How are you completely disregarding the data integrity and privacy aspects of rolling your own tools?

I vibecode an app that only I use and store data locally. That means my data never leaves my device, I never have to share my email with anyone, never have to enter my credit card info anywhere

You buy SaaS and you have to then login, share credit card info, and have your data stored in the cloud somewhere with godknows what security practices

That’s worth more than the cost of any tokens

Some of this "I can do it for free" stuff gives me the vibes of people who monitor gas prices every day. Only to drive 10 miles out of their way to save $0.30 a gallon filing their 15 gallon tank ($4.50 savings - $2.00 gas used - $X for time). They probably also buy an overpriced drink/snack for a net negative value proposition even if time is free.

Some of these things are the feeling of "getting a deal" or "screwing the system" and people can spend their time in whatever way brings them joy. I don't want to be a "markdown editor app developer" or whatever and would rather work on more creative endeavors. In the end, we give our time to get money and then trade our money for time but time is our only limited resource.

Most apps rationale for subscriptions is "Ongoing development" without an option like jetbrains etc. to fall back to a perpetual license. In practice, regardless of whether an app needs ongoing development or not, this is the best way to try to guarantee continuous income and make a living off of a project I guess.

Perhaps LLM's will force developers/companies to change their stance and to stop users from recreating what they have already created, just buy an at-a-time snapshot of their app for a one-time-fee? Probably not but one can hope.

What's actually going on here is the Unix Philosophy applied to more and more platforms.

Previously, if you wanted to rig up a screen recording app in a few minutes you'd use Linux and specifically one of the minimal desktop environments like i3 or sway. Then you'd wire up a few command line utilities (slurp, wf-recorder, etc) and get the exact experience you want. These small unix tools allowed the greater ecosystem to just cobble together what they wanted without too much hassle. I've done exactly this!

This is the exact mindset that keeps people away. They'd prefer to NOT maintain their own video recording software THANK YOU VERY MUCH. So you get people who go to Mac OS because there's always a slick solution for a couple bucks and you never have to be TOO fiddly.

This doesn't destroy the market for people in the latter camp, but it DOES open up the market for people in the former.

Biggest problem for SaaS is that people don't have enough time to be informed buyers. Like in theory you should be able to make a $0.99 annual SaaS app that provides some small service really well and sell it to a million people who need it, but that kind of sale is almost impossible. Most people are either missing out on great software they should be buying, or paying for software they don't need.

No amount of what ifs and buts is going to change the fact that the tech is now mature enough to make software in hours that previously needed man-years.

And it is getting better at a pretty rapid pace.

The problem with one time purchases is that they don’t allow for rent seeking behavior - the cornerstone of any sufficiently sustainable greed model

The time argument is countered in roughly the same manner as when you do home improvement.

Yiu don't pay taxes on the time spent on your own projects.

There is no alternate I've cost, as the time would usually have been spent watching television if not doing these projects.

> the value for “SaaS apps” without clear monthly costs should have always been under scrutiny.

It should have been, but the number of people qualified to offer proper scrutiny has been low, and those people have largely been occupied with bigger things. Or they were making those apps and had a conflict of interest.

The point is that now that vibe coding is at a level where it can identify and put together off-the-shelf components, and there are all these end users that don't really care about standardization (it's not like their SaaS products used open, interoperable standards in the first place), the ability to compete with those offerings has exploded.

> I can’t reimplement it in $30 of tokens or $30 of my time.

Probably not.

I also paid for FreeFileSync (the donation version) instead of rolling my own local backups (across drives), as well as MobaXTerm because I really like their UI/UX and so on. Software that others have developed and supported for multiple years, which has been already tested by a lot of folks thoroughly across their usecases is probably a good bet, doubly so if you can buy it (or I guess choose to support the devs) instead of renting it, the difference being that in the latter case you're not in control.

At the same time, 30 USD gets you about (assuming 85 input and 15 output split, which approximately matches my stats across months):

  * Gemini 3 Pro:  8.57M tokens (7.29M input, 1.29M output)
  * GPT 5.2:       8.36M tokens (7.11M input, 1.25M output)
  * Sonnet 4.5:    6.25M tokens (5.31M input, 0.94M output)

(actual figures would change with the input/output proportion, it matters a lot, and also any caching)

Not really enough to build serious software, but definitely quite the bit of help along the way!

