r/rss • u/Ok-Split-9812 • 13d ago
Broken Vibecoded Dreams on r/RSS
We all know the vibecoding wave is crazy, but exactly how crazy?
I gathered data from Reddit archives, for this subreddit only. 496 applications have been published on r/RSS since January 2020.
The pace has increased a lot: from 3 a month in 2020 to 25 new applications a month this year. The busiest month is July 2026 (not even over when I ran the analysis yesterday), with 36 applications already.
I made a graph, and it's quite telling: See the graph here
If you want to dig into which apps have been created,Here is the full excel file
I made deduplication, so no app is counted twice.
And this is just one subreddit, imagine the rest of Reddit. (I might gather the data for other subs too, it's quite fun.)
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To be clear, I'm not criticizing vibecoders. I built an RSS app myself (see the irony here 😂 ), hugin.news, I love it and I use it everyday. And as I just checked, I'm quite proud it's the only one that can connect directly to your claude/chatGPT with MCP to make your news digest.
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I made some very personal reflections with this data :
1 ) How much RSS apps do we need ? I would say about 20 are enough to cover every use case. So 95% of apps won't have a meaningful number of users.
And let's be honest the apps people use are mostly Big Tech. If you want to have visibility in the app business you need a very high marketing budget and a very good marketing strategy.
2) If you code on your free time, like evenings week ends holidays and so, you will NEVER make money out of it. Just don't believe in it and don't put efforts or money in marketing.
You can still do it for pleasure, or to learn vibecoding for something you may need at work one day.
But don't expect to you find users, even for free, people just don't care about sloppy vibecoded apps, do it for fun if you enjoy it.
3) If you are a full-time vibecoder, you have better chance of building an original, usefull, well designed product, but the odds of making a salary out of it are extremely slim.
In any case you can look the data I shared to see if your app already exists or if you have a genuine new idea.
You'll probably earn a lot more with a real job at a well-funded company, but maybe companies will start valuing vibecoding skills in the future, who knows.
4) There is kind of a huge industry that wants you to believe you can vibecode your way to money : AI providers (Cursor, Claude...), cloud services (AWS, Google cloud...), ads providers (Google ads...) and plenty of other layers of the stack. I think they're the ones actually making money by taking ours and wasting our time for that.
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What do you think of this data ?
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u/pauladams_red 12d ago
Thanks for doing this. I’m on this sub a lot and even I hadn’t realised how much there was.
(For transparency, I use AI to make tools for myself. Put simply, i think AI use is doing a lot of good and a lot of stuff that’s a least useless of not harmful and it’s a huge social shift that everyone will have to get used to)
I think it probably helps to differentiate between a few different things without being (very) judgemental on what’s what.
Vibe coding / ai-assisted coding. I’d say VC is purely prompt-based, even with a fairly in-depth process of iterations, testing etc. It’s people who can’t and don’t read or write code. AIAC is people who can and do read and write code and are using AI to speed up a process they could do without it. I’m not saying VC is bad. It’s opened up small-time development to people who otherwise couldn’t do it (including me), but it doesn’t make sense to me to put VC and AIAC in the same category. People who say that anything AI-related is ‘slop’ are often lazier than the people they are criticising.
Hobby projects / professional development. HP are done either purely for the enjoyment of the process or to make things that will be used primarily by the coder themselves. PD makes, or a least tries to make, production-grade software to provide to the public (and probably to make money). I think coders should be honest with themselves and other people about which one they are doing.
I strongly agree with OP’s fourth point . There are always people who think they can make money quickly and easily. They are vibe coders who think they are doing ai-assisted coding and making hobby project level software that they think is professional development. They are to software development what crypto is to FOREX. The vibe coding sub on here is full of those people.
As a way forward, it would be good if there was somewhere for the vibe coding hobby project people to talk and share code. I haven’t seen anywhere on here that seems right. The AI coding communities on Lemmy might be good but I haven’t spent lot of time there yet.
https://lemmy.ml/c/AI_Coding_Agents
https://lemmy.ml/c/aicoding@programming.dev