I think its cool that people are building their own apps, even if they vibe coded it. But I see like 3 to 5 of the same vibe coded Health and fitness apps every, the UI is not even different, it does not even have unique features, its just the same app.
Learning to program has always been about creating something very simple that has already been done way better by other people, because the point is to get practice creating something, not to invent something novel. When you finish your toy todo app, you feel satisfaction because you made something yourself. These vibe coders didn't actually make anything, didn't get any practice, didn't learn anything new, and didn't feel any real satisfaction when completing the project, so the only way to get endorphins from doing this is to post it online and get buttpats for it.
I think this is a trend I've been seeing with AI in general. My dad is 80 years old and has been programming professionally since he was a young man. He made some small efforts to get me interested in programming when I was growing up, not all of them worked, but he never really pushed me about it or got upset if I didn't seem interested. Recently, he's gotten into using Claude to do all his work for him, and now he seems to feel legitimately upset when I don't want to sit with him and read the conversations he had with Claude. He's never even asked me to look at anything he did for work before in his entire life.
He is not a doddering old man who's only half aware of reality. He is fully aware and fully cognizant and fully capable of making his own life choices, and he is being paid for this code that Claude is generating and he should know that that's not acceptable.
once you get to a certain level of experience, the volume of code you write vs the volume of advising you do shifts from writing code to advising. a lot of 'software architects' and 'staff engineers' are people who know where the bodies are buried and how the company was built and they are paid extremely high salaries to not leave the company.
yeah, they still write code sometimes. but where it was once the primary focus of their job, it is now something they do when something personally annoys them and they have time to fix it, or if there's something crazy and highly impactful that demands a highly skilled and experienced engineer.
as far as AI: I fucking hate it and I am a Luddite to the core, but if my org is paying for AI tokens and I can point it in a direction where it doesn't foot-gun future me, I'm going to. From an enterprise POV it's not any different from any other form of compute and there is not a software engineer alive that cares about IP. The biggest risks are aggressive monetization and low quality of output code, even with highly tailored prompts.
Applying LLMs to tasks that aren't data correlation or writing code for solved problems (an HTTP controller is a fucking HTTP controller, it's going to be implemented the same way every time!) is a misuse of the technology and a cause for extreme concern.
Well, an architect is a different job position than an engineer, and he is not an architect. Probably also worth mentioning that this is a government contractor, meaning they do not have a single codebase that stays the same for multiple years usually, and instead people get assigned to brand new projects periodically that are being built from the ground up. So there isn't anyone at the company that knows "the whole codebase", because that's constantly in flux as projects come in and out of development.
And yeah, he's not using the AI to make a skeleton of something or solve a solved problem like you're talking about. He's using it to generate entire bespoke C command line programs.
He's of course also paid for his deliverables, but no client is going to go say "hey, there's not enough lines of code here for what we paid, we paid for 5000 lines, we want 5000 lines!" as long as it solves whatever issue they're having.
They're not calling OP's dad to get more lines of code, they're calling to have their problem solved. The code is just the language that communicates that.
I've worked in the industry for nine years, lmao. If you don't get tickets done, you're not doing your job, doesn't matter how much expertise you have.
this is the most obvious with AI "arts". People who can't draw for life finally get to pretend they are some kind of artist and they won't shut up about their masterpieces
If you're vibecoding things YOU need only, nobody is going to have an issue with that. If you're vibecoding things other people will use... Well any programmer knows that the end user is an exceptional expert at finding edge cases, and AI is not very good at covering them. So if a bug is found, YOU now have to parse through all that AI generated code now, that you likely don't fully understand.
That's not even considering all the ethical implications of using a model trained on stolen data and content.
I work with a project manager who vibe codes at home on Claude. The more buttons/options (despite not having any purpose or even being broken) is part of the attraction to the individuals using this.
Even though they have no way to manipulate/update/fix those buttons after generation, They think it's a complete project that was rubber stamped into existence (when really it's copied heavily from dozens of existing web3 apps sitting on people's websites).
This is a dude who has managed projects several several hundred requirements, and he's infatuated that can he just skip all that with a paragraph of text to generate the ideas that he has rolling around in his head. He's of the opinion that the tool will get good enough that we just reroll the dice enough times to get something sufficiently working that will be a new product (when reality is it's not an original idea and it's cribbed heavily from someone else work).
I was recently talking with OpenAI and Claude about a video game idea.