Or if you go with subscriptions, it can vary even more, even if will cap how much you can do per day.

For example, if you pay 50 USD for Cerebras Code, you get 24M tokens per day, so that'd be close to 730M tokens per month. They're running GLM 4.7 which isn't SOTA in my experience, but is somewhere around Sonnet 4 and therefore actually quite capable: https://z.ai/blog/glm-4.7 (my experience might not match the benchmarks, but either way it can be good enough for most stuff out there)

For a decent percentage of software development, maybe where you want a feature nobody else out there has, AI can help you get rid of enough friction and lend enough help along the way, to maybe make it worthwhile. The caveat there might be that you have to treat the expense of your own time as something you do for the enjoyment of it (building something, or the delayed gratification of benefitting from using the software).

I probably didn't market it enough but I specifically made an iOS game last year to be premium, $2.99, as a one time purchase to try and get around the obsession with subscription and freemium/ad-supported models but pretty much didn't get any more than a handful of sales.

At least for games I think it's much too late for the one time purchase model unless you're part of a pro studio making relatively big games.

One only compete against his own costs.

If you need $1M/y in subscriptions to build your software, you'll be outcompete by solos who needs $60k/y and don't care about the 100% churn of a one-time fee.

This is simply market optimization when the marginal cost of producing the good falls.

> First of all, I’m skeptical about these being free. Time isn’t free, and the tokens to make these projects certainly weren’t free.

Yes, but it's almost one time payment. Your own personal use case is usually narrow enough, and you don't need to support different OS/browsers. You can vibe code it and just forget the fact it's coded.

Actually it's the best use case for vibe coding (the strict meaning of this word) - when you don't plan to maintain the codebase anyway.

It's the app "stores" that encourage and push for that.

You pay less tax to them when you do subscriptions rather than one time payments, if I recall especially with Apple Store (something like 30% first year, 15% the second year of subscription).

This is why 120$ over 10 years (1$/month) is more profitable to companies than 120$ in a shot.

how do you feel about licensing where you pay once, get the software, and have access to updates for one year?

if you want future updates, you pay for another year of updates (discounted, of course, for loyalty).

or is it more compelling to just have one clean, flat, lifetime rate?

hopefully this at least bring us to pay to own software instead of subscriptions

Almost all software “subscriptions” are a complete scam.

I like to say "my code is 200% vibe-coded; the tricky bit is figuring out which 100% to keep".

Decisions matter, both technical and product ones. LLMs don't make as good technical or product decisions as I would, and the way I work with them tries to maximize my strengths and the LLM's strengths. I don't know if I succeed, but it's better than "make me an app like X" as a prompt.

> I think people will start valuing good software a lot more.

How will people determine what is good software and what is not? Even experienced engineers can't tell just by looking at the final product.

Some of the most solid rock-solid applications I see were built years ago and still look primitive (native Windows 7 controls, etc). Many of the worst, bug-infested anti-user software looks slick and modern.

> Claude code can deliver the first 90%, but we all know it is the last 90% that differentiates.

My experience with trying to complete that last 10% of a CC generated project is that it's all very alien looking; very uncanny-valley vibes, and I have serious velocity issues because of the lack of coherence.

> Building all the software you use yourself, whether by hand or by vibe coding, cuts you off from the world.

No one is doing that. In foreseeable future I don't see people making their own OSs, browsers and drivers. Workplaces never ditched Offices and Windows for the open source counterparts and they are certainly not going to do that for vibe coded solutions.

You can rest assured.

Making your own software is a good way to escape enshittification and influence.

I switched from Spotify to buying MP3s and using my own audio client, because I'm fed up of a company telling me which music I should listen to every single time I open the app. It costs more, but I own the music and I escape the constant redesigns, price increases and influential behaviour.

