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Comment by fmbb | Hacker News Reader

There are still no successful useful vibe codes apps. Kernels are pretty far away I think.

This is a very strange statement. People don't always announce when they use AI for writing their software since it's a controversial topic. And it's a sliding scale. I'm pretty sure a large fraction of new software has some AI involved in its development.

> new software has some AI involved in its development.

A large part of it is probably just using it as a better search. Like "How do I define a new data type in go?".

I strongly agree with this. The only place where AI is uncontroversial is web search summaries.

The real blockers and time sinks were always bad/missing docs and examples. LLMs bridge that gap pretty well, and of course they do. That's what they're designed to be (language models), not an AGI!

I find it baffling how many workplaces are chasing perceived productivity gains that their customers will never notice instead of building out their next gen apps. Anyone who fails to modernize their UI/UX for the massive shift in accessibility about to happen with WebMCP will become irrelevant. Content presentation is so much higher value to the user. People expect things to be reliable and simple. Especially new users don't want your annoying onboarding flow and complicated menus and controls. They'll just find another app that gives them what they want faster.

Apps are a strange measure because there aren't really any new, groundbreaking ones. PCs and smartphones have mostly done what people have wanted them to do for a while.

There are plenty of ground breaking apps but they aren't making billions of advertising revenue, nor do they have large numbers. I honestly think torrent applications (and most peer to peer type of stuff) are very cool and very useful for small-medium groups but it'll never scale to a billion user thing.

Do agree it's a weird metric to have, but can't think of a better one outside of "business" but that still seems like a poor rubric because the vast majority of people care about things that aren't businesses and if this "life altering" technology basically amounts to creating digital slaves then maybe we as a species shouldn't explore the stars.

I think this might miss the point. We put off upgrading to an new RMM at work because I was able to hack together some dashboards in a couple days. It's not novel and does exactly what we need it to do, no more. We don't need to pay 1000's of dollars a month for the bloated Solarwinds stack. We aren't saving lives, we're saving PDFs so any arguments about 5 9s and maintainability are irrelevant. LLMs are going to give us on demand, one off software. I think the SaaS market is terrified right now because for decades they've gouged customers for continual bloat and lock in that now we can escape from. In a single day I was able to build an RMM that fits our needs exactly. We don't need to hire anyone to maintain it because it's simple, like most business applications should be, but SV needs to keep complicating their offerings with bloat to justify crazy monthly costs that should have been a one time purchase from the start. SV shot itself in the face with AI.

Define "successful"?

Does it need to be HN-popular or a household name? Be in the news?

Or something that saves 50% of time by automating inane manual work from a team?

Name 3 apps that are

1. widely considered successful 2. made by humans from scratch in 2025

It looks like humans and AI are on par in this realm.

To be fair, Claude Code is vibe-coded. It's a terrible piece of software from an engineering (and often usability) standpoint, and the problems run deeper than just the choice of JavaScript. But it is good enough for people to get what they want out of it.

But also, based on what I have heard of their headcount, they are not necessarily saving any money by vibecoding it - it seems like their productivity per programmer is still well within the historical range.

That isn’t necessarily a hit against them - they make an LLM coding tool and they should absolutely be dogfooding it as hard as they can. They need to be the ones to figure out how to achieve this sought-after productivity boost. But so far it seems to me like AI coding is more similar to past trends in industry practice (OOP, Scrum, TDD, whatever) than it is different in the only way that’s ever been particularly noteworthy to me: it massively changes where people spend their time, without necessarily living up to the hype about how much gets done in that time.

> But it is good enough for people to get what they want out of it.

This is the ONLY point of software unless you’re doing it for fun.

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