance with other LLMs, then come in and give it a final QA yourself.
I have a bugtracker I build into any software I build, an agent watches for new entries by users and does some preliminary work before bringing it to my attention and then every day I get a report that I can say what gets worked on while I have coffee. Honestly, I don’t care if the agent decides to refactor the whole mary-anne, it pings me perioidically in Matrix and I steer it around like I do my hired men asking which field to cultivate next.
At this point I have almost entirely vibe-coded software that’s been dogfooded for almost 2 years that works great and massively improves our operation. And I have a dozen other ideas ready for me to give some attention to in order to get them off the ground. It’s an exciting time. I love it.
It’s definitely the early pc era x1000.
For better or worse.
Yeah same. I make loads of little things to bodge my own problems but would never be moronic enough to try and capitalise on something that took 60mins to make.
I like Cory Doctorow’s take: AI is good for single-use, personal code to solve an immediate problem, and terrible for long-term, production projects. I imagine there’s a bunch of neophytes out there who use AI to create their first project, find out that github exists, and thinks someone else must be having the same problem they just solved, so why not release it to the public?
Exactly. Oh I have this small problem, or solution I want to solve. Great I can put something together quickly and move on with life. I am not selling it, and it’s not even needed for ‘open source’ because its often incredibly niche problems that I am trying to solve for, that I wouldn’t be able to do elsewise.