Most apps are very simple and there isn't too much to learn, especially if you're building it to scale to a userbase of yourself. I can't see the need for a ton of CRUD apps which demand subscription fees personally. If you build them yourself, you get to keep your own data, build it out the way you want it, keep it that way, and use computers as a person using a tool as opposed to a customer buying a product.

>Claude code can deliver the first 90%, but we all know it is the last 90% that differentiates.

So most software is 180% of 100%? :p

Opensource has been available since before the internet. What is `git clone ... make install` if not "vibe coding"

Your entire post is self selection bias and survivorship bias.

SWE field is one of the most cognitive dissonant social groups; cries foul at the slightest whiff their free speech and agency is being put upon; seeks to reduce blockers to their productivity, fewer PMs! Less management!

Now complains about users using their machines without having to block on an SWE.

Insert that quote about how someone will not see the obvious if their paycheck relies on them ignoring the obvious.

Here come LLMs and all they can accomplish with a few arithmetical rules instead of the arbitrary semantics of an SWE; watch as SWEs block social evolution away from disrupting software engineers.

As an example; "protected memory", among many other individual software problems, is an access control problem mired in old semantics relative to OS monoliths.

Didn’t see you all halting as you decimated travel agent jobs, retail jobs, etc etc. Technology advancement must now stand still after centuries of evolution? The self selection bias is as obvious as Trump's.

"Transportation, like software, is accumulated knowledge. The horse embodied centuries of breeding, training, and hard-won understanding about terrain, endurance, and failure. People learned from the horses they rode. Travel improved through incremental refinement, generation after generation. The automobile didn’t appear in a vacuum.

Building all your transportation yourself—whether by breeding horses or assembling a Model T—cuts you off from that accumulated experience. You lose the benefits of thousands of hours spent by others thinking carefully about the same problems.

I have no objection to Model Ts for personal use, but I wouldn’t be one-tenth the traveler I am without constant exposure to well-bred horses.

Some worry cars make horses obsolete—who needs breeders if anyone can buy an engine? I’m more optimistic. As cars proliferate, people will value good horses more. A Model T gets you the first 90%; it’s the last 90%—judgment, robustness, and adaptability—that differentiates."

There is probably a huge chunk of people who only need a slither of the features of a SaaS but are paying for everything they don't need.

If your particular use of a SaaS is not susceptible to security issues (for example you can use it on your local laptop) then a slither of features that are insecure is exactly the thing for you.

Not everyone is going to replace SaaS with half-baked personal implementations, especially the big companies that most SaaS are aimed at, but it will gnaw out some of the long tail of SaaS subscription revenue for sure.

“You too can implement a slither of the features you need right now in an insecure form without hosting, support, maintenance or future development.”

Intuit does just that and charges north of $100 per month.

Insecure? What do you think is more secure, trusting a third-party SaaS with your data or processing it on your own server?

This seems like an incredibly defensive take for vibe coding personal apps.

Replacing some subscription app like Any.do, Google Calendar, fitness/diet tracking or basically any other CRUD-centric app, needn't be insecure, and a semi-competent developer can easily host it, continue further development (with or without vibe coding) and secure it. There's huge benefit for software developers that do find themselves using many of these apps with active subscriptions to make their own, tailored for themselves, and cut down their spending.

Yes, when it comes to commercialising such software, more work needs to be done (mostly in support and marketing), but for personal use it's fine. The author explicitly states they don't trust vibe coding enough to turn these into products.

The writing is hardly on the wall for all these companies which make little todo list apps and calendars. The vast majority of people could get a LLM to produce an alternative but the lacking they have in basic software engineering would eventually be a hurdle to further development. Most people will continue spending $1.00/month here, and $2.99/month there. There's no reason why software engineers need to do that anymore, unless paying this gives them access to some sort of content repository (music, books) or actual advanced software.

> This reminds me of the people who think they can build docsend in a weekend.

The author is very clear that that's not what they are trying to achieve:

"Now, don’t get me wrong, Jabber is not “production quality.” I would never sell it as a product or even recommend it to other people, but it does what I needed from Wispr Flow, and it does exactly the way I want it to."

You over-estimate quality of most SaaS products

> This reminds me of the people who think they can build [some commercial app] in a weekend. No, you cannot.