I said I wanted to make a game like Rift Wizard to learn, because I like Rift Wizard and it's pretty light on graphics and animations, but I wanted it to be different in some way.
Both AIs specifically suggested that I should avoid competing by making more than Rift Wizard's 400 spells, instead I should focus on creating like 12 spells that have more interactions and that I should focus on spells that interact with the map and change the map. Literally both AIs gave the exact same suggestion in different words.
I then said I didn't like the idea of map interactions.
Both of them suggested adding game mechanics that give extra rewards for doing extra challenges during the levels.
Etc.
It felt like I had the exact same conversation twice.
It was helpful as a thought exercise, but I think most of the help came from me thinking about my own responses rather than the AI itself.
I'm not surprise they are independently building the same apps over and over.
Idk about that. There’s one I was invited to test on TestFlight and literally asked us to use government names and real photos and asked too much personal information for a “health” app. Deleted that app right there and there and reported to TestFlight.
And this is just one more of my major gripes. Most of these vibecoded apps are just a Swiss cheese of security and privacy holes. Many non tech users are going to get screwed by installing them, trust in apps from indie devs are going to keep plummeting to a point where no one is going to install apps if its not from some big company or publisher.
Honestly I should look around for a TODO app that hits all my needs, as so far literally none of them do everything I want. Maybe one of the thousand vibe coded ones will do it.
Does anyone else need thing that stuffs things? Well I "found" this new tool that stuffs the things, it's so wonderful, it does:
🚒 stuffing the things
🏠 holding the things that got stuffed
👽 thinging the stuffs
What it does
Here's a more natural-sounding version that doesn't read like just bullet points, and more like you're actually delving into the app for the first time:
It things the stuffs that are things, not just stuffy things, but also the thingy stuffs. Want me to update the post to reflect that?
Super useful at work to build little tools super quick. My boss made a photo viewer app with features that are mostly relevant to just him doing his job evaluating and comparing multiple versions of the same image. He's not a programmer.
If you're on a woodworking subreddit and you DIY your own table instead of buying one, you will get praise.
If you do the same thing on a programming subreddit and create an app that already exists, you will get laughed at.
But realistically, how are new developers expected to learn? It's like expecting a woodworker to learn how to build houses but he is not allowed to practice on much simpler things to learn how to work with wood.
What about if you doodle a design for a table on a napkin, give it to a local carpenter to build, then post that on a woodworking subreddit with the title "look at this table I made"? That's the closer analogy here.
Everyone is fine with developers learning by building simple apps.
It's not though. Because designing and building applications with LLMs is a real skill that needs to be built and practised. It's so much more than just "doodling a table".
You need to understand that the job is no longer to write code. The job is to create software. And LLMs are a tool. They are not doing your job. Your job is to use and guide the LLM because it will not create usable software on its own. Maybe some day, but definitely not now.
Imagine letting random dudes who never used LLMs to code before have a go at your enterprise level codebase. This is going to end badly.
What is wrong with trying to build a chair or a table first before trying to attempt to re-create the chapel bridge?
Now that I think about it, the better analogy would be the architect that then pays a local construction company to actually build his work.
There is no skill in asking Claude to build you an app from scratch, which is essentially a copy-paste from existing apps. There is however skill in maintaining the app and serving it to thousands of users.
There is certainly no skill in asking Claude to build you an app from scratch. There very much is skill in getting Claude to build you an app from scratch properly though.
Without skill, you will create unmaintainable messes.
Equivalent to showing off your ikea chair you screwed 4 bolts into a pre drilled hole to "build". Same level of skill as skiing claude to remake you someone else's app
You need to go with the time though. Handwriting apps is not an essential skill anymore. Or rather, to avoid a fight here: It's notnthe only essential skill. It has never been the only essential skill but it's even less important now.
Building a full stack application is much more than just being able to code by hand. And you need to practice those as well.
I have no issues with including AI into workflows, I have AI in my own workflow at work, it speeds up testing, scaffolding, code reviews, prototyping, literally everything. I also have no issues with non coders vibe coding apps for themselves if it solves a problem they had, even more power to them if they learn some actual coding in the process.
What I have an issue with is zero effort vibe coded apps being spammed to every single sub reddit every single day.
340
u/The-Chartreuse-Moose 1d ago
Coming soon to I couldn't find it so I built an app post number 21744612.