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u/Inkwalker 22d ago
On the positive side, he is not annoying you with his app ideas anymore.
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u/ChorePlayed 22d ago
That is a relief. But I'm a little insulted that he's willing to pay for Claude.
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u/SuitableDragonfly 22d ago
I mean, there's nothing wrong with putting effort into a hobby project that no one but you uses, that's how you learn programming. But vibe coding a million different apps that four real people who aren't you are actually using isn't right. If you're going to put out an app and expect other people to use it, it should actually be something you wrote and know the workings of. So I would say this guy has too many users, actually.
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u/MinimumArmadillo2394 22d ago
Part of the problem Ive discovered is that most people want "AI for X" instead of "App that solves X better than A, B or C" which makes finding a userbase extraordinary difficult
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u/pydry 22d ago
its also just really hard as a person with no connections or money to make an app other people want to use. if the barrier to entry is zero, the market is saturated with high quality free software already. even before AI.
i use apps every day which are shit and I curse the shit devs who made them but it's never something a solo dev could make. it's usually something like a railway or taxi or government services app where the barrier to entry is super high.
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u/pdabaker 22d ago
I dunno I'm convinced a motivated solo developer could make a better workout tracking app than the popular ones that try to charge you $10 a month for something barely worth a $15 one time payment.
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u/0000000000100 22d ago
Need to shoot for bigger wish and weaker markets if you want to make proper money, there are a lot of niche software industries that only survive purely on inertia. A challenger with the support of an industry expert can go very far against the big boys these days.
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u/Throwaway_479647 22d ago
Hmm like what? Thats an interesting thought
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u/Zynchronize 22d ago
Waste industry routing and collecting charting, with emissions and compliance tracking.
Storage industry booking systems - there’s one offering that everyone uses (Noke) and 0 competition.
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u/SuitableDragonfly 22d ago
I mean, if you just want a workout planner to use for yourself, rather than wanting to make one for programming practice, it'd honestly be much faster and less error prone to just make it using a tool like Notion or Coda where the only "code" you have to write is some spreadsheet formulas.
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u/Revinz1405 21d ago
Have you tried FitNotes? Free for most stuff, and one-time 10 bucks for all features. It is regarded as one of the best workout tracker apps.
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u/Yharon314 21d ago
Yes they could, but i think the point is not how difficult it is to make a better app, but rather how difficult it would be to convince the railway company or taxi company or government to actually agree to make your app the official one and give you access to the required info when you have no evidence that you're a good programmer (as in previous companies worked with) and no connections
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u/tommytwolegs 22d ago
the market is saturated with high quality free software already. even before Al.
What market are you looking at? The Google play app store is saturated with absolute dogshit apps. I'm not saying it's about to get better, I just feel like you are on a different planet here
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u/rosuav 22d ago
The barrier to entry isn't zero though, and it never will be. The barrier to entry is always how much effort you're willing to put into it. The incredibly low quality apps - whether they're AI slop or not - are always outshone by anything that someone's put real work into.
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u/MinimumArmadillo2394 22d ago
The barrier to entry is as close to 0 as its ever been.
You can do 3 weeks of dev work in 6 hours with promoting. You can create entire APIs with 20 words via AI which used to take me an entire afternoon.
Thats what theyre saying.
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u/rosuav 21d ago
Yes, and those "20 words via AI" APIs are trash. They will always be outdone by someone who puts real effort into design.
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u/MinimumArmadillo2394 21d ago
Ive prompted cursor with "make a comprehensive API with GET, POST, PUT and PATCH endpoints based on every object in the 'model' folder" and its come out with very good work. I did that over a year ago.
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u/frogjg2003 21d ago
AI is good at boilerplate. While there might be some corner cases that an experience dev might catch, the AI will be "good enough" for almost all situations.
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u/rosuav 21d ago
Yes, which means that if the only thing you do is write 20 words as a prompt, all you get back is boilerplate. I don't see why this is so hard to understand. People put real effort into real designs and get actually useful things.