If the article was claiming that you could, you might have a point.

> You can build a wee throwaway app with some of the features of [some commercial app].

Which is precisely and explicitly what the author has done.

A big pricing problem in software is that people try to sell products as-if you'd use all the features, but people rarely have any interest in most of it.

There are whole products that succeed by simply being less capable, but cheaper, variations of some other product. This is most obvious in the art space, where you can visually see the reduction in tools and menu items.

This people often don't want support, maintenance, or future development. Their needs have been met.

What you say isn't different from what the blog post says: he makes it clear that he wouldn't trust the results to be production-ready and he wouldn't sell nor recommend his vibecoded stuff to others. The only claim is that those are good enough to cover his specific use case, no more and no less.

Being able to self-host is a plus for me. And being able to support myself avoids being told "no" for a feature I want.

Reminds me of a guy I know who wants to vibe code all his company tools, his latest target was Ashby

Lots of people threw small apps on their Github accounts for their own convenience in having a backup, and in case other people might be interested, but realistically never expected to get one more user. I have several scripts, Chrome extensions, and the like in my Github that fit that description. The difference is that coding agents let you write a one-user app at a much larger scale than before.

> In the pre-LLM days people with resolve to make 1-user version were likely to polish it for 100-users and somewhat likely to get it to a stable place when it can satisfy thousands of user

And then put it on an app store and put all the vital features behind $15/mo subscription.

Which is totally justified! I understand the time and energy needed to get a product polished for 10,000 users. But thanks, I will take my vibe coded one.

Contrastingly, Minimal (minimal.app) is a markdown notes app made by me for me (for one person!) improved to support 100 thoughtful writers, improved again to support thousands, then tens of thousands… now 6 years later I continue to ship meaningful updates (OS parity, new features, better designs for existing features, greater stability and performance, and occasionally entirely new patterns).

What made the difference? For one thing, I know better than to ignore the future. A small success in 2020 was like a seed planted amidst an infinite future, and I knew to water the seed. Secondly, I continue prioritize this fulcrum between complexity and utility, where the app gets better by getting simpler wherever possible (most people neglect this fulcrum as not offering much “business opportunity,” failing to realize it is the foundation of all business opportunities). Finally, I just love it, and appreciate that others love it too.

(For those interested, you’re welcome to join the beta at minimal.app/#beta on Apple devices and contribute to the roadmap.)

i mean, sure. but the point is, you yourself are often a solo user of these little productivity apps. if you're not using team-based features then a lot of these things aren't worth paying for.

Unless your name is “Legion”, you’re a single user, not a 10-thousand.

That’s what these “time is money” people don’t get: It’s only opportunity cost if you would otherwise be working. Lets say I make $200/hr on my day job. If I choose to spend 4 hours in the evening writing an app, it’s not costing me $800 because I am not doing it instead of working. I would otherwise be cleaning up the garage or walking the dog or something.

Most people’s free time is not worth anything monetary. Sure, there is non monetary value in chilling out and spending time with family, but if I spend a few hours making an app for myself, then I got something for free.

Get a better hourly wage. About an hour of my month pays for all of my entertainment and software subscriptions. Another couple of hours pay for a year of iPhone. Coffee? Another hour per month maybe? We are worlds apart in our arithmetic and I don't even earn that much.

If people enjoy spending their unpaid hours building clones of paid software that's fine, but it's fine because they enjoy it. It's not minimally worth it. The time I waste on YouTube and the news etc etc is sorely needed and enjoyed downtime. If someone has enough energy to build instead of vegetating, more power to them. I prefer to save my energy for the stuff I value. (Which is actual work, helping family and games)

EDIT: another thing to consider is that each hour I spend fully pursuing my occupation pays me an hourly wage but also pays me in career growth. This compounds massively over time in higher and higher wages. Building throwaway apps generally does not. Why would I waste energy on work that doesn't compound? I'm all for serendipity but not as a financial argument.

> But as the models get better and the quality of the output will match the quality of the established SaaS but tailor the whole thing to a single user with the ability to make any change they can imagine within minutes, and perhaps deploy to Hetzner and whatnot where they could host all of those apps for a single $5 instead, the exodus will accelerate.

