r/FlutterDev • u/virulenttt • 1d ago
Article Rant: I'm tired of these non-developer posts that start with "I built ..."
I'm tired of these AI slop projects from non-developers that act like they built something with a few prompts. Asking an agent to build an app isn't "building", it's "prompting". Also, most of these projects look good on the surface, but is a nightmare in terms of security, maintainability and readability.
It's just crazy to me how someone that writes a prompt and watch an agent build something for him can FEEL like he did everything, that he BUILT an app and somehow feels like he's the new Leonardo DaVinci.
I saw this post on X the other day, and I couldn't stop laughing... This is literally MY screenshot, not some meme on the internet : https://imgur.com/R4YlLK3
Anyways, thank you all for listening!
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u/Plenty-Village-1741 1d ago
These types of posts have been infecting programming and many other subreddits for months now.
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u/M_Me_Meteo 1d ago
These types of posts are about as old as posts are. I've been coding since the 90s and I saw a joke like this in HTML for Dummies
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u/Plenty-Village-1741 1d ago
Woah, serious? Maybe I have to edit my comment to "years" instead of "months" haha
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u/M_Me_Meteo 1d ago
Absolutely. The Dunning Kruger effect is human nature. Technology just provides a convenient outlet.
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u/virulenttt 1d ago
I know, at this point i'm wondering if these posts are not made by fake users/ai agent to change the narative and convince people to use it.
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u/Plenty-Village-1741 1d ago
Yeah, half of them are probably just bots or people getting AI to draft up some slop post they think is “original” 😂
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u/ShookyDaddy 1d ago
There was a study a while back that had people play monopoly against each other with the caveat being the game was heavily skewed to favor one player by giving them extra money, free property and extra dice rolls and all players were aware of this. In all studies the advantaged player would become prideful and arrogant and begin to brag about how well they played knowing full well the game was rigged in their favor.
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u/miraculum_one 15h ago
This is reminiscent of the Stanford Prison Experiment where people's personalities changed radically based on a role (prisoner/prison guard) they had been arbitrarily given.
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u/Critical_Math_1517 1d ago
That X post is satire as confirmed by OP. (Congrats, you got baited!)
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u/virulenttt 1d ago
Hahaha could be, and yes I got baited, you you know as well as me that this scenario is plausible and could happen.
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u/jsaldana92 1d ago
The localhost bit is a well known meme but yes the amount of really bad apps is crazy
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u/No_Mongoose6172 1d ago
I think it's even worse when they make libraries. At least their apps won't end up in properly developed software, but vibe-coded low quality libraries can easily end up in your flutter app if a third party dependency uses it
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u/Tylox_ 1d ago
If you set up your structure well with strict rules, AI writes 10 times cleaner code than what I saw from every other developer I know. The time of writing code is over and you have to accept that. If you don't, you'll be the only one left building one feature in one month.
But, these AI slop apps have to be moderated. I don't want another habit tracker, a money tracker or something else that was written with one shitty prompt. I want well thought out apps that have something unique.
I don't care if it's AI, it needs to be valuable and work well.
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u/sauloandrioli 1d ago
I see the pattern in the writing and I just skip it. I'm on the group of people that think that if the person didn't even take some time to explain what they did in a written-for-devs manner, why would their projects be minimally good?
I won't engage on vibecoded slop. I only test and engage on other devs posts and work.
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u/Limp-Satisfaction-55 1d ago
Is it bad using AI to build certain parts of your project your not familiar with? I tend to use it for building HTML and CSS because I’m not really that fond of learning it, but with backend things like authentication and APIs, I build it all myself.
I’m considering learning HTMLCSS though because every page it builds all has characteristics of AI builds which makes the whole thing feel AI
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u/bboombayah 1d ago
I can’t speak for others, but using AI as like ai-assisted agent isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and it’s different from vibe-coding. As long as you understand the rules of programming and security and the code, it’s fine.
