4 ms·

Enabling more people to make cool things themselves isn't necessarily a bad thing.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
jsheard 2y ago
It's all fun and games until you realize the cool thing you made is locked into an overpriced cloud stack that will bleed you dry. "Vibe coders" seem to invariably end up offloading as much heavy lifting as possible to ultra-expensive PaaS/SaaS vendors, and those vendors are encouraging it (e.g. Vercel v0).
- gkoberger 2y ago
  Okay? Let's say it's $200/mo or something for a moderately popular app. An engineer starts at $200/hr, so you're still saving a ton. With Vercel/Netlify, you're paying for ease of use. For a lot of people, that tradeoff is worth it. Not everything can be free.
  - inertiatic 2y ago
    >An engineer starts at $200/hr Starts?!
    - hoseyor 2y ago
      I’m assuming that’s the fully burdened rate, i.e., salary, benefits, taxes, overhead, profit, etc that employees never see, even though they should. I remember getting a sheet from an employer early in my career that fully broke down the cost of benefits and taxes and showed me the full cost of just my employment, not including overhead, profit, etc. it was rather eye opening because although I kid of knew it from accounting and finance, it never really impacted me quite as much before seeing the numbers.
      - hirako2000 2y ago
        If the system didn't structure it that way, everyone would know the numbers and protest. As it is people pay up for the most part, they even defend the concept of taxing, supposedly going to public services.
  - SomeoneOnTheWeb 2y ago
    Starts? With 40h/week, that's basically a $400k annual salary. This is certainly not the start price of an engineer.
    - gkoberger 2y ago
      If you hire someone full time, you can do the math that way. But the market rate for a freelance midlevel US-based engineer would be about double per hour what you'd pay a full-time employee of the same level, to account for taxes/PTO/health care/etc.
      - mixmastamyk 2y ago
        Would be happy to find something at half that, but there’s no work right now. Lots of ghost jobs and even upwork has twenty+ applicants fighting over $30/hr scraps.
  - mhitza 2y ago
    Is that 200 a made up number? https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/computer-programmer/salary https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/computer-programm... Do you have a better source for your number. As far as cost, 200/month is nothing, but those are not the numbers we hear about when things spiral out of controll due to a ddos or sudden surge in popularity.
    - anxman 2y ago
      We serve thousands of customers off Supabase for $250/month including PITR. It’s a STEAL. Technical support is also responsive and knowledgeable. Outside of the auth SSR upgrade, it’s technically also been great to work with. Supabase is some of the best value we get from any vendor.
- jmathai 2y ago
  It's the right trade-off, IMO. Most projects won't succeed and the ones that do can be refactored - by real engineers if needed.
  - sroussey 2y ago
    Agreed. And you can take a lot of the supabase code and try and host yourself if you get there.
  - jmtulloss 2y ago
    I’m a “real engineer” and I don’t want to do all that until I have to.
    - tptacek 2y ago
      As a "real engineer" you'd likely use LLMs differently. I save my conversations, have chats and codebase exegesis summarized into .txt files, and constantly refactor LLM output. I have an increasingly reliable sense of when to dip in and write things myself and when to let the LLM rip. My LLM-assisted code is better than my hand-written code; how could it not be? I'd have to be committing raw LLM output without even reading it to end up somewhere worse. If I did that, how much of a "real engineer" would I be? All this is to say: even if all progress on AI halted today, it would remain the case that, after the Internet, LLMs are the most impactful thing to happen to software development in my career. It would be weird if companies like Supabase weren't thinking about them in their product plans.
      - jmtulloss 1y ago
        Yeah I think it depends on what I’m doing. For “real work” done by a “real engineer”, I approach it almost exactly as you say. For side projects/personal software that I most likely would have never started pre-llms? I’ll just go full vibe code and see how far I get. Sometimes I have to just delete it, but sometimes it works. That’s cool.
      - kasey_junk 1y ago
        Have you found any good resources on how to get a good process going? That would be an interesting read. I have two main issues, first the tooling is changing so rapidly that as I start to hone in on a process it changes out from under me. The second is verifying the output. I’m at like 90% success rate on getting code generated correctly (if not always faster than I could do it) but boy does that final 10% bite when I don’t notice. An aside, I think the cloud ought to make your (perhaps especially your) list. At least for me that changed the whole economy of building new software enterprises.
- ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
  Honestly I love that vercel and Superbase and these companies are making enormous amounts of money by only targeting JavaScript developers who have such a phobia of doing actual development work that they're willing to pay 10 times, 20 times the price for infrastructure to actually host their apps. They are not real developers and it's great to see them being squeezed and I'm glad that companies are making them pay through the nose and locking them in. They should suffer and face the consequences of their lack of skill.