I do think you're vastly overestimating people's ability to write software, even with LLMs, and use it in production. The average computer user does not even use a computer as their primary computing device, they use a phone. The barrier to going from idea to phone app on iPhone or Android is relatively high.

Todo list apps, habit trackers, and the like are almost a special snowflake breed. Almost everyone has some different cross-section of needs they care about, and no app is perfect for each individual. So it's natural to say "is there something that matches what I want?" and then reach for tools to make that. The world is your oyster for todo list apps. Of course, the real issue comes from data sovereignty, trust, quality, things like that. When Apple launches a new device or a new iOS feature people want, you get to see which apps will actually implement the new features or which stagnate. They're a natural avenue for vibe coding since they're so particular.

Exactly! It’s like I saw you selling pre-cut fruit for $7 so I decided to cut my own fruit every week.

Not for long. Tools to create tools will get more popular. My 70 year old mother can login to Replit and vibe code anything (and has thankfully stopped asking me to help her). We’re close to something like that for phone apps and then it’s game over for us devs.

Part of the AI hype is that normies can build things without learning to code. In which case, if AI is as good as some expect, wouldn't that kill all software products? What's stopping me from asking an AGI to oneshot me a photoshop clone?

I think it's more likely the case that AI is not going to be as disruptive as they think.

Linux is free, but it doesn't come bundled with hardware that might not work with it.

What about be people that search and use existing open source alternatives?

Linux is free, but you pay for it with your time.

And calling Windows and MacOS a tax is a complete misunderstanding of what a tax actually is.

Yeah, I was confused by that as well. Typora is sold as a perpetual license for 3 devices at $15. I don't understand why their friend would be tired of paying for it.

My first thought as well, there is (or was) also Cisco Jabber which I wouldn't touch with a ten feet pole. It's generally a good idea to Google the name of the software you're about to publish online at least once.

I had never written an iOS app until a couple months ago and was initially very put off when I hit the same wall. The alternative is to host on a cheap VPS and find some way to prevent other people from using your app. When you cost it out, it's close enough to the 100 bucks a year for the Apple account. However, the kicker for me is the side loading process. Way too much headache compared to a deploy script that has my changes running nearly instantly.

Are you using features that can't be replicated with a PWA?

this is the primary reason i've never even considered buying an iphone.

I had to download file attachments from a specific niche web forum that's behind login. I could've went looking for a browser plugin or a 3rd party tool to do it.

Once again, it took me about an hour while watching my shows to get a custom one made.

The first version operated by me downloading the pages one by one to a directory, the Python app parsed the html, downloaded the files and renamed according to thread name.

After a few iterations the tool just grabs a cookies.txt file exported from Firefox and can take any thread URL, browse through it, skipping existing files and determining if everything is already downloaded

I could easily have it just watch a set of threads for new content and download automatically, but the current system is fine =)

What I fear is a pollution of the open source space with tons of tailored apps that have a lot of overlap, but none of them get meaningful contributions because the maintainer will most likely respond with wontfix to almost everything (if they respond at all).

Was reminiscing about the early iOS App Store days when many apps were free and often hobby projects. Some hooked up google ads to make a nice easy profit if they stumbled on a particularly good early app idea. I don't really find apps like that anymore, or at least they don't really get shared the same way. Maybe this is a return to that in a sense.

I also don't think any particular idea is off limits for making a profit, if you do something and you do it well, you can charge a fee. But if the free hobby version is better then you best find a way to justify the price.

The subscription craze is getting worse where often the features I need are locked behind a recurring fee costing hundreds to thousands of dollars over its useful lifetime, or are only available in 'enterprise' versions where the sales people laugh me off for not having $30k to spend and won't even let me trial the software (because inevitably I'll just RE it and make a crack)

The most recent example is I wanted a simple home security system with presence detection and a private control panel, none of the free ones hit my requirements, or require custom hardware, or lock you into a cloud, or assume you can spin-up some containers - or are super enterprise grade stuff.

Within about 2 days I had an android app for my tablet, Google FMDN integration, fingerprinting of my other devices, all controllable via Telegram from any of my phones with alerts that "just work" wherever I am and include an inline gif snapshot.