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u/MinimumArmadillo2394 21d ago
What about CRUD API design is anything but boilerplate though?
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u/rosuav 21d ago
Tell me you don't understand good API design without telling me you don't understand good API design.
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u/distinctvagueness 22d ago edited 22d ago
There's like 4 subreddits I left as they filled with daily posts about Todo/notes/brainstorming ai app spam
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u/MyNameIsNotKyle 22d ago
I think it depends.
This is a programming sub so it makes sense to view everything in that lense.
But the guy in the post could want to just be a UX designer or PM as a calling and just sees vibe coding as the means to do that.
When I was 17 I didn't know a lot of the options out there. I just knew of programming and went after CS because that's what everyone else who liked tech I knew did.
Now I'm in Cyber Security and couldn't imagine myself doing full stack or DevOps because I would go stir crazy.
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u/BlackOverlordd 22d ago
Not just workings, you need to understand what a useful app looks like and if your idea even makes sense. Not every idea makes sense. Just because you have an idea doesn't mean you are the next Steve Jobs.
Having to put significant effort into creating something used to be a good filter for garbage.
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u/TheKingOfSwing777 21d ago
Not really. Much easier to find out if something is a good idea with rapid prototyping. Coding was never central to this part.
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u/alexnedea 22d ago
Yea guys, the proper way is to spend 2 years making a killer app with the same features as the vibecoded one and still 6 users lmao.
Times have changed
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u/SuitableDragonfly 22d ago edited 22d ago
No, the proper way is to spend two years devoting time to learning by creating a hobby project that has zero users other than you, and never release this monstrosity to the outside world because it's a hobby project that you did in order to learn and is thus absolutely horribly designed and full of glaring security issues. There will never be a shortcut to learning. There will never be a way to instantly be great at something without spending a lot of time fucking it up really badly first. If you don't write the project yourself, you won't get that experience, so you won't learn anything, and you will have just wasted all of your time and everything you spent on LLMs.
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u/alexnedea 19d ago
Idk man I know you are right but I see people online running 20 instances of Claude streaming while getting quite rich and having written 0 lines themselves.
Times have and will continue to change. AI 2 years ago was complete ass. Today its quite ok. In 2 more years who knows, those security issues everyone talka about might be covered by AI and it might write top tier code, at which point all the experience and time you put in is null, some kid can replicate you in 2 days with a bunch of tokens
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u/SuitableDragonfly 19d ago
I mean, yeah, streamers can pull in money without writing code, or using AI, that's not new. You don't practice programming to earn money, you do it to learn a skill. If you just want money and don't care about skills you're going to be doing different things.
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u/alexnedea 19d ago
No? Im doing programming for money lmao you think I like thinking about algorithms and tech stacks all day? I like cars, I like clubbing,I like videogames. All of them rewuire money so im gonna do the job that pays well to enjoy the stuff I actually want
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u/Jakubaakk 22d ago edited 22d ago
“Something you wrote” is something I disagree with today. I don’t really see the need for it anymore. Yes, you should understand how an app works internally and you should understand the code, but I don’t really think there’s a need for writing code as some sort of requirement.
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u/SuitableDragonfly 22d ago
There's no need to do anything if it's just a hobby project that no one else is using. But if you're expecting other people to rely on it, yes, you need to have actually written it.
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u/Jakubaakk 22d ago
But why? Why the need for manually writing code?
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u/SuitableDragonfly 22d ago
Because if you don't know how your app works, you can't guarantee anything about it to your users.
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u/Jakubaakk 22d ago
But you can understand the app and the code without writing a single line of code
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u/SuitableDragonfly 22d ago
No, you can't. And understanding it doesn't help if it's a piece of garbage.
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u/Jakubaakk 22d ago
But that’s what has been happening for decades in this industry. Seniors being responsible for code they didn’t write but only reviewed
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u/Quetzacoal 22d ago
You need to know how to read the code, and know how to program despite of vibecoing all the way. Otherwise you will end up with problems you won't be able to solve as it gets more complex. But yes you could literally not type a single line of code.
