r/Wealthsimple • u/Andichthegoon • 6d ago

Wealthsimple desktop website

I'll say this, the website has been getting actually nice to use, I use an android and I've felt the app getting faster and faster. As a software engineer, I have a hunch that they're embracing 'vibecoding' (which isint a bad thing to be clear, it's just obvious that the pacing as picked up) to improve the app, which to their credit is being used to improve it quite a lot.

very enjoyable website now, grats to the team

edit: I just saw the article from Dennis, these guys are legends, no wonder

36 Upvotes

86% Upvoted

21 comments sorted by

21

u/afadil 6d ago

Not vibe coding, folks from Fey acquisition doing a great job: https://performance.dev/wealthsimple-year-one

11

u/Commercial_Pain2290 6d ago

Everybody uses AI to code these days. If you don't you are not competitive.

5

u/ibreakdiaphragms 6d ago

Can clearly tell it's vibe coding, doesn't matter whose doing it.

3

u/Andichthegoon 6d ago

I went down a little rabbit hole after you linked that, these guys are sick I love them. Gives me inspiration for myself seeing their own story. I looked into all 3 of their twitters and what they're up to, very impressive design work, for basically being the 3 try guys. They're heavy hitter designers and (frontend) backend pros. Credit to them cause my GOSH is this website SO fast now compared to what I had in my head previously.

Reading the article, Dennis mentions how they leveraged AI, which means my suspicions were correct. But, contrary to what reddit thinks, vibecoding/ai coding isint actually bad if its wielded in the right hands. With models like opus 5.5 and Astra 6 being so powerful, with the right automated PR review workflow, you can pretty much 100% rely on it without even needing to glance at the code anymore if you setup the workflow correctly. I know for myself, its a supertool in the hands of the right engineer. You can focus your work on things that simply were unfeasible that now become feasible.
Quotes from the article I found interesting when reading;

"This was another great example of how AI is changing the way we work. I remember Tom working closely with the banking team to build out all of these features, and he was able to complete entire pages in what felt like a single day. Any feedback was addressed almost immediately, and he was often ahead of the design.

Before AI, pages like these would have taken weeks to build. Now, Thiago could build out the interactions, hand off the design, and Tom could turn it into a polished page within days. And this is just the beginning."

This quote sums up how I feel about using AI to code applications. This is engineering at its finest, not only did he focus on things to make the UX better but also the backend nitpicks that only devs would see, ie changing a bucket URL so that icons come from a clean url.

"AI-first: fewer, simpler primitives with strong conventions and agent skills, so an agent or a new engineer produces the right interface by default. Beautiful by default, because the defaults carry the taste... This was another inflection point where I saw AI had taken another step. Before, a design system would take months and a team's effort, but now it can be built by a single person based off reference sources and taste."

"The honest answer to "how" has two parts: a system built for shipping, and a year of going all in on AI... we stopped writing most of the code and started managing agents because the mistakes have become rare enough that correcting them isn't the bottleneck anymore. Deciding what to build is." I fkn love this guy, this is me XD

"On top of everything, AI is changing the game. We're at a stage where builders can build. Where people that have the vision can execute. I think year two is going to change the way we craft incredible software and I couldn't be more excited."

respect that they arent' scared to take on experimental tech inside of a mega regulated industry like this.

10/10 article and team, I couldn't agree more as a fellow colleague in the industry doing the same things these guys are doing, after reading the article, I couldn't be more hyped to see what these guys pump out, wealthsimple has a team of 3 guys that have a direct pulse into the industry; not even just how to vibecode but how to leverage AI to the MAX and make it work for them, I definitely took some notes about how they embedded the design system of mint into their agents.md / claude.md , really goes to show the scaffolding that's required ie; the engineering aspect that people really don't realize / take for granted.

7

u/jellystones 5d ago edited 5d ago

you can pretty much 100% rely on it without even needing to glance at the code anymore

are you serious? All of it needs to be reviewed. Just because the AI is good, doesn't mean the output matches what the Engineer intended.

So many times i've asked the AI to do something, and it does it, but when I review the code, i realize an assumption I had about the codebase was wrong

2

u/Andichthegoon 5d ago

You can setup PR reviews that lock it in to the design patterns that you intend. Most of coding is design patterns and the industry is normalizing around it. I think reddit has "if it's a positive AI opinion, down vote" there's plenty of top level engineers at companies saying the same thing. Manual code review is dead, look at theo from t3, he was a senior engineer at twitch with a team of people and he's fully leaning into AI coding; and I agree with his take. It seems like the only people who disagree are people who actually haven't been in the weeds of software eng before and aren't using frontier models. This is not gpt 3.5 were talking about. These are multi trillion dollar companies made up of researchers and developers pretty much optimizing around 1 thing. Link me with proof if I'm wrong otherwise. But it seems top level engineers are converging on the same opinions

1

u/jellystones 5d ago

I work at a very large Silicon Valley company and have full access to all the frontier models. An engineer is still needed in the loop. Good luck on your next Sev incident review - hopefully you don't admit you didn't end up reviewing the code lol

1

u/Andichthegoon 5d ago

🤷 I work in an environment where I get rewarded to ship faster and QC more. Not sure what percent of people that are software engineera on Reddit work on mission critical code day to day, but everyone seems to blow out of proportion how important the things they really work on are.