  - mathgeek 2y ago
    Let’s not raise ourselves up by saying that other developers are no true Scotsmen based on what language they prefer.
  - jim201 2y ago
    “Real developer” label or not, it is now easier than ever to dream up, build, and ship an app. And at the end of the day, that’s all that matters—-what you ship. Just seems incredibly gatekeepy to devalue someone’s work based on the tools they used to build their product. Yes, “vibecoding” still has issues (and likely will for the forseeable future). I’m sure the next decade will be an absolute boon for security researchers working with new companies. But you shouldn’t dismiss people based on their use of these tools. And other commenters are right that these expensive infra tools can be replaced later when the idea has actually been validated.
- serial_dev 2y ago
  I don’t think it happens because the “vibe coders” are necessarily clueless, it can very much be a calculated risk or tradeoff. Based on the “vibe coders” crowd I see on X, they are a superset of indie hackers with lower barrier to entry when it comes to coding skills and less patience for mediocre success. They seem to have the “go big or go home” mindset. As long as they have a popular product, they don’t mind forking over some of their profit to OpenAI or a hosting provider. None of the Ghibli generator app creators complained about paying OpenAI… If the product is not popular, no outrageous costs, and the product will be abandoned anyway very fast.
- adolph 2y ago
  > the cool thing you made is locked into an overpriced cloud stack that will bleed you dry Not necessarily applicable to vibing with Supabase specifically, right? There are several ways to host Supabase on your own computer, server, or cloud. https://supabase.com/docs/guides/self-hosting https://supabase.com/docs/guides/self-hosting
- cab11150904 2y ago
  I think the real "vibe coders" in the end will be people like me. Making neat little personal projects that don't use many resources and can be relatively insecure because they don't matter much. I made wannawatchsomething.com with no knowledge of how it works and full knowledge that it's insecure and dumb. It still does what I want and I couldn't have done it a year ago so it's a net win.
- whstl 2y ago
  PostgREST is open source, and so is the rest of Supabase. Migrating from it is not that hard so far. I did it on an afternoon for a customer. Also a couple friends are running the open source version in their own containers. Maybe there are (or will be) cloud only features, but for the basic service there isn’t as much lock-in as something like AWS.
- cpursley 2y ago
  None of these are expensive if they help you ship products that solve problems that customers are willing to pay for.
- dvt 2y ago
  Heroku is the OG "vibe coding" platform and, honestly, it was awesome. The first platform where you could deploy with one CLI command, sure it was expensive, but for years it was my favorite place to prototype or MVP stuff.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

It's all fun and games until you realize the cool thing you made is locked into an overpriced cloud stack that will bleed you dry. "Vibe coders" seem to invariably end up offloading as much heavy lifting as possible to ultra-expensive PaaS/SaaS vendors, and those vendors are encouraging it (e.g. Vercel v0).

gkoberger 2y ago
Okay? Let's say it's $200/mo or something for a moderately popular app. An engineer starts at $200/hr, so you're still saving a ton. With Vercel/Netlify, you're paying for ease of use. For a lot of people, that tradeoff is worth it. Not everything can be free.
- inertiatic 2y ago
  >An engineer starts at $200/hr Starts?!
  - hoseyor 2y ago
    I’m assuming that’s the fully burdened rate, i.e., salary, benefits, taxes, overhead, profit, etc that employees never see, even though they should. I remember getting a sheet from an employer early in my career that fully broke down the cost of benefits and taxes and showed me the full cost of just my employment, not including overhead, profit, etc. it was rather eye opening because although I kid of knew it from accounting and finance, it never really impacted me quite as much before seeing the numbers.
    - hirako2000 2y ago
      If the system didn't structure it that way, everyone would know the numbers and protest. As it is people pay up for the most part, they even defend the concept of taxing, supposedly going to public services.
- SomeoneOnTheWeb 2y ago
  Starts? With 40h/week, that's basically a $400k annual salary. This is certainly not the start price of an engineer.
  - gkoberger 2y ago
    If you hire someone full time, you can do the math that way. But the market rate for a freelance midlevel US-based engineer would be about double per hour what you'd pay a full-time employee of the same level, to account for taxes/PTO/health care/etc.
    - mixmastamyk 2y ago
      Would be happy to find something at half that, but there’s no work right now. Lots of ghost jobs and even upwork has twenty+ applicants fighting over $30/hr scraps.
- mhitza 2y ago
  Is that 200 a made up number? https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/computer-programmer/salary https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/computer-programm... Do you have a better source for your number. As far as cost, 200/month is nothing, but those are not the numbers we hear about when things spiral out of controll due to a ddos or sudden surge in popularity.