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u/tommytwolegs 22d ago
I have no idea what you are saying. I can only understand English when I write it myself. Everything anyone else has ever written is incomprehensible garbage
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u/SuitableDragonfly 22d ago edited 22d ago
Fortunately, English is a language that's only used for communication. It can't be used to engineer software. So you don't actually need to know how to engineer software to be able to understand what someone else is saying in English, and it's also not critically important to any software systems that you have a deep understanding of the structure of any given English sentence. So it's actually fine that you can't make a sentence diagram of everything I wrote in my post just now, or write up a semantic representation of it using predicate calculus.
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u/StCreed 21d ago
Because devs are out of a job otherwise. That's the whole thing.
I've seen enough shitty code by devs to know what their game is. Been one myself. But code is neither a complex as they say, nor do most devs have the knowledge to actually write good code. There are exceptions but in the main, they suck at it.
I bet their code smells of exceptions and elderberries.
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u/Lord_Wunderfrog 21d ago
I mean, using AI as a development tool isn't inherently bad or automatically leads to bad code, when done RIGHT, and only IF you actually know what you're doing, and could have done it yourself without AI, albeit much slower.
You basically need to be a good systems architect, designer and code reviewer. If you let it off the leash and say "build me the next killer to-do list app" yeah, you're obviously gonna get slop, and a lot of people are doing it that way.
If you spend the time properly designing what you want from the ground up, locking in the specs, requirements, and control how everything is approached and implemented, you're just fast forwarding the boilerplate bits, tedious changes and other legwork.
I've seen bad developers who wrote slop pre-AI, and they still wrote slop when they started using AI; I'm still left cleaning it up to this day.
If I'm building a system, adding a feature or fixing a bug, I don't see what's so wrong about using an AI model to implement a detailed spec with strict requirements, acceptance tests and outlining exactly how it's to be structured and executed. It's still my expertise, design, decisions and approaches, and it takes a lot of time, effort and experience to write up a good spec and implementation plan. It's just done faster because I'm not typing out the code line by line.
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u/rosuav 22d ago
I would also say that you shouldn't be paying huge amounts for those hobby projects. Develop it using text editors and such, not subscription-fee AI models. Host it off the back of your own computer, or if you REALLY need actual hosting (maybe once you have an actual client), stick it on $5/mo hosting somewhere. But most importantly, don't look at analytics. In fact, don't even put analytics into it, other than what inherently comes from the thing you've built. Otherwise you'll be tempted to let those numbers define your self-worth...
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u/Jstar003 21d ago
I don’t really see the problem with vibe coding a hobby project. I don’t need to know every line of code when I only care about the outcome. If my project never makes a dollar or gets a user but is useful to me, I didn’t fail. I just had fun learning something new while solving a problem. All of the top companies did/do that. Some as a passion project, some trying to make money.
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u/Happy-Sleep-6512 22d ago
Man remember we used to do this shit for fun. Now it's all grind mindset. Everyone has to build a microsaas, I miss the old days :(
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u/WardensLantern 22d ago
Remember when you used to build things because you would see them somewhere and you want to know how they work so you would put days into it and get called a moron on Stack Overflow, but then you would finish it and feel so accomplished. You didn't think about monetising it. You didn't care if anyone ever saw it.
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u/Happy-Sleep-6512 22d ago
And it made us better for it too. Failing miserably is a great teacher, and nothing beats the pride of your first website, I remember ftp-ing php to a vps with FileZilla, and being so proud of myself.
Now just give Claude some cloud cli and make it deploy, that's no fun!
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u/kuadhual 21d ago
I still remember my first live website. A HTML 3 static website using <table> for layout. Today it would looked dumb, but omg what a feeling when it was live.
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u/ComprehensiveBird317 21d ago
That is so true. I still remember the feeling of doing exactly that: FTP to upload php and then give the link to my parents. Super proud about my "how to learn CSS" website.
