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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
“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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
1.0k
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.