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Comment by cube00 | Hacker News Reader

Made with care for accuracy.

I'm not sure how you can claim this on the footer of every page when you're vibe coding these calculators.

This is more than just a bad side project - it's borderline malicious.

How confident is the OP that every single one of these 60 calculators work all the time, with all edge cases? Because if someone is on your website using your calculator, they are putting trust in you. If it's wrong, it could have downstream impacts on them. I hope every single one has a comprehensive set of tests with good edge cases. But realistically will they?

I'm actually pretty pro-AI development. But if you're going to use AI to help develop a website, at least focus on quality rather than quantity. AI makes quantity easy, but quality is still hard.

As an aside, the website doesn't even work for me. My clicks don't don anything.

> How confident is the OP that every single one of these 60 calculators work all the time, with all edge cases?

The compound interest calculator, which is their 'favorite page', already shows an incorrect value in the graph. So my faith in the other calculators isn't great. I also kinda doubt OP's story of them using that page all the time, since it took me about 20 seconds to find this issue.

Can you provide details on the bug?

I built one of the top 3 results on Google when you search “compound interest calculator” and a dozen other similarly popular calculator pages.

The value isn’t the interface, it’s the trust that its calculations are accurate. I can’t tell you how many meetings I had with accountants and finance people to validate all the calculations.

There's a weird conflict going on here and I've experienced it myself. Essentially we hear 2 claims:

- You all should build your own software. AI is so good!

- You all should use the software I built with AI. It's so good!

> How confident is the OP that every single one of these 60 calculators work all the time, with all edge cases

Would you be asking the same question if it's written without AI? How can any software be always working will all edge cases?

Yes of course. These are calculators - they are meant to reliably calculate things.

I think the difference is that building 60 interactive calculators manually would force you to do a lot of manual testing. If someone built up that many interactive calculators I would imagine a lot of attention has gone on each one. Why would they spend so much time on something and not test it?

I've been thinking a bit about vibe coding with trust-critical apps. My solution has been hand-code and test the parts where bugs would mislead users, and vibe code the rest. In my case that's been hand-coding backend calculation logic and vibe coding the UI and server (this is also the part I am least expert in). In practice this does wind up including a lot of little judgment calls at the interfaces.

In the end, my feeling is there needs to be transparency in how bulletproof-tested a product is. IMO even a calculator that might be wrong can be useful if it's the most convenient option and the user knows the risks (though to be clear, that is not the philosophy I am employing in my personal project).

Because it's better for marketing. Doesn't matter if it's true.

what marketing? this must have been done 1000 times just in last month. There is nothing new here. At best its for personal use.

This. I have so many things to say about the site, but have been withholding them in fear of "posting shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work"

Is it a shallow dismissal if the work doesn’t work?

Whether the dismissal is shallow is in the eye of the moderator.

I have seen that before, so I am not going to touch that.

I will say it for you though. If the calculator doesn't work or shows wrong results, then it is shit. I don't care if made with AI, humans or monkeys.

`Professional Calculators

Free, accurate, and easy-to-use tools for finance, math, and everyday calculations.`

So yeah, fuck this. Website looks 99% similar to the many shadcn themes available, has some errors in the calculations and then have a new account propagating 'ohhh look at me, I did all this with Claude/GPT/my aunt's raspberry pi running X, AI is amazing. All Hail AI.` is tiring and I'm just going to assume it is either paid marketing, people invested directly or indirectly in these companies or just sycophant idiots.

Also, anyone knows an extension or website where I can just filter submissions if they include AI or LLM or Clause in the title? Getting really tired of this shit.

If it was for personal use, it wouldn't be on the internet and advertised on sites like this.

So it is at least marketed for personal reasons. I don't know why, but it could be for ad revenue, resume filling, ego bolstering.

This is the problem with AI music generation too. Many people actually feel like they made something and are proud, despite just having clicked a button after asking for a result. This gives them some kind of feeling of accomplishment, despite having done absolutely nothing for it.

The title even says so 'I quit, but AI brought me back'. No, it didn't, you're not back, you just paid someone on Fiver a couple bucks and then used his work to pretend you're back.

You can still test it for accuracy?

ah, the thing every person does when searching for a calculator: verify that it can actually do the math, a thing computers were historically good at from about the 1960s until within the past few years.

do you understand how bad it is when you search for software and you cannot trust it to do what you ask of it? it's bad!

Imagine saying this for medicine.

Did you miss the part where they generated tests too?! I mean what do you want, for him to actually review the code or something? That's what kills the love of coding, man.

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