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Comment by spiralcoaster | Hacker News Reader

Actual title: I had Claude code up a diff tool in Rust over the weekend

My guess is this made it to the front page solely from the Rust boost.

That's just too funny, even the README is entirely vibe-coded and the label under the image doesn't describe AT ALL the content of the image:

> ~120fps scrolling a 37k-line package-lock.json — viewport virtualization + off-thread highlighting.

When it's a static PNG of an extremely small diff.

I'm flagging the post as spam, that's what it is.

Hey, actually there's a script that generates the screenshots so that I don't have to adjust them every time the UI changes. I do get 120fps with a 37k line package-lock, try it yourself if you don't believe me.

> I had Claude code up

What's the difference?

To some, it's less authentic. In my mind, it's like "building" a house, when the truth it, you orchestrated contractors who did the actual work. A different set of skills, not necessarily less impressive, but probably is depending on the audience. (In my example, you wouldn't want to shoulder way into a group of tradesmen and talk about your building prowess)

You don't know the difference between "I painted a picture" and "I asked Samantha to paint this picture"?

Are companies allowed to make “Show HN” posts?

How is this different than X company saying we build Y, when they literally paid people to do it for them?

Notice how you said "we" instead of "I". If some CEO posted "Hey, 'I' made this neat tool!" and took credit for the work of the staff that would be a more accurate comparison.

The difference is that the resulting software is useless, buggy, unpolished, will only be used by the person who prompted it and only for about three days before they get tired of it, and that nothing was learned.

I think you are just afraid for your job.

Not in the least. If an IDE worth using could be built in two days, we would have seen one with widespread adoption months ago. There is a world of room to improve on existing IDEs, but nobody has done it yet. The only real attempt we've seen is a couple of forks of VSCode adding a chatbot prompt to the UI. What I am is sick of Show HN having become complete trash with nobody putting effort into anything, displacing all the cool little projects that people used to make.

Hey, actually my goal is to stop using my IDE, it'll be one less subscription for me. So I won't get tired of this, I plan on using it daily. I've spent quite a few years obsessing over software quality so I won't accept unpolished and buggy!

Everyone who vibe codes something over the weekend thinks that their vibe coded software will be the greatest thing since sliced bread. Then they realise that as they continue prompting, it takes disproportionately large amounts of effort to see any progress as program complexity rises and the token predictor begins tripping over itself more and more. At least use it daily for a month rather than saying you plan to use it, then try showing it. If you could actually get through a month of using and prompting on the project without getting tired of it, that would already put you ahead of 99.9999% of vibe-coded projects. As it is, literally anyone could prompt for this over a weekend, so what value does showing this have?

I do agree with some of this principle, if I sat blasting prompts with all the things I could think of, of course it won't end well. Strong regression tests and good patterns are needed.

RE a month usage, that is a good idea, I will use it for a month and do a more long-form post.

I've been using it since I started building it, and have not touched my IDE, thats the goal. All commits to the repository have been made via the tool itself.

That's what I'm not getting about these kinds of posts. What is the point of sharing this? It's just a bunch of nothing.

It's still software. It's on frontpage because people (like me) found it a good starting point for things we wanted ourselves but were too lazy to prompt.

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