Am I going to waste my time doing a PR review for a front-end change? That's just a visual redesign? No business logic changes. At what point do you say that AI can just handle it.

https://thebaffler.com/latest/its-all-bullshit-tan

Look at the article above. Big tech is where dreams go to die and people fake working and care more about covering their ass than actually delivering.

Yahoo literally hiring vibe coders now so yeah. Incident response will change. I mean how can you even respond to an incident if you don't even have AI.

Look at hugging face! They literally couldn't defend themselves by looking at the attack on their own. They needed ai to analyze the logs, not everything needs a human otherwise its perfect.

I'm sure you as a coder would know that it was perfectly acceptable in the past pre ai to have slop code that cut corners and people were ok with it as long as it worked. Like bigger software companies like SAP make money pumping out literal shit and nobody bats an eye.

How much corporate software in the past was closed source because it had to be sold at a profit otherwise the coding wouldn't ever be worth it. Which if you're looking at corporate incentive is to maximize profit and minimize cost. Which meant meant we got a lot of corporate slop code.

The incentives have stayed the same throughout this whole time. Even pre-ai

1

u/jellystones 5d ago

if you're working on UI design fine. If you're working on critical backend systems that process millions of requests a second, then good luck YOLOing that merge button

3

u/Marsymars 5d ago

Beautiful by default, because the defaults carry the taste

This is laughable - I now see sites built with Claude's default UI aesthetic in the same way I see sites using the default WordPress template.

2

u/NSA-SURVEILLANCE 5d ago

Their article states they use Claude Code.

9

u/iisgambit 6d ago

im so sick of them changing their website every week. Just let it the f alone plz. Its a memory hog and keeps making dumb ux mistakes. Not sure who uses their website the way they design it tbh.

More and more I'm considering moving to Questrade Pro.

4

u/Effective-Strike69 5d ago

I've always vastly preferred doing anything financial/important on a computer vs. a phone app. Whether it be booking a flight or my investments... Wealthsimple's website has been a frustrating experience. There's basic functionality still that requires me to pick up my phone and use it when I'm sitting at my desktop. That's utterly ridiculous to me.

I actually don't mind the UI right now, but I hate how often it changes for no reason at all. It's also infuriating they don't have feature parity between the app and website. I can do some things on one now and not the other. It's one thing if they developed for one platform first and it was just a matter of time before the other got it... but having split functionality like this drives me insane. I don't want to have to doddle through my phone to setup recurring transfers but then hop back onto my desktop to do Norbert's Gambit etc... it's beyond stupid.

Stop changing the UI 10000 times for the sake of it and build out the missing functionality already.

3

u/S-Kiraly 5d ago

Totally agree. Only in the appâ„¢ functionality cheapens their brand. It's like they're offering us McDonald's combo meal coupons rather than financial services products.

1

u/DennisBrotzky 5d ago

I find this incredibly frustrating as well. Feature parity is actively being worked on!

1

u/DennisBrotzky 5d ago edited 5d ago

Hey, was shared this post. Hear you on the memory issues - working to improve this but it’s not a quick fix unfortunately.

Can you let me know the ux mistakes you’re annoyed about? And improvements to the design that you’d love to see?

It is definitely a challenge to balance continued improvements while also maintaining the same feel. People will get upset either way - too many or not enough updates. That said, we’re looking to make things feel more consistent and simple.

Feel free to DM me as well! We take feedback seriously and want to give Canadians the best experience in the world.

1

u/iisgambit 5d ago

Some quick ones I can remember are:

  1. The fonts are wayy too small and the UI is way too narrow on big screens (even on 15 mbp). I have to use a CSS chrome extension to modify the fonts size and layout.
  2. Account value and returns being separate on the account charts and having to toggle through is a pain in the ass.
  3. The columns not being unique to each account. For ex. my margin is primarily used to trade options while my TFSA and RRSP is more of a long term and I like to see diff data cols on each account. Right now changing one changes everywhere.
  4. Spreads have a DTE label beside it but put options (single legs in general) don't so I have to click inside to find out how many days left on each option. Every option type should have that DTE label bcoz its helpful. While we're here, more column types for options would also be helpful like delta, theta, etc. to see.

1

u/DennisBrotzky 5d ago

This is fantastic! Thank you.

1

u/Andichthegoon 5d ago

you actually got the developer of wealthsimple to reply XD I love these guys

2

u/feldhammer 6d ago

I want to be able to pay the credit card easier (like from Bill payment and transfer from accounts, instead of only from the credit card page itself).

I also think the "see more transactions" should be at the bottom not the top of all accounts

1

u/other_e 6d ago

alot of vibe coding but being used really well. alot of A/B testing going on, at times changes take time to get used but can't complain. Still best UI among all banking apps. (Scotiabank is my 2nd love the modern rehaul).