The secret is that it doesn't work. None of these people have built real software that anyone outside their bubble uses. They are not replacing anyone, they are just off in their own corner building sand castles.
Aren't you worried that they'll work fine for 3 weeks then delete all your data when you hold them slightly different? Vibe coded software seems to have a similar problem to "Undefined Behaviour", in that just because it works sometimes doesn't mean that it will always work. And there's no limit on what it might do when it doesn't work (the proverbial "nasal demons") - it might well wipe your entire harddrive, not just corrupt it's own data.
You can of course mitigate this by manually reviewing the software, but then you lose at least some of the productivity benefit.
It might. It probably won't though. I don't see any code in it that deletes files. And, unlike BloatedShittyCommercialApp (and its cousin, BloatedDoEverythingOpenSourceApp), the code is going to be relatively small and if I do have doubts I can easily check to see what it's doing. I can build it quickly. I can patch it quickly. I don't have to file a bug to someone and beg him to look at it. I don't have to worry that the next release is going to break stuff I want and add stuff I don't want.
I recently moved my home theater PC from Kodi to a tiny bespoke vibed video player app, that basically just wraps libVLC with a minimal Android GUI. It's like 3000 lines of code total. I can practically keep the entire app in my head. If I need to fix something, it's 5 minutes in my dev terminal and then adb install. Ever tried to find and fix a bug in Kodi? The goddamn thing takes forever to even build, let alone debug. And that's even open source. I don't even have a remote chance of getting a bug fixed in professionally-built proprietary software.
Continues to make an app with 150K lines.
I have 100% vibecoded software that I now use instead of commercial implementation that cost me almost 200 usd a month (tool for radiology dictation and report generation).
I built a clinical pharmacist "pocket calculator" kinda app for a specific function. It was like $.60 in claude credits I think. Built with flutter + dart. It's a simple tool suite and I've only built out one of the tools so far.
Now to be fair, that $.60 session was just the coding. I did some brainstorming in chatgpt and generated good markdown files (claude.md, gemini.md, agents.md) before I started.
I think azan_ is demonstrating that shipping products 'suitable for the needs of many' is going to have to compete with 'slopping software for the needs of one'.
There is a small subset of the population who is now enabled to make proof-of-concepts with less effort than before. This is no way diminishes the need for delivering performant, secure, interoperable software at scale to serve humanity's needs.
I'm going on a tangent here but what's with this constant deprecation of mothers to make a point? There are many people here whose mothers can develop software.
I think the thing you're missing is that the tool doesn't need to be marketed because someone else could ask their LLM to make them a similar tool but fitting their use case.
It doesn't matter if the tool "needs" to be marketed. There is a market of paying customers. If other people are paying $200/month, both your and their lives would be improved significantly by you offering a $100/month replacement software. For all the talk about LLMs replacing the need for packaged software, people are still paying for packaged software, and while they are, you could be making large amounts of money while saving them money. If you're altruistic, you could even release it as FOSS and save a lot of people $200/mo. Unless, of course, your vibe-coded app isn't actually remotely capable of replacing the software in question.
Is it _just_ speech-to-text, or god-forbid are you giving it scans and having it write reports for you too?
Is it calling some external API or doing this text to speech locally?
You always have to review overall diff though and go back to agent with broader corrections to do.
This thread is about vibe coding _without_ looking at the code.
I don't know why people keep repeating this but it's wrong. It works.
Honestly I don't get the hostility. Yegge is running an experiment. I don't think it will work, but it will be interesting and informative to watch.
To be clear, I think LLMs are useful technology. But the degree of increasing insanity surrounding it is putting people off for obvious reasons.
Not really new. Back in the day companies used to outsource their stuff to the lowest bidder agencies in proverbial Elbonia, never looked at the code, and then panickedly hired another agency when the things visibly were not what was ordered. Case studies are abound on TheDailyWTF for the last two decades.
Doing the same with agents will give you the same disastrous results for comparably the same money, just faster. Oh and you can't sue them, really.
Maybe it's better, who knows.
But you don’t pay them any money and don’t enter into contractual relationship with them either. Thus you can’t sue them. Well, you can try, of course, but.
You could sue an Elbonian company, though, for contract breach. LLMs are like usual Elbonian quality with two middlemen but quicker, and you only have yourself to blame when they inevitably produce a disaster.
I mean... I feel like it's somewhat telling that his wikipedia page spends half its words on his abrasive communication style, and the only thing approximating a product mentioned is a (lost) Rails-on-Javascript port, and 25 years spent developing a MUD on the side.
Certainly one doesn't get to stay a staff-level engineer at Google without writing code - but in terms of real, shipping software, Yegge's resume is a bit light for his tenure in BigTech