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Comment by bena | Hacker News Reader

I keep seeing the canard that "Anyone with an idea and access to an AI agent can ship a product. What used to take a team of twenty and six months now takes one person and a weekend. That's not hype. It's happening right now, everywhere, all at once."

But I don't see it. Where is this glut of software?

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It is not true. Speaking from experience: family member tried this and they couldn't get past a landing page.

I suppose if one is simultaneously ignorant when it comes to software and an expert at agentic workflow, then yeah sure, maybe--at the cost of how many tokens, though? But logically it seems that the former would preclude the latter.

Also, the "get it done in a weekend" seems to be a gross exaggeration.

I am mainly seeing across a lot of my engineer friends and mentor who I respect deeply. They are using swarms of agents to build crms, small business and run their homelabs.

Where are these small businesses and startups? The software economy should be booming, right? I’m not seeing it.

There's a massive difference between launching a piece of software and launching a successful business.

Over the last couple of months I've seen a load of new "product launches" in my niche but when you look at them they're largely vibecoded and don't show deep understanding and sustainability, so it's pretty likely you'll never see them as successful businesses.

Looking at some of the related places like /r/sideproject/ there's a lot of releases and I'd be willing to suggest that most of them are using LLMs

Then, respectfully, what is the point? Does the trillions-of-dollars AI industry exist to support a few hobbyists building niche products to scratch their own itch? I thought the promise here is increased productivity, presumably in the economic sense.

There seems to be a lot of hype, and has been for years, but I’m not seeing it materialize as actual economic output. Surely by now there should be lots of businesses springing up to capture all of this value created by vibecoded software.

Whilst I have no special knowledge, my expectation is it'll do both. If you reduce the barriers to coding you'll get more code, both at the hobbyist/one-person level and also at the large corp level.

Whether that translates into more value for those larger corps is the trillion dollar question :) Writing code is a small part of the process of finding and shipping features that customers want, so it remains to be seen how much LLM tools translate it.

I think it's fairly widely accepted that from a financial standpoint we're in an AI/LLM bubble. There has been more investment than we're likely to see financial benefits, but it's impossible to predict to what degree (if you can predict that and the timing you can make a lot of money!!)

Ever since Opus 4.6 came out, I've "vibecoded" a bunch of personal apps/CLIs that would've taken me months before. Some examples:

- CLI voice changer with cloned Overwatch voices on ElevenLabs.

- Brother P-Touch label maker using HTML/CSS. Their app is absolutely atrocious.

- Converted a FileMaker CRM into a Next.js/Supabase app.

- Dozens of drag-n-drop or 1-click/CLI tools. Think flattening a folder, a zip file.

- Dozens of Chrome Extensions and TamperMonkey user scripts. Think blocking ads with very targeted xpath.

But when I think about sharing them it feels like what's the point since anyone can make them themselves?

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