I feel like the name “vibe code” is really the only issue I have. Enabling everyone to program computers to do useful things is very very good.

It captures not understanding what you’re doing crossed with limited AI understanding which means the whole thing is running on vibes.

I still wish a better name had been coined/had stuck.

It’s hard to take the name “vibe coding” seriously, and maybe that was the whole point, but I feel like AI coding is a bit more serious than the name “vibe coding” implies.

Anyone that disagrees that it should be taken more seriously can surely at least agree that it’s likely it will cross that threshold in the not too distant future, yet we’re still going to be stuck with the silly name.

It is the perfect name for an industry that considers "enshittification" a serious term of art.

And I say that knowing it will absolutely rule everything in the future - I'd bet at last half of all Show HNs are vibe coded apps now. Not long ago tech was seriously talking about monkey JPEGS being the future of global commerce and finance. We've been living in unserious times for a while.

I'd feel better about vibe coding and AI in general if I thought it would lead to more people learning how to do what it enables for themselves, and actually exercise control over their devices and creativity. But as useful as it can be - and I have to concede that much at this point - it requires depending on centralized AI services and isn't much better than proprietary code in terms of defending end user rights. I fear AI driven everything will lead to more closed systems and more corporate commoditization of our data and our lives. Unfortunately from what I've seen not only do many vibe coders not care, they don't want to care and they think anyone who does care is a slope-headed neanderthal.

So yeah, call it what it is. OP's app would have just been a simple web app ten years ago, it's just a quiz, doesn't require any deep coding magic. But no one cares about anything but the vibe anymore.

I wish that computers were designed in a way that pushed the users to script more. Its such a powerful ability that would benefit almost every worker.

This has often been tried. SQL, for instance, was specifically designed to feel like natural language and be useable by people with minimal technical background. But it always runs into the same problem. As you start to expand the capabilities of these scripting languages and you get into the nitty gritty reality of what programming genuinely involves, they always end up being just really verbose and awkward to use languages that are, otherwise, like any other programming language.

Even worse is the tendency for scripting languages tend to try to be robust against errors, so you end up with programs that are filled with extremely subtle nuance in things like their syntax parsing which, in many ways, makes them substantially more complex than languages with extremely strict syntactic enforcement.

Ah so you're saying we should remove error handling and let the users feel the consequences of their actions.

The users are already feeling it, but may have trouble understanding why! The reason strongly typed languages with rigid syntax are easier is because it's much more difficult to accidentally do things like check if 3 is greater than true.

Apple has always been pretty good at this. AppleScript, Automator, Shortcuts. I did all kinds of cool stuff in OSX 10.4 back before I wrote any traditional code.

Before that was HyperCard. It was always amazing to me the types of applications that could be written with HyperCard.

In a similar way, VBA was amazing in MS Office back in the day. If you ever saw someone who was good at Visual Basic in Excel, it’s impressive the amount of work that could get done in Excel by a motivated user who would have been hesitant to call themselves a programmer.

I wrote, and sold my first piece of software in HyperCard. It was a pretty lame Choose Your Own Adventure style game, where you clicked on buttons, having read the text. 7 year old me was pretty chuffed, to buy some baseball cards out of his hobby. I really, really miss that world.

Applesoft Basic

Workers are over specialized. And our business domain models are rigid. We want to streamline and standardize which often means that code is written in few places.

It would be nice if we could have the cake and eat it here. With LLM:s there's certainly opportunities if we can find ways to allow both custom scripting and large scale domain constrained logic.

The only issue is security. The amount of open endpoints, standard logins and stuff will get out of control.

but they're not programming computers. They're commissioning footgun-riddled software from a junior intern

People have the grandest ideas about the quality of the average piece of software existing in the real world.

for your own use you can use whatever crap you have a machine come up with for you.

For use on others, no. It's not about just the quality, it's about not even knowing what you're selling.

What is the end goal of software? The vast majority of engineers seem to believe the goal is for the software to be perfect, when actually it's to do things like catch cancer early or make money. Do you think a person who’s life was saved by software with footguns cares?

Lose the tunnel vision.

