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Comment by chocoboaus3 | Hacker News Reader

I used AI to build an app just for myself that parses data (using pandas, python etc, not LLM but an LLM coded it) for a report that i need to produce

it's purely for myself, no one else.

I think this is what AI can do at the moment, in terms of mass market SaaS vibe codes, it will be harder. Happy to be proven wrong.

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This is my experience as well. It's been great to make an application that's small in scope, doesn't require access to my main project repo and is basically a nice to have value add for the client.

I was already quite adept in the language and frameworks involved and the risk was very small so it wasn't a big time sink to review the application PR's. Had I not been it would have sucked.

For me the lesson learned wrt agentic coding is to adjust my expectations relative to online rhetoric and it can be sometimes be useful for small isolated one-offs.

Also it's once in a blue moon I can think of a program suitable for agentic coding so I wouldn't ever consider purchasing a personal license.

Aka its the next stage of stackoverflow/google search

What is it that you feel is missing that would take AI from “just for myself” to “mass market SaaS vibes”?

being able to properly deal with scale and security. Being able to be confident that if I am capturing PII data into my application, its as secure as it can be and as secure as if a principal developer had put the architecture together etc.

Mass market SAAS will generally just use other products to handle this stuff. And if there does happen to be a leak, they just say sorry and move on, there are very few consequences for security failures.

What use is privacy and security when all our data lives in a DC in us-east-1?

You're right

but guess who advises that architecture and implements it... the principal developer/architect.

You can use good security tools, badly.

Yes i cross referenced the data to ensure it was producing the correct numbers vs my manual methods

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