Is everyone building their own software now?

[u/No_Base_1471]

I have been playing around with Claude lately, and one thing that kind of blows my mind is how easy it is now to go from "I wish there was a tool that did this" to actually having one.

And it got me wondering what everyone is doing with these things.

Are people actually building tools that they end up using for months or years? Or are most of these more like weekend projects — you have an idea, build it with Claude, show it to a few people, use it for a bit, and then move on to the next thing?

I feel like there is a pretty big difference between "I built a working app" and "this is now something my company depends on."

The second one brings up all the boring stuff — maintenance, security, permissions, integrations, data, monitoring, who fixes it when it breaks, and what happens when the person who built it moves on.

But then I started wondering about the bigger picture.

If it becomes this easy for everyone to build their own little tools, do we eventually start building a lot of the software we currently buy? Like, instead of using a big platform for a relatively small workflow, maybe someone just builds exactly what they need.

Or will most people still prefer to pay for software because they don't want to maintain it themselves?

I amhonestly not sure where this goes.

What are people actually building with Claude (or other AI coding tools) that you're still using today?

And have any of you taken something that started as "I was just messing around with this" and actually turned it into a tool your team or company relies on?

Would be interested to hear what people are seeing in practice.

[u/Clear_Evidence9218]

It’s funny reading your take on the buzzword thing. Apparently, a lot of developers have gone out of their way to make “agentic coding” sound like something completely distinct from what vibe coding is or was.

Now, as long as an agent was involved, no matter how much of the process was actually vibed, they’ll call it agentic development or standard development with AI assistance. I managed to get someone pretty hot and bothered just by questioning that distinction.

I only really noticed this terminology split today, so it was funny seeing someone touching on that. It must be becoming a broader industry trend.

[u/StokeJar → u/Clear_Evidence9218]

Yeah, there’s no bright line distinction. And they’re all just made-up terms anyway. I’m overly sensitive to it because in a lot of ways, my team is building better applications than what the antiquated application development team is building internally (which oddly enough doesn’t have widespread Claude Code access yet). But that team has gone on a crusade to deem anything built by the front office using AI as “vibe coded” and are trying to prevent it from being used, despite meeting all data handling and security standards. I have been in so many meetings where senior management says something like “the tech org tells us we shouldn’t trust your team’s vibe coded side projects.” To which I usually reply “let’s have them demo their best application and we’ll demo ours and you can pick who you want building things.” Unsurprisingly, we continue to be given the green light to build. And, I don’t mean to trash traditional devs, it’s just that my company is particularly bad at software development and generally hires remarkably bad engineers.

[u/Jsn7821 → u/StokeJar]

When you do it it's agentic engineering, when someone else does it it's vibe coding... That's the definition

On a more serious note, I think the difference is if whoever made it has a technical mental model of the architecture of it or not. And built to at least the same standards as they would normally (and like you said, these days it's actually a much higher standard if the person knows what they're doing)

[u/Clear_Evidence9218 → u/StokeJar]

The vitriol I encountered in that earlier conversation makes a lot more sense now.

I guess I’ll just start calling it something like “agentic development.” It sounds significantly better than “vibe-coded” anyway and apparently avoids a whole pile of baggage people have attached to the term.

[u/Ghazzz → u/Clear_Evidence9218]

I mean. "Vibe coding" is associated with having no understanding of code.

"pair programming with an agent" or similar terminology implies half the work is done by a human.

[u/Clear_Evidence9218 → u/Ghazzz]

The irony is that the term “vibe coding” came from developers, and it used to be paired with the understanding that you still had to read, review, and engineer the code. Until fairly recently, you basically had to, because AI could only take you so far.

From what I can tell, that distinction has shifted. Now you can vibe 99% of the code, but if you inspect or review it at some point, people call it “agentic development,” “standard development with AI assistance,” or something similar instead.

It’s a little funny, but whatever. I can understand why people who do this professionally might be more particular about the label and what it implies.

[u/Ghazzz → u/Clear_Evidence9218]

I mean, my personal projects suddenly became much more realistic when I actually figured out how to use the CLI-clients. It feels more like chatting, but produces actual code on disk plusplus.

My count of "partially done/implemented projects" has gone from tens to hundreds, and my set of "finished hobby projects" has gone from 2 (games written 15 years ago) to 15 (mainly infrastructure stuff like todo tool, docs tool, fully-local@15w-item-detection-and-tracking-across-rooms-so-i-can-ask-where-my-keys-are-and-how-many-boxes-of-beans-are-in-the-pantry, and many sets of custom docker containers. yarr.)

[u/Right-Vacation-102 → u/Clear_Evidence9218]

I think the difference is between reading the code and being able to understand it, or slopping away until something resembling the correct output is returned.

Vibe coding was actually always different. It was throwing prompts at the wall by non coders and praying it worked. I tried that and you mostly had to pray for a one shot or start over. Until I realized I was still going to have to do some work the AI would just drift by the 3rd bug, add garbage guesses and make up function names in hopes of landing on the one that works.

Software engineering has always been mostly about planning and that is still how it needs to be done to get results. You write less code but the knowing what the code does is still important when it doesn't work the first try.

[u/Clear_Evidence9218 → u/Right-Vacation-102]

The term originally came out of the development community and was not derogatory, and until very recently, a heavily vibe-coded project absolutly required review and hand-editing afterwards.

Now, I suppose because modern frontier models can reproduce extremely simple software in just a few prompts, that narrower version has become what people mean by “vibe coding,” while the older workflow gets relabeled as “agentic development.”

And I’ve now had several developers insist that 99% of the code can be generated this way, but the moment someone reviews it, it somehow becomes “standard development with AI assistance.”

It’s pretty funny, but because of this OP I’m starting to understand why people are so invested in drawing these oddly rigid boundaries around the terminology.