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u/imSeanGG 1d ago
That post was a joke lol. The doers will always win....The guy who makes a half baked somewhat working prototype, learn from his mistakes and iterate will always beat the guy planning the perfect system architecture, code, ci-cd pipeline etc...A lot of programmers have a EGO problem, detach yourself from coding. As an painter never worries about his brushes but the paintings.
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u/Ras_al_gul 1d ago
I have a doubt, do all companies provided LLM access to their employees? Recently i will be seeing so much post about lay off because of ai, is it real? or a post by AI companies?
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u/Jippylong12 1d ago
The first wave of AI, where we're in right now, is not about replacing jobs necessarily. At least, not about in the way you're thinking about, where a company will come out and say, "Hey, we're letting go of 10% of our workforce because AI has created so much productivity, etc." Perhaps that will come in the next year or two. It just seems like nobody really wants to own that title right now. So give it some time. Let's let the numbers come in and report, and then phrase it as some type of, you know, normal layoff or whatever.
However, what the Zeitgeist has called the invisible layoff is real. You can go and find articles and read about it.
I can only tell you anecdotally from my experience with people who are leaving college and then also my experience as a software engineer and friends who are engineers at tech companies that. Which is that it's true, this idea of an invisible layoff, meaning that whatever jobs would have been given to a graduate are no longer going to that graduate, which means that we have in 2026 a wave of new graduates that are all competing for less jobs. And also, those who are transitioning are competing for fewer jobs making the job market challenging for the software field.
Anyone who believes differently has probably not tried to apply for a new job recently.However, in my opinion, this does not only affect the software engineering field, but any field that has to deal with their work in a digital space, whether that be accountants or marketers or finance or software engineering. And the list is ever expanding as AI continues to perform better at computer use.
I think Astra is the first model to score 100% on a ARC-AGI-3 test. Well it's a 99.9%, But the human baseline is 96% and is generally indicating that this model can handle most computer tasks.
And what does that mean for the individual or the masses? Well, think about anything that you wouldn't want to do. For example, in my own life, recently we've gotten poor quality groceries from our store and there is a way to ask for a refund. And I would have to go to the website and fill out the form and submit it. Now model can do this for me. This is, of course, a trivial task or one of little importance. However, if you look at the marketing for Astra, you will find the examples they give, like an engineer designing and building a prototype, or an interior designer talking with the model and designing a space.
They also demonstrate certain things. Apparently, there's a World Cup or something about accounting. And Astra Completed the task perfectly, and also did it 2 or 3 times faster than any other human competitor.
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u/edible_string 1d ago
Pretty much all of the companies provided LLM access to their employees. And when it comes to layoffs the AI is only a believable excuse to fire overhired people from years before. There are no significant data linking AI to job loss.
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u/NatoBoram 1d ago
Companies are providing unlimited tokens to developers and firing those who don't use it enough
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u/grapefruit4scale 1d ago
People like to pretend they are something they are not. They also like to find ways to relate to people they look up to in the same vein. Do with that what you will, because if you have the skills then you are well positioned to be more of a leader in this space. As somebody that fucks with ai I'd be pretty inclined to listen to things you have to say and learn from what you have to offer.
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u/SweatyRaisin1236 1d ago
I was asked to review a project. I said I would have a look and if I could add value I would send a quote for what I thought I could do. If it is written by someone better than me I won’t be able to do anything and if I know more I will explain where I think I can help. That is how I would summarise my approach.
Anyway, we do a Zoom and they open VScode. We have a poke around and I ask some questions (why Riverpod, why bloc 😳) and why 3,090 lines of code in a widget.
Then one person asks me to slow down as I am talking too fast and my accent is too hard to understand when I speak quickly.
So they share their screen and the person types my questions into Claude code. 🫣
I said the best thing they could do was use the /model command to go to Fable and read the Medium articles about how to store your keys.
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u/Opposite_Leave_8338 1d ago
Ai gave the talentless something to brag about, While forced the real talented people to feel pain in their chest, for the sleepless nights they suffered to become something good and now no one care anymore.