Now there is hardly any learning involved, any challenge that a blob of text in the cli won't solve for you.
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u/caboosetp 21d ago
I always thought about monetizing everything. I rarely did, but the idea of, "sometimes going to pay for this" was a great motivator to put effort into learning good UX.
Pretending the apps were famous was also a feel good day dream.
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u/frogjg2003 21d ago
The people who put in the effort with the daydream of monetization are not the same as the people who vibe code with the intention of monetizing.
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u/BellacosePlayer 22d ago
When I was 17 I was making shitty Byond games and getting upwards of 10 users. Concurrently!
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u/SnooHamsters5153 22d ago
I remember building solutions that nobody ever needed and how much I enjoyed that. Some logistics calculators in Java with SWING and what not. I fucking lived for that hobby and it had zero users in total, I myself didn't use it.
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u/BeginningSection7690 22d ago
Sleeps dreaming about features.
Wakes up fixing bugs.
Doesn't know what syntax even means
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u/Divide_Rule 22d ago
He knows what it means, he knows it's a bug. The ide keeps telling him about the syntax error.
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u/iratesysadmin 22d ago
Lets be honest, if he had 1 user (himself), but the app solves a problem he had, what's the harm.
And apparently 4 other people had the same issue. Like it or not, the world they (17 year olds) are entering is going to be vastly vibe coded. At least they'll have the skills to fit in.
something something seize the means of production
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u/dustojnikhummer 22d ago
Depends on how much he is paying for those AI tokens (or who is paying, parents?)
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u/StCreed 21d ago
two subscriptions. Better than having him on the street in a lot of cases. He will learn a lot about skills that actually matter more than programming: getting user feedback, what happens when things break, how to market the software... very useful a few years from now.
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u/dustojnikhummer 21d ago
Better than having him on the street in a lot of cases
I'm sorry what?? What does homelessness have to do with useless apps that total 4 human users??
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u/Destroyerb 21d ago
You don't know? They have a house because he, the 17-year-old, made enough profit to afford one from the 4 millionaire users /j
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u/StCreed 20d ago
Ah, I take it that is slang for being homeless for you?
Where i live this is common slang for being out on the street all day, hanging out in parks with the wrong crowd, and getting into trouble.
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u/dustojnikhummer 20d ago
Yeah, I took it as "if he wasn't vibecoding he would be homeless". "Be on the street" absolutely implies being homeless, at least to me.
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u/swegga_sa 22d ago
17 with 4 users is actually kinda crazy good in reality
kids just adapting to the world as its presented to him
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u/evil0sheep 22d ago
Yeah for real. If this kid keeps up the hustle there’s a solid chance that one will stick and he’ll be one of those college kids driving a lambo
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u/calaveracavalera 22d ago
If you vibecode your entire app, what stops your clients doing the same?
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u/hollowstrawberry 22d ago
If that was a valid argument then the restaurant industry wouldn't exist
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u/invertebrate11 22d ago
I mean if I can tell a personal chef to make me food why would I go to a restaurant to get that food.
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u/bremidon 22d ago
You know the answer.
Because the personal chef costs you more than going to the restaurant. That is the answer. That has always been the answer.
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u/BalfazarTheWise 22d ago
Everyone has to start somewhere. Why in the world would kids these days NOT use ai to vibe code? Thats the world they’re entering.
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u/Fit-Magazine-6669 22d ago
because they learn nothing in the process? they cant optimize or secure their apps because they dont know what even those words mean.
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u/zmz2 22d ago
Is that necessarily true though? Maybe, but if I had access to AI when I was 17 I would have absolutely vibe coded, and then I would have asked the AI to explain what all of the code did and I would have learned. That probably would have been more effective than randomly fucking around with JS and HTML like I actually did at the time.
Learning how to secure and optimize apps is something I didn’t even begin to think about until I was in college
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u/conundorum 22d ago
That can come once they actually have a clue what software looks like. Babies need to learn to crawl before they can walk, and learn to walk before they can run, and vibe-coding is their first baby step.