I believe this captures it well. There are many people that would have previously needed to hire dev shops to get their ideas out and now they can just get them done faster. I believe the impact will be larger in non-tech sectors.

Right. And what a lot of folks here miss is that the prototype was always bad. This process only speeds up the MVP, and gives the idea person a faster way to validate an idea.

Focusing on "but security lol" is a bad take, IMO. Every early attempt is bad at something. Be it security, or scale, or any number of problems. Validating early is good. Giving non-tech people a chance is good. If an idea is worth pursuing, you can always redo it with "experts". But you can't afford experts (hell, you can't even afford amateurs) for every idea you want put into an MVP.

There's a big difference between a "prototype" (or a POC, or a spike, or whatever your company calls it), and an "MVP" (minimum viable product). An insecure product is not viable. A product which cannot be extended or maintained without being almost competitively rewritten is not viable.

MVP means just enough engineered code to solve a problem, rough around the edges and lacking features sure, but not built by someone who has literally no idea what they were doing.

Prototypes of physical products are never put into production and sold to consumers. Unfortunately software prototypes "run", and are sold at that point. Then they begin to scale, and the inherent flaws in their design are amplified. The same thing used to happen with MS Access apps; the same thing still happens with "low code" solutions.

The engineers cost just as much after the prototype phase, but if you don't hire them to build your MVP then you never have one.

Yeah, no. Every MVP I've ever seen has been riddled with problems. Hell, even publicly launched projects are a mess most of the times. How many social networks we've had in the past 5 years that were pwned right after launch? I remember at least 4 or 5 very public failures (firebase tokens, client-side apis and so on). Those are just the most public ones.

Everyone wants to pretend that the software used to be better, but the reality is that MVPs and sometimes even public launches were always a house of cards.

You are pointing to the same low code/no code prototypes that I am, but you keep calling them MVPs for some reason. There's no "used to be better" here, there is good and bad software full stop.

Most ideas suck and never deserve to see the light of day.

True productivity is when what is produced is of benefit.

Why don’t they deserve to see the light of day? Maybe the market gets to decide what “sucks” or doesn’t. More ideas in the marketplace gives users more choice.

Different people have different ideas about what counts as benefit.

The only kind of productivity is progress toward somebody's arbitrary goals. There's nothing "true" about it.

Same, I've had ideas rattling around in my brain for years which I've just never executed on, because I'm 'pretty sure' they won't work and it's not been worth the effort

I've been coding professionally for ~20 years now, so it's not that I don't know what to do, it's just a time sink

Now I'm blasting through them with AI and getting them out there just in case

They're a bit crap, but better than not existing at all, you never know

I'm a big fan of barriers to entry and using effort as a filter for good work. This derma app could be so much better if it actually taught laypeople to identify the difference between carcinomas, melanomas and non-cancerous moles instead of just being a fixed loop quiz.

IMO it is better to keep the barriers to entry as low as possible for prototyping. Letting domain experts build what they have in mind themselves, on a shoestring, is a powerful ability.

Most such prototypes get tossed because of a flaw in the idea, not because they lacked professional software help. If something clicks the prototype can get rebuilt properly. Raising the barriers to entry means significantly fewer things get tried. My 2c.

> IMO it is better to keep the barriers to entry as low as possible for prototyping

Not in an industry where prototypes very often get thrown into production because decision makers don't know anything about the value of good tech, security, etc

it most definitely is not.

It's perfectly fine for most MVPs to go into production. Most SaaS software is solved. Prototypes are outsourcing the hard parts around security. The hard part is making a sale and finding the right fit. Spending 4x the cost on a product that never makes a sale is bad economics. This app isn't remotely harmful, so do you care to make an argument for why it shouldn't exist?

Should decision makers be more informed? Yes, of course, but that's not an argument for gatekeeping. We shouldn't be gatekeeping software or the web. Not through licensure or some arbitrary meaning of "effort". That will do nothing but stifle job growth and I'd very much like to keep developers employed.

Same here, that's why I only ever code in assembly and recommend everyone else to do the same.

