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Comment by anonymous908213 | Hacker News Reader

And yet I notice you haven't mentioned publishing it and undercutting the market. You could make a lot of money out-competing the existing option if what you produced was production-grade software. I'm guessing the actual case is that you only needed a small subset of the functionality of the paid software, and the LLM stitched together a rough unpolished proof-of-concept that handled your exact specific use case. Which is still great for you! But it's not the future of coding. The world still needs real engineers to make real software that is suitable for the needs of many, and this doesn't replace that.

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>The world still needs real engineers to make real software that is suitable for the needs of many, and this doesn't replace that.

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'.

The only people who think that are programmers already or programmer-adjacent. Your mother is never going to be able to use a Gas Town-like workflow to make software for her own needs, nor is she even going to want to spend her weekends trying. These tools still require a baseline minimum of technical knowledge, and a real time investment, and also a real money investment the way some people are using them. Moreover, most real software has interoperability needs. A world where everyone makes their own Twitter or WhatsApp is a world where nobody can talk to anyone else.

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.

> Your mother is never going to be able to use a Gas Town-like workflow to make software for her own needs, nor is she even going to want to spend her weekends trying.

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 it’s just a generalization. They could have said “your uncle Pete” without actually implying anything about anyone’s uncle named Peter.

People's mothers are statistically unlikely to be programmers, obviously. My own grandmother was a programmer, but it conveys the idea in two words rather than making up a clunky phrase to describe the exact degree of non-techiness of the hypothetical person.

What if we packaged Gas Town up in an operating system userspace, put it on rails, and gave people an interface to it?

An interface isn't enough. Even if you never look at the code, the results are going to be influenced significantly by having the vocabulary to accurately describe what you want. The less sufficient your technical vocabulary, the more ambiguous your prompts will be and the less likely it is that the Polecats will be able to deliver anything resembling your unspoken imagination. To say nothing of being able to guide the lost critters when they run into problems.

It sounds like a medical device, in which case marketing it may require FDA approval or notification. Whereas vibe-coding a one-off tool for yourself might still require validation but you're the one taking the risk and accepting liability for it.

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.

If they're using a 100% vibe-coded tool that they've never read the code of to replace something that would require government approval, for use on real-world patients, they're probably committing medical malpractice as we speak. Let us pray that is not the 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.

Jumping to conclusion that I’m committing malpractice is completely uncalled for and offensive. > Unless, of course, your vibe-coded app isn't actually remotely capable of replacing the software in question. It is completely capable FOR ME. I’m not interested in publishing it because I love my job and it pays great already.

Not everything has to be monetized, buddy. It's okay to relax.

> 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.

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