Comment by netdevphoenix | Hacker News Reader

Comment by netdevphoenix | Hacker News Reader

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Exactly this. Anti-AI Devs/Techies have their heads in the sand or/and resorting to binary thinking when it comes to AI.

No one is going to vibe code a Photoshop replacement just like no average smartphone user is going to take prize winning photographs with their phone or directly compete with professional photographs.

What is going to happen is what happened to videographers and photographers and what is happening to record musicians: the medium is going to become more accessible by reducing the cost and skill required to make lower quality items.

Just like random selfies don't need you to be a photographer, neither will the one off random app that only your household uses require you to be a programmer.

Making a music video of a trip doesn't require you to know technical knowledge of video recording nor basic music theory. You click buttons and it is done. It won't win prizes but it will be satisfying for the use case it occupies: a one off low scope purpose.

Making tiny one off apps is definitely going to become a thing among people beyond tech and tech adjacent fields. It won't be code clean, it won't be code reviewed or even code versioned but it will be useful and that's what matters ultimately.

> neither will the one off random app that only your household uses

This reminds me a bit of the 2010s idea that every house would have a 3D printer to make one off repairs. Years later, this still seems far out of reach. If anything, it seems to have been settled that most non-technicals don't want a 3D printer.

Vibe coded apps are great, but unless they're hitting an already open API, they're effectively hermetic. There aren't many useful, high quality APIs out there without a companion app these days.

I encourage you to ask members of your household what apps they use which don't connect with any other apps, sites, or companies. I think we'll find the number is pretty low.

In your mind, what are some apps which don't currently exist which would be solving a bespoke household issue that non-techies will be reaching for vibe coding to solve?

I'd be happy to be proven wrong, but I'm just not convinced the puddle is very deep. It's really hard to compare taking a photo with vibe-coding an app.

> Years later, this still seems far out of reach. If anything, it seems to have been settled that most non-technicals don't want a 3D printer.

They would if you could print things out of durable materials that had weight and structure. I haven't seen any 3D printers that do anything except for that light resin-plastic that feels like you could snap it easily. But if I could print a PVC section for my sink that would totally change the calculus.

I actually printed a few PETG ones. They are nigh indestructable compared to PVC.

As noted above, it's the mechanical design / CAD that has to be seriously learned to do anything useful.

You're quite wrong.

You can, in fact, print perfectly well in any thermoplastic, including PVC (although it's unpopular due to toxic fumes). Nor is strength neccessarily an issue. In fact you can 3D print polycarbonate parts strong enough to scratch-build a drone - props and all.

No - the reason you wouldn't want to print parts for your kitchen sink isn't because you can't, it's because you rarely need such parts, and when you do you can simply buy off the shelf parts for next to nothing. A printer simply does not justify its overhead for most people. It's like having a lathe: useful if you're seriously into manufacturing or crafting, but not worth it if you want something pre-designed. There's just not much that it wouldn't be easier to just buy.

How much is a 3D printer that can print durable thermoplastics that I can use for replacement of trivial household items? I thought that would require an industrial setup to do. If you're telling me that I can just start replacing plastic crap in my house, including critical parts like plumbing, with a 3D printer that can sit in its own corner, I probably WILL buy a 3D printer.

A Bambu Lab P1S is $600, and then you gotta buy PET-CF filament, and there's shipping consider as well, so let's say ballpark $800 to start. They make more expensive printers too if you have the budget for it, but the underlying technology is mostly the same. Filament comes in 1kg rolls, and small stuff is like 50 grams, but a large piece of pipe including support structure could be as much as 500g, so if you end up printing a large amount of large items, eg https://makerworld.com/models/1441653 instead of https://makerworld.com/models/77668, which is 2g, and cheaper PLA, filament costs are going to add up.

https://bambulab.com/en-us/filament/collections/functional-p... goes through the various filaments and their different strengths and weakness, depending on the kitchen sink drain pipe you're printing.

> They would if you could print things out of durable materials that had weight and structure

You and I totally would, but we're nerds!

Think of how much coaxing it takes to get the average North American homeowner to replace a leaky shower head or a spark plug. A lot of normal happy folks will spend their lives not really learning to fix things much, and that's quite alright, IMO. We don't all need to be good at everything.

> would have a 3D printer to make one off repairs

The problem with that is, like many people found out the hard way, that printing is the easy part and 3D CAD design is much harder.

Many people now have 3D printers to print all kinds of useful tools, though, and there are businesses dedicated to one-off prints for the very occasional repair.

3D cad is avoided by having a critical mass of other people putting their cad online. I used https://makerworld.com/models/77668 to replace my one that broke. Easy-peasy.

Similarly, it seems like people are finding out the hard way that coding is the easy part and software design/architecture is much harder.

It was always the hard part, hence why experienced eng get paid 5-10x what new grad do. It’s not because they type faster.

>printing is the easy part and 3D CAD design is much harder.

I'm curious if AI will make that part more accessible. You can ask Gemini to make you a parametric openSCAD model and it can do a pretty good job for most designs I've tried. Then just plug in your measurements, export the stl to your slicer, and print.

The people empowered by AI don't have to be nontechies, just everyone who has the will for an app to exist but didn't have the means (like interest) to yak-shave into a software engineer just to build one.