Well I mean more low-brow stuff like "Pint?", a social media app to find other people to go for a pint with :)

>They're a bit crap, but better than not existing at all, you never know

I don't agree. I think because of llm/vibe coding my random ideas I've actually wasted more time then if I did them manually. The vibe code as you said is often crap and often after I spend a lot of time on it. Realize that there are countless subtle errors that mean its not actually doing what I was intending at all. I've learned nothing and made a pointless app that does not even do anything but looks like it does.

Thats the big allure that has been keeping "AI" hype floating. It always seems so dang close to being a magic wand. Then upon time spent reviewing and a critical eye you realize it has been tricking you like a janitor that is just sweeping dirt under the rug.

At this point I've relegated LLM to advanced find replace and Formatted data structuring(Take this list make it into JSON) and that's about it. There are basically tools that do everything else llms do that already exist and do it better.

I can't count at this point how many times "AI" has taken some sort of logic I want then makes a bunch of complex looking stuff that takes forever to review and I find out it fudged the logic to simply always be true/false when its not even a boolean problem.

brother, no one cares. if LLMs made something exist that did not exist previously, they worked. it doesnt matter if you could have done it faster by hand if doing so would have resulted in the program not existing.

To anyone wondering if their are LLM paid shills on HN here is proof: A less than 30 day old account which only comment is a nonsense praise of LLM against legitimate criticism.

user: anthonypasq96 created: 22 days ago karma: 2 about: submissions comments favorites

why are people online obsessed with the idea that anyone who disagrees with them is a paid actor

well yeah, better not existing at all actually, if they're crap and you're ok with that. Those just serve to pad out your resume for nontechnical people. It's not like you're actually learning much if you couldn't be bothered to even remove the crap parts

My Resume has plenty of padding already and it's not about learning, it's about "maybe this random idea might actually work" and proving out that concept

Yes I agree - I could probably have worked out how to do it myself but it would have taken weeks and realistically I would never have had the time to finish it.

Well, image classification tasks don't require coding at all.

You just need one program that can read the training data, train a model, and then do the classification based on input images from the user.

This works for basically any kind of image, whether it's dogs/cats or skin cancer.

...none of this requires coding?

No additional coding.

You can take the code from a dog/cat classifier and use it for anything.

You only need to change the training data.

I've done enough image classification stuff that, nah. If all you care about is high level confirmation with high error rates, sure. But more complex tasks like, "Are these two documents the same?" are much, much harder and the failure modes are subtle.

I think most experts wouldn't approach this problem as an image classification problem ...

And, more importantly, I don't think you'll see good results either from a vibe-coded solution.

So I don't think your comment makes sense here.

> I think most experts wouldn't approach this problem as an image classification problem ...

Indeed. It is first and foremost a statistics and net patient outcomes problem.

The image classification bit - to the best of the current algorithms abilities - is essentially a solved problem (even if it isn't quite that simple), and when better models become available you plug those in instead. There is no innovation there.

The hard part is the rest of it. And without a good grounding in medical ethics and statistics that's going to be very difficult to get right.

It's a problem that has many image classification components to it.

"Vibe coding" does a surprisingly good job at this problem.

Yes it does. :)

Maybe but you have broadened the scope from a simple image classification problem to a pipeline of multiple image classifications steps.

Friend, we're talking about classifying skin cancer. The topic is already quite broad.

I think it is a pointless discussion because at some level we are both right.

I'm not going to argue with the idea that a pre-made classifier can be improved upon by experts.

But pre-made classifiers exist and are useful for a very large variety of tasks. This was the original point.

> No additional coding.

> You can take the code from

https://xkcd.com/2501/

More seriously, for most non-programmers, even typing into a console is "coding."

I am a "noncoder" because of a number of reasons. My best friend is a "coder" and still starts instructions with "It's easy! Just open the terminal...".

Unfortunately, I do advanced knowledge work, and the tools I need technically often exist...if you're a coder.

Coding is not that accessible. The intermediary mental models and path to experience required to understand a coding task are not available to the average person.

He wasn't saying no coding MDs existed. Just that, generally speaking, most MDs would have had to partner with a technical person, which is true. And is now less true than it was before.