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Comment by colesantiago | Hacker News Reader

The best thing about tech is that technology becomes a commodity very quickly.

Now you don't need to pay huge sums of money to these consultant grifters any more as now AI tools like Cursor, Windsurf, Devin, Bolt, Lovable and Replit can build these apps and websites for you almost for free.

I nearly signed off a six figure deal for someone to make an app for us and we instead went down the AI tools route after some evaluation and prototyping and we saved a lot of money on this to get it built.

This was very sad to read and I wish these people found these tools at all or even sooner rather than plowing their money into scammers.

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But tech has always been un-navigable.

Yes, many things can do rapid prototyping, especially for CRUD apps. And yes, professional programmers can go very fast with the right tech. Unfortunately in most cases, programmers use what they know, because discovering the tool that already does 99% of what you’re customer needs is already a lot of work.

So people who are out of the loop clearly won’t know about Bolt or Claude.

What did you build?

I have not seen an example of anything that should cost six figures done by traditional development done using AI tools.

Don’t get it. Cheaper ways of doing software have been always available; that doesn’t mean they are the best way. You get what you pay for, as usual. Anybody thinking that 2025 AI is some sort of magical “free lunch” device, is just delusional.

Agreed, either you get bit by your choice early on and can’t ship, or you ship and get bit later when trying to maintain the puddle of guck you just shipped.

If you don’t know how to do it, you don’t know how to do it. Learn how to do it.

That paying more insures quality software delivered by humans is delusional as well.

Half the early startup code I’ve seen delivered by agencies can best be described as performance art.

At least with AI delivered code the most likely output is some middle of the road boilerplate.

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The median. Which is 1000x better than what lots of these agencies are peddling.

Sorry, but these tools are far from usable for the average run-of-the-mill guy. They are specifically tailored for developers and people who can code. The people who were scammed were literally average folks, a working mum, a tarot-card reader, a truck driver....

If a scammer wants to, they can flee from all repercussions without building anything, even if all the AI tools were available to them. While Josh Adler is just one person, there are multiple such people in Dubai who've done the same to thousands of victims. Dubai is notorious for attracting those types.

This wouldn’t be the first time “tarot card reader” and “scammed” have appeared in the same sentence.

Not sure why she would go to national media. Seems clear that she can't be too good at her job.

I'll give her the benefit of the doubt here. I'm also going to presume she wanted something that could be done with Squarespace and Stripe. Years ago I heard of someone calling Dell sales looking to set up file and printer sharing at a small business. Dell offered them a PowerEdge server.

To be fair, I presume most of the folks getting their tarot cards read at some county fair are usually doing it for the cheap entertainment value rather than actual actionable advice. Pay $10 for a few laughs for some time.

AI vibe coders are just another stream of frauds.

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