What I wanted didn't really exist as any individual product, so I absolutely see the appeal of DIY vibe-coded stuff, and a day of the build time was optimizing the OpenGL motion-detection pipeline with shaders & DMA which in itself was good to learn about.

Most users expect everything to be cloud these days. In the cross-stitching community (which is mostly older non-technical folk), the amount of people that get mad every day because the most popular app is local-only, is phenomenal. What do you MEAN they smashed their device, bought a new one, and all their WIP projects aren't there anymore?

The likely hard truth: 90% of software 'itself' will be easily replaceable, especially indie software. The reason why Shopify, Jira, TurboTax, etc are hard to replace is due to most of the HARD work being OUTSIDE software- the legal work for being a payment processor, legal insurance, special client relationships that only salesmen can foster, high market TRUST requirements, legal COMPLIANCE (HIPAA), etc etc. I'm fairly convinced that AI coding is going to force most programmers to move into becoming experts in specific business hard problems.

This feels like a far better reason to code your own; when your use case is just a bit too niche to ever be prioritized but you otherwise need a similar tool.

[dead]

Depending on how you read the owner of an app subscription (the provider or the subscriber) maybe 'My' is better.

I think author has a point when he didn’t needed all those extra features.

But then they did made a bad choice for paying for loom. They could have just learned (or used llm) to make a bash script to use ffmpeg for capturing screen to a file. Or OBS is a pretty good solution as well. And a ton others

Loom does also have a trim and edit after recording feature, I use it all the time

> you'll slowly get dependent on things that will eventually break in ways you will have no capacity to fix

If the commercial provider charging you $10 a month breaks it, you also have no capacity to fix it.

Your options are: send them an email, or unsubscribe and use something else.

Why wouldn't I be able to fix these things? If I managed to build a thing from scratch (with Opus 4.5), I don't see why I wouldn't be able to fix it and maintain it in the future (maybe with Opus 4.7 or even better future models?).

Why would they "eventually break"?

In what situation would a simple script or helper app just suddenly rot away and stop working?

Of course it's POSSIBLE to vibe together a massive monstrosity of an everything-app, but that's not what the author is doing here (nor me).

If you build enough things, you will also gain the experience to fix those things

I agree with your point on surviving the market, but I also suspect vibe coding give rise to lemon [1] projects that only intend to get quick money and don't care about recurring revenue.

My wife was preparing for a specific exam and found an AI-powered mock exam app. The trial version was polished, but after she paid for full access she realized most contents are of low quality and some basic functionalities are broken. I imagine with LLM one might easily create such lemon products in infinite niche markets even without much domain knowledge, scam out some money from new users, and care not about survival.

[1] As in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemon_(automobile)

can you share which paid webapp you were using and maybe a link to your version's github?

I think it depends on the project size and how much your time is worth. Vibe coding might be able to save some time, depending on how well it can solve the problem without needing correction.

So basically steal code from OSS, oh no I meant "get inspired by" OSS code without actually contributing anything. This is just gross as a developer imo.

> which can be as low as $20 per month for a ChatGPT Plus subscription

That's way too much money. The opencode default models are free

Also you dont need the architecture to scale to millions of users. So it can be a bit more rough and OK to be inefficient.

"Death knell" is, I think, putting too fine a point on it.

At the same time, Apple better wake up as the quality of the App Store (such as it is) is about to get much, much worse as a flood of vibe-coded apps make it onto the store. These will likely crap out in spectacular ways and, as I say, bring user's experience with the App Store in general way down.

It's like when Amazon intermingled drop-ship sellers on their platform.

(Oh well, not my problem.)

I agree that spending money on claude code is stupid. But the default opencode models are free. I used one last night to replace the ad-filled alarm clock android app I use with a 90% ai written one.

Seconded, I would be interested in knowing people's workflows + experiences developing MacOS and iOS apps with claude, etc.

From the repo here, it looks like its just using swift command line tools, which might just work well enough with cursor/vscode/etc. for small projects. You won't have Xcode's other features but maybe thats fine for an agentic-first development workflow.