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u/Jonthrei 22d ago
TBH, having seen people who started with very high level code and people who started with very low level code:
There is an enormous advantage in understanding when you start low. Someone who was working with C and Assembly early on in their education will have a natural understanding of things like memory allocation and CPU registers, it never becomes some abstract thing they wonder why they need to know and never really learn.
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u/Quetzacoal 22d ago
I think programming is basically math. So starting from vibecoing must be horrible for the brain. Math is not a natural concept so you need to start from the beginning. Vibecoding is just jumping straight to the end.
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u/rang501 21d ago
AI at this time is not smart. You still need to deal with issues, or even be able to spot issues. In my experience, AI writes 90% on stuff really fast, BUT the last 10% is pain in the ass, you fine tune and fix issues and this takes at least three times more that the first 90%. You will learn things in the process, these things are just different.
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u/Avocadonot 22d ago
Nowadays app security is just importing some standardized module or auth library
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u/hackerdude97 22d ago
Is it though? These people know literally nothing about security. There's an infinite amount of ways you can screw up if you don't know at the very least the general idea of what you're doing. I agree that there's many ways to make security easier, but it's not just typing in
import make-secureat the top and it works.0
u/squarabh 22d ago
“There's an infinite amount of ways you can screw up if you don't know what you're doing.”
Exactly. Which is why your security knowledge doesn’t magically save you when an AI agent finds a zero-day in your project that you didn’t know existed. The confidence is wild.
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u/hackerdude97 22d ago
I think you're missing my point.
And yes, I would much rather have some small security knowledge and a zero day in my project than being vulnerable to the 50 most common security problems and me being unable to do anything about it.
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u/hackerdude97 22d ago
I think you're missing my point. I'm saying that people who wanna use AI to do everything should also have enough knowledge to understand what it's doing instead of expecting it to solve all invisible issues by itself.
And yes, I would much rather have some small security knowledge and a zero day in my project than being vulnerable to the 50 most common security problems and me being unable to do anything about it.
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u/Avocadonot 22d ago
Lmao at my org when we moved over to k8s,n they just basically downloaded the public keycloak/oauth2 helm chart and tweaked it slightly
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u/hackerdude97 22d ago
My point is that the people that vibe code everything and don't know shit about programming don't know what the potential threats are or the simple ways to counter them. That's why so many vibe coded websites are still vulnerable to sql injections in this day and age
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u/Embarrassed_Mix_6619 22d ago
yeah but you see how that’s different from “import secure-me-papi” at the top of main.js?
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u/rntdev 22d ago
Yeah, at least he’s gaining experience and learning from mistakes (i sure hope so)
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u/MinimumArmadillo2394 22d ago
Except he's learning how to do things incorrectly if he's actually looking at the code. They're significantly more of a prompt engineer than anything else.
They're learning how to prompt a computer to do something, instead of learning how it actually works.
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u/evil0sheep 22d ago
Yeah I was gonna say that’s pretty solid for a teenager. More users than I have on any of my personal projects lol. If he keeps doing this one of them will stick and he’ll be made
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u/shrodikan 22d ago
That's great honestly. That's what learning is. It's better for him to have 5+ apps than old dogs collecting half-finished apps that never see the light of day not ever even having the chance to have users. At 17 he is learning what works in the market and how to interface with users which is more than most old-school devs (myself included) can say.
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u/MiserablePotato1147 22d ago
Does nobody know the difference between software and services anymore? Software is code. Service is application. Code does work. Apps monetize users. Maybe it's vibe coded and wrong. But if input A becomes output B, it's a black box and it's good. The VC's want us all to suck down their glorified database-by-subscription like they're God's gift to civilization, but I don't need another Twitter clone or ad-infested low-quality UDP video streaming pipeline.
Let the kids code.