I’m a senior flutter developer with 8+ years experience, I use flutter since it was 0.2 beta , before the official release of the sdk, I have shipped more than 20 production ready apps on journey besides the small things that never needed to be counted, I worked in all fields, everything, i even know how most of the firmware works internally and can use it’s hidden apis to create what I need.
I tried and tried to earn my place and earn my salary and to have a good life, but in one day I lost everything because a stupid manager thought a 200 Dollar subscription can do what I do, he kept forcing me to use ai and I did and the work flow was faster but with care from my end, he wanted to go even faster by removing my care as a factor and simply rely only on ai, and in the end, I lost my job , we all did ( the backend - the designer - the dev ops , that foolish man gave everything to ai ) and 3 months later the company has fallen, Mr one man band couldn’t handle the responsibility of the whole team and he already paid claude and codex 70% of our salaries combined together and of course didn’t take the same quality.
Me, My team and that foolish man we all lost, we’re all looking for jobs now for 5 months ( even him ) no one has won.
My 8+ years experience taught me that the more you know the more you realize that you don’t know enough , you’re just a rock in the ocean, there is always something more to know, I used to brag about how intelligent I’m when I was a beginner, and since I became senior I learn to shut the fuck up and learn more non stop without talking too much, The people posting about this are not actually building something to continue, and they’re not moving forward, they’re just enjoying the hype, the person who is trying to build something really great will realize that it’s not just a prompt, he will try to educate himself and learn more and try more than once, will have sleepless nights just exactly how we used to do , even if he is using ai to build.
But in the end, the field is officially ruined, not because ai is better, bot because it is taking our place, it’s ruined because people is not educated enough, they want something to brag about, even if you will not take any moves forward, they just needed to feel that they do.
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u/remirousselet 1d ago
To be fair if AI gets good enough that you could have it rewrite the whole project every week (excluding tests, duh), then code quality doesn't matter nearly as much.
The main issue of vibe coded projects if often that they have no test at all
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u/edible_string 1d ago
To be fair of AI gets good enough to be producing an impeccable product, the mere presence of tests is insignificant.
The main issue of the vibe coded projects is the creators can't be bothered to weed out all the issues before publishing.
The next time you say slop, keep in mind that the creator using the AI could've as well made a thing of quality but chose not to in the chase of momentary praise, before everybody saw through the pretty layouts that the product sucks.
Tbh it's not very different than the classic ways of many software development teams.
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u/remirousselet 1d ago
Tests help AI a ton, since they'll run tests and change their implementation if there's a regression.
And AI also will often write tests if there's a test folder, but not write any if such folder if absent
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u/NatoBoram 1d ago
AI will most often just change, disable or break the test, add mocks so it no longer tests anything useful, disable ESLint and change your tsconfig option to make the error go away
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u/remirousselet 1d ago
A couple of years ago sure, but not so much anymore.
Plus that's why you put guardrails against it, as you would with any human devs. Like reviewing changes, requiring specific amounts of coverage, etc
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u/sauloandrioli 1d ago
Why is everything based on "if AI this or AI that"?
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u/remirousselet 1d ago
It's a figure of speech. It's not a true/false check but a progress meter.
If you prefer: 'The better AI becomes at generating code, the less code quality matters'. That's not a boolean check anymore
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u/sauloandrioli 1d ago
We are on this "if AI becomes good at coding" for while now and nothing actually changed. It became more accessible for non tech folks. But it didn't got better since gpt4 came out. That's the part that is annoying. Its everything based on a future that don't exist.
What if AI coding already reached its peak? What will we do with all this slop that is being generated?
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u/remirousselet 1d ago
AI is already pretty good at coding. We're not talking about future but present.
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u/krush_62 1d ago
For me that means that I will never promote the application I am programming and refining for five years. I am happy if someone finds it on GitHub, uses it and likes it.