It doesn't mean people who still don't have the interest are suddenly going to build apps.

Also, the idea that there is no more room for apps just because apps already exist is wrong. Incumbent apps would love for you to believe that.

I just vibe-coded my own pedometer app after the most popular steps app on iOS started charging for Duolingo-like "Streak Phrases". The main input was my own interest/energy/attention which is the filter for whether someone will build an app. It uses the iPhone's steps API.

Just because most people don't have the interest/energy/attention to build an app doesn't mean AI hasn't made app-building trivial.

As long as you have to do something, like open a new conversation tab in an AI app, there will always be a filter for the segment of society that will do something.

The puddle for doing some pushups at home isn't very deep yet involves a little bit of time and discomfort. Almost nobody does it despite the upsides. The conclusion you can draw from that is less about the process and more about human disinterest.

Practically speaking it’s rarely cost efficient to vibe code your own all compared to buying. It might cost $100-200 in tokens alone and then there’s the time cost, maintenance, etc. Paying $10/month is cheaper.

I’ll only make an app if there’s nothing else comparable out there (surprisingly common)z

It's "free" if you want it to be.

I think there's a use case for LLM's being able to treat websites as API's (I mean, it is an API, really, running on port 80/443) but this is why attestation seems designed to ensure only large companies can do this and not end users.

It's really funny to be declaring the idea of 3d printers being ubiquitous as dead because they weren't a smartphone scale change in how the world works, while pretending that 3d printers aren't more common and accessible than ever.

Yeah, a better comparison than the smartphone would be something like a table saw. You don't assume everyone has one, but it's not very unusual to have one in the garage.

Yeah that's a great comparison.

> Years later, this still seems far out of reach. If anything, it seems to have been settled that most non-technicals don't want a 3D printer.

Considering the 3D printing barrier for entry is buying, setting up, learning, and maintaining a whole new piece of equipment vs going to a website on a phone or computer everyone already has and telling it what you want in plain english, I think the comparison is lacking.

I have my doubts, yes there will be tinkerers who build their own apps, but this will be roughly the same crowd who today tinker with home automation, soldering or model trains as a hobby (or as Douglas Adams said: "I am rarely happier than when spending an entire day programming my computer to perform automatically a task that would otherwise take me a good ten seconds to do by hand" - just replace "programming" with "vibecoding").

I don't see 'grandma' building here own calendar app via Claude Code that reminds her of the family birthdays.

Ya I wholly agree. The barrier to entry for new SaaS products also got really low for the KPMG-backed PE darlings of the world.

> I don't see 'grandma' building here own calendar app via Claude Code that reminds her of the family birthdays.

If you think of apps in the traditional sense I think I agree with you, but I have a feeling things are about to become a lot more messy.

Grandma might not even know she's building her own calendar app.

I don't think we are that far from being able to ask a general purpose AI to "help me not forget my family's birthdays" and it creating and maintaining code for that purpose. Not quite an app, but more than a one off script, I think AIs are going to unlock this weird situation where they're running a bunch of barely organized code almost as an extension of thinking.

Grandma likely isn't able to use most existing web apps beyond facebook, her default email client and little else either.

Uncle Bob on the other hand will stop nagging you to make him those apps you never have the time to make him and will do it himself. He is a handyman, literate and numerate and able to use a computer like most middle age folks outside of tech can. Uncle Bob's mates at the local bar will see the software he wrote and will get into it themselves.

The Gen X+ non-techie population is made up of more than just grandmas.

> Anti-AI Devs/Techies have their heads in the sand or/and resorting to binary thinking when it comes to AI.

The goal posts are being moved, yet again, as the reality of generative AI's usefulness starts to narrow. I think most "anti-AI" devs wanted the technology to be supplemental in the first place, in the hands of responsible engineers. The hype riders are the ones who are saying our job is over.

> reducing the cost

The evidence is the contrary. The tools are become more expensive by the month it seems.

As a more emotions based response to your post: I find it pretty gross that we are ready to accept that this tech should be used in art whatsoever. I think saying this is a barrier-to-entry-lowering tech is a misnomer, because even those who use computers still need to understand the program, mechanics must understand the function and implications of a torque wrench; there is no effort or skill involved with generating slop, you always get a result. Additionally, the first part of your post was to argue that we should be using these tools to do narrow scoped tooling and one-off script, and then you moved to generating videos and music, which shows that you aren't even aware of the "scope" involved in those efforts.

> The evidence is the contrary. The tools are become more expensive by the month it seems.

Maybe, but compare the monthly cost of a ChatGPT subscription to the cost of a face to face CS education, the cost of a dev machine, the cost of spending your time building the software that you want. The subscription easily wins. And yes, yes, overtime the sub is more expensive but the point is that your average layman is not going to front five figure amounts in costs in something like this just like most people don't buy a gym's worth of fitness equipment, they instead go to their local gym and pay monthly. Now think of all the things LLMs cover even if unreliable and low quality and you can see why the fast-food/fast-fashion era of software is upon us. People won't be experiencing the software equivalent of Michelin rate restaurant food or wearing Gucci but they will certainly be having their needs met in a way that they didn't use to before.

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