Not OP, but I use Xcode with Claude Pro and it is going fairly well. I also am creating my own personal-use apps instead of paying for monthly subscriptions. I know a bit of Swift, and had been trying to learn it while also using LLMs. At this point, I've decided to also not make these real projects and just vibe-code exactly what I want.

I've been using Cursor with the Swift Extension. Works really nicely, but sometimes I switch to Xcode to do some tasks such as testing that it works to build.

I think it's a question of how polished the process is. Imagine a new fully functional app popping up in your phone after a single prompt. Then, imagine you can edit this app while you are using it by saying what you wish it should do.

There might be a lot of people interested in all kinds of small apps for their particular hobbies, interests, jobs, etc

I doubt LLM-generated software is going to replace more traditional software any time soon, especially when accuracy is pretty important (such as accounting). One thing I learned from years as a PM in a very data-centric organization is understanding data, how it is generated/stored/cut/etc. is very important to getting accurate results.

Where I could see some really interesting results is the marriage of the two. For example, you have a solid data structure that an LLM can generate infinite custom views from.

You can pivot your knowledge into building bespoke tools for the same people, just a LOT faster.

The recommendation thing is a nice benchmark, but if you're building hyper-specific tools - why would people recommend them to anyone? If you build a tool for an accountant that does some very niche thing only they're bothered by, why would they recommend to the analyst or receptionist in the company?

Yeah, a little bespoke editor is exactly the kind of thing I'd've been happy to fork over a one-time cost for, but never a subscription. Interesting!

Yes, the options presented were overpay for something or roll your own. Could you not try to find a better alternative first?

It was $99 for a specific version which (maybe) got updates. If you wanted the next version, it was another $99 (or maybe it was $129 now, or $149...).

Some software essentially maintains this model, and I think it's fine. If something is going to charge monthly I expect it to either be much cheaper, or have some web service that they need to keep up.

yeah someone needs to vibe code all the adobe products ;)

I think it's happening, some of them are even making it to the front page of HN, like the "I built 50 calculators" a few days ago. I'm still working to release some of the things I've built over the last month:

- A nice little single-file web "random slideshow" to replace an aging one I bought. - A fairly feature-complete read-only SQL console. - A development SMTP server (like Mailhog) https://github.com/linsomniac/smtphotel - A work status dashboard that I'll probably release once I have run it a bit longer. - A fairly extensive Docusign-like webapp. - A retrospective meeting runner. - A cron "swiss army knife" helper. - A "social calorie tracker" (I'm unhappy with the existing ones out there).

These are all things I've vibecoded in the last month, and are more than I could have coded in my spare time in 6 months or more.

For me, the renaissance is here.

The incentive for sending in patches was that you needed to fix a bug in software you were using for your own use case, so you might as well send the authors the patch, and they'd keep maintaining it all for you. But if you can vibe-code your own solution, you don't need to use somebody else's software, so the patch doesn't get made, much less submitted.

The other thing is, LLMs tend to generate terrible code that pisses off open-source maintainers. So I'm not sure even LLM-made patches will make it into open source much.

This might be the death of traditional open source. Vibe-coded-only open source may be the next generation. Which I'm fine with, as long as we can start regulating software, so that vibe-coded tools are banned for safety/privacy uses unless they follow a software building code.

> There's only 50 weekends in a year.

That's sad for you. Do you spend the other two weekends dead for tax purposes?

> automatically sends the email you've almost certainly seen that asks you to rate something you

Just FYI, most of us maintain blacklists of sellers who do that and would never give business to one again, even if it requires paying more. If I bought something from you, that is not permission to email me anything other than a tracking number. Ever. If i like it -- i'll review it mysef. If i dislike it -- i'll email you. Note the direction of comms here.

Making you click a button per-order was perhaps Amazon's way to add friction to this -- to avoid poor users being spammed with endless review requests. I am sad that someone automated the friction away. I hope that one day amazon starts charging sellers a nontrivial fee per such email sent.