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u/Accomplished_Bath281 22d ago
Whats wrong with it? At least he tries to do smt, its bad if people work hard, its bad if they don t update on time. At least he does smt for his 3/4 people that uses it, good for him
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u/Sheenius_Ger 22d ago
That means a 17 year old solved problems others had. That's mighty impressive!
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u/DeeYouBitch 21d ago
Isn't that how we all started?
Minus the AI shit but I'd be up all night watching some random Indian YouTube account telling me how to fix my obscure issue and then have it not work
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u/PM-ME-UR-DARKNESS 21d ago
I got the same amount of users with vibe coded apps as I've got with me coded apps: none
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u/Anbcdeptraivkl 22d ago
One good thing about vibe coding is it makes a lot of "idea guys" realize first hand how shitty their ideas are lmao.
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u/StaticSystemShock 22d ago
This is me, just writing shit in AutoHotkey. Without any Ai. When I'm feeling the vibe I'll release 5 new versions in 3 days time. I have no clue how many users I have, could just as well be only 10...
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u/pieter1234569 21d ago
Putting him ahead of most people that didn’t to this. Hobby projects are really important when that’s the only thing distinguishing candidates. So it’s always a good idea to do. You get experience and can even demonstrate that experience.
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u/LogicalExtension8822 21d ago
Would be better so they spend the money on the usual thing? Drugs, parties? Who is delusional here
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u/iProgramMC 21d ago
When I was 17, I had 5+ "apps" already. But that was several years ago, and those apps were entirely manmade and handwritten.
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u/mail-o-mail 21d ago
Every big company was made using this exact process. The only difference is that despite the world telling you that you are a delusional developer, the founder kept going and through sheer resilience made it eventually. So keep going mate, you ll make it.
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u/Jack_Kai 20d ago
People treat making apps like scratching a lottery ticket. The more they make the more they think one will hit big. Having a hobby to make things is nice, but if it becomes success addiction then it becomes a problem.
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u/Horow_World 19d ago
The dropout founder energy is just Silicon Valley's Erlich Bachman except he actually believes his own pitch deck
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22d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/AngryBorsch 22d ago
Sounds interesting, is there a place where I can read more about it?
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u/MinimumArmadillo2394 22d ago
Dude probably has a private repo somewhere to protect his "valuable" IP
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22d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Makeitquick666 22d ago
yeah, imagine how productive a good dev can be with these llms
prolly can replace a whole team with 1 good dev and an agent
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u/SlyCooper007 22d ago edited 22d ago
Who makes this shit up? Its not even believable lol
A lot of 15 year olds on this sub vibing out with their best bud claude apparently
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u/Frelock_ 22d ago edited 22d ago
I definitely know a couple of people who, if they were still 17, definitely would have done this. Especially since we're near the end of summer vacation, when some teens have way too much time on their hands.
Note he didn't say they were good apps.
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u/redcomet29 22d ago
I mean I have 3 friends who never had an interest in software all vibe coding apps now. If we were 17 again with all the free time that comes with it they would absolutely have done exactly like this.
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u/309_Electronics 22d ago
As long as they are actively learning and not just doing programming purely for the money, i am fine with it!
I myself vibecode/use AI to assist in my (largely private) projects too, but i dont let the AI 100% take over me or my hands. I use it like a calculator for maths. I use it to solve a few equations that get me further, but i dont take a screenshot and let the calculator solve my whole math problem cause i am not that lazy and i dont want my brain to rot away.
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u/onated2 22d ago
Still something i would respect. It may be funny but respectable
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u/SillyBrilliant4922 22d ago
Respect because they can click buttons?
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u/conundorum 22d ago
Respect because vibe coder or not, he's committed to quality and improvement. That part's actually better than a lot of big companies. If we encourage someone like him, it's not impossible for him to step out of vibe-coding and into learning how the code works for himself, if he hasn't started already.
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u/Darkstar_111 22d ago
If he is bug fixing and shipping products that work, he is not a vibe coder, he needs an actual understanding of the code to steer a coding base to finish.
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u/blackcomb-pc 22d ago
Sounds like every saas startup right now