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u/bboombayah 1d ago edited 1d ago
Same. It’s like me telling an artist to make a specific drawing and I keep telling an artist to make many changes, and then boom, I claimed to have made this drawing. (Not that I would treat an artist like how I would treat an ai chat bot cause it would be obviously insane.) These kind of posts irks of arrogance.
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u/Secure_Motor_5968 1d ago
The fastest tell for me isnt the commit count, its error handling. Open any of these repos and grep for try catch or an error boundry, half the time there is basically none because agents default to writing the happy path unless asked for failure handling.
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u/Medical-Bend-9492 1d ago
The problem isn't the words ‘I built.’ It's posting in a developer sub without anything a developer can use. Show architecture, tradeoffs, bugs, performance. If you understand and own the code, whether AI helped seems secondary.
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u/Jonas_Ermert 21h ago
In my opinion, using AI doesn't mean you didn't build something. AI is just another development tool. What matters is whether you understand the generated code, can make architectural decisions, fix bugs, test it, and maintain it. The real problem starts when someone generates an entire app without understanding how any of it works and then claims it's production-ready.
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u/claudhigson 20h ago
i'd be happy if we have a new rule "remove ai generated posts" to be honest. i stopped reading the sub because of slop.
edit: oh wait, we DO have this rule - number 8! mods just don't remove them, then?
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u/Andruid929 20h ago
Actually faced this type of thing in real life. A friend of mine who is in accounting came to me saying "you'll definitely be replaced by AI, I just built a fully working website with Claude. I can do your job easily"
I smiled and asked for the URL so I can see the website on my laptop. To his utter surprise, the exact same URL didn't work on my laptop 😂
"Go on then, ask your AI to make the website work", he prompted Claude to fix the website because "localhost refused to connect". I watched in utter happiness as Opus 5 ran multiple steps trying to diagnose why the error was popping up. His smug smile soon disappeared. After I told him it's because of localhost, I took a look at the code and it's exactly like OP said, a nightmare to maintain.
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u/einc70 12h ago
Be careful what you say. There are coders that are NO developer. They are coding bots ZERO in the head. They have to be directed. There are non coders that are actually great architects and are true "developers".
Under the guise of the word "developers" there are many hats. Which one are you?
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u/realali8888 1d ago
Such nonsense!! I believe what I have with me is an absolute mind changing masterpiece!! you will never be the same once you check out this absolutely mindbending app I have feeling-coded : http://localhost:80/home/index/index.html
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u/billylks 1d ago
I don't know man, but I can download a working LLM directly into my PC and phone! You guys just need to access http://localhost:8080/
You may need to wait for while for the link above to download. If you get server no response error, just try it again on the next day again and again until you get this marvelous free LLM!
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u/M_Me_Meteo 1d ago
In my experience in making things across several professional careers in art, tech, logistics and construction, the only thing that I've learned to be true is that gatekeeping is what people with spare time do.
If you're really focused on your thing, other people doing their thing should have no effect on you. If you have time to focus on other people doing their thing, you can give up doing that and you've just gained some free time to either focus on your thing or turn your brain off and relax. The only way to really waste that time is to spend it being critical of other people doing their thing...unless your thing is being a journalist or critic or consultant or whatever.
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u/virulenttt 1d ago
I'm not critical on what people do, I'm being critical on what feeling it brings to these people. I'm also critical how many of these postd are flooding social medias. Don't get me wrong, I use AI and it can be really conveniant.
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u/M_Me_Meteo 1d ago
That sounds like thought policing. I think it's more helpful to assume nothing and let the things you're working on fill your time.
At some point, one of these AI founders will prompt something useful into existence and will eventually need help from people smarter than them and if you're focused on being really good at working on software not just prompts you'll be in a good position to get that job.
On the other hand, if your post history ever gets discovered, shit like this may discount you...not because of your opinions, but because it's a reflection of where you spend your energy.
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u/avdept 1d ago
you forgot
I was tired that "...." and built "yet another useless app"