This is what confused me too. Why are people paying for these types of things? They don't need vibe coding, they need a search engine. Ironically I'm confident the LLMs could find them a free version of what they're looking for. But that's the problem with them, right? They do what you ask and don't question if there's a better way

For the same reason that there are already lots of markdown editors out there. Why didn't the they all use the first one that came out?

Markdown editors specifically? I think the general idea is people are paying dozens of dollars a month for all kinds of crap that used to be one-time purchase. And some people, fed up, are pushing back.

Most small businesses don’t need the complexity of Salesforce and people use Netflix for the content, not the software.

I don’t understand why Netflix needs 3500 engineers. They built what needed to be built already.

Zapier also has a free product which works well - https://zapier.com/zappy

It's interesting, because a few years ago I would have put this strictly under the "not invented here" fallacy, where we'd now be stuck maintaining another project for the foreseeable future. I used to press pretty hard to avoid it.

Now I wonder if the maintenance cost for this type of internal system has gone down to a level where that is no longer an issue.

We're currently paying through the nose for a shitty intranet solution that could've been just hugo with a markdown editor.

Or a vibe-coded simple website.

But "designed and implemented company-wide intranet" looks good in someone's CV so here we are.

As a non iOS user wouldn't be the hard part getting it on the phone? The last time I checked you would still need apple hardware and 100$ per year for the developer license or something like that.

I'm currently assisting three very non-programmer people in-house who did just this.

Their problem is solved, now it's up to me to update the internal guidelines and agent instructions so that the code is at least semi-decent.

None of these are going to "production", they all live on local company controlled laptops and only one of them might access an external API automatically later this spring.

But each of them takes hours of manual work and does it in minutes.

With the current tech, I agree this will still be pretty niche. I'm vibe-coding my own iOS apps, and it still needs a decent understanding of the tech and a willingness to put up with a lot of rough edges.

However, with a proper framework (e.g., a very opinionated design system, the ability to choose from some pre-designed structures/flows, etc.) I could very much see ad hoc creation of software becoming more widespread.

I assume the learning curve will get shallower over time. Onboarding is better than ever and will only improve. Lots of 70 and 80 year olds on Facebook now, and future Facebooks will verbally handhold you as you log on. "Press the red button that I just highlighted... great job!" etc.

Personally I hope we land on "widget" although I'd settle for "thingamabob"

A few of the tool choices in the article seemed uninformed though, e.g. for markdown editing you have perfectly functional (and open!) tools that are free and powerful with good UX.

Only assuming a sufficient number of your customers is happy and capable to vibe-code a product for their set of the requirements that your product solves.

$20 claude code subscription for a month can replace the $15 + $10 for each month. How is that 3x more espensive? The user just saved $280 per year, on just two subscriptions alone.

Hardly doubt that this was the 'most waste of ones time'. For one, it's not like most of us can decide to "work" for 3-5 hours on a Saturday and get any money. I play games on my pc while claude codes for me. I alt tab each few minutes and see if it needs any input. Then I can (not that I do it), read and perhaps learn from the code.

Target undeserved businesses with niche problems that have traditionally been ignored by tech companies because those markets have always been considered "too small" to be worthwhile.

I don't think it is "a stigma against something that was built assisted by an LLM." I think the author is coming at it in the same way I do with some similar tools: "this is good enough for me, I am the end user, and I don't have the time or desire to iron out a bunch of edge cases or make things for more than one user."

I am rewriting my website. I was using a converted Pelican template. I started the rewrite using variables similar to the template, then about halfway through, I realized, "this is dumb. I am the only user. I care about nobody else. I can hardcode nearly all of this, and if I want a change, change the hardcoded name." An example of this was various social media names.

I have scripts that convert color themes for applications from more popular themes to a theme I particularly like. I hard-coded the input colors and output colors. I could have made a config file, etc, but, that adds complexity and, more importantly *I do not care about other users.*

There is a huge leap between "good enough for me to use for exactly my use case" and release or sell as a product.

>In a world where everyone can cook, why would anybody buy prepared food?

I would guess for convenience and saving time. While vibe-coding might be faster, you still have to "do it". As in, think about what you want your software to do, write out or dictate your prompts, test that it works etc. That takes time (might be less time than writing it out by hand but it's still a non-zero amount of time).