  - anxman 2y ago
    We serve thousands of customers off Supabase for $250/month including PITR. It’s a STEAL. Technical support is also responsive and knowledgeable. Outside of the auth SSR upgrade, it’s technically also been great to work with. Supabase is some of the best value we get from any vendor.
jmathai 2y ago
It's the right trade-off, IMO. Most projects won't succeed and the ones that do can be refactored - by real engineers if needed.
- sroussey 2y ago
  Agreed. And you can take a lot of the supabase code and try and host yourself if you get there.
- jmtulloss 2y ago
  I’m a “real engineer” and I don’t want to do all that until I have to.
  - tptacek 2y ago
    As a "real engineer" you'd likely use LLMs differently. I save my conversations, have chats and codebase exegesis summarized into .txt files, and constantly refactor LLM output. I have an increasingly reliable sense of when to dip in and write things myself and when to let the LLM rip. My LLM-assisted code is better than my hand-written code; how could it not be? I'd have to be committing raw LLM output without even reading it to end up somewhere worse. If I did that, how much of a "real engineer" would I be? All this is to say: even if all progress on AI halted today, it would remain the case that, after the Internet, LLMs are the most impactful thing to happen to software development in my career. It would be weird if companies like Supabase weren't thinking about them in their product plans.
    - jmtulloss 1y ago
      Yeah I think it depends on what I’m doing. For “real work” done by a “real engineer”, I approach it almost exactly as you say. For side projects/personal software that I most likely would have never started pre-llms? I’ll just go full vibe code and see how far I get. Sometimes I have to just delete it, but sometimes it works. That’s cool.
    - kasey_junk 1y ago
      Have you found any good resources on how to get a good process going? That would be an interesting read. I have two main issues, first the tooling is changing so rapidly that as I start to hone in on a process it changes out from under me. The second is verifying the output. I’m at like 90% success rate on getting code generated correctly (if not always faster than I could do it) but boy does that final 10% bite when I don’t notice. An aside, I think the cloud ought to make your (perhaps especially your) list. At least for me that changed the whole economy of building new software enterprises.
ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
Honestly I love that vercel and Superbase and these companies are making enormous amounts of money by only targeting JavaScript developers who have such a phobia of doing actual development work that they're willing to pay 10 times, 20 times the price for infrastructure to actually host their apps. They are not real developers and it's great to see them being squeezed and I'm glad that companies are making them pay through the nose and locking them in. They should suffer and face the consequences of their lack of skill.
- mathgeek 2y ago
  Let’s not raise ourselves up by saying that other developers are no true Scotsmen based on what language they prefer.
- jim201 2y ago
  “Real developer” label or not, it is now easier than ever to dream up, build, and ship an app. And at the end of the day, that’s all that matters—-what you ship. Just seems incredibly gatekeepy to devalue someone’s work based on the tools they used to build their product. Yes, “vibecoding” still has issues (and likely will for the forseeable future). I’m sure the next decade will be an absolute boon for security researchers working with new companies. But you shouldn’t dismiss people based on their use of these tools. And other commenters are right that these expensive infra tools can be replaced later when the idea has actually been validated.
serial_dev 2y ago
I don’t think it happens because the “vibe coders” are necessarily clueless, it can very much be a calculated risk or tradeoff. Based on the “vibe coders” crowd I see on X, they are a superset of indie hackers with lower barrier to entry when it comes to coding skills and less patience for mediocre success. They seem to have the “go big or go home” mindset. As long as they have a popular product, they don’t mind forking over some of their profit to OpenAI or a hosting provider. None of the Ghibli generator app creators complained about paying OpenAI… If the product is not popular, no outrageous costs, and the product will be abandoned anyway very fast.
adolph 2y ago
> the cool thing you made is locked into an overpriced cloud stack that will bleed you dry Not necessarily applicable to vibing with Supabase specifically, right? There are several ways to host Supabase on your own computer, server, or cloud. https://supabase.com/docs/guides/self-hosting https://supabase.com/docs/guides/self-hosting
cab11150904 2y ago
I think the real "vibe coders" in the end will be people like me. Making neat little personal projects that don't use many resources and can be relatively insecure because they don't matter much. I made wannawatchsomething.com with no knowledge of how it works and full knowledge that it's insecure and dumb. It still does what I want and I couldn't have done it a year ago so it's a net win.
whstl 2y ago
PostgREST is open source, and so is the rest of Supabase. Migrating from it is not that hard so far. I did it on an afternoon for a customer. Also a couple friends are running the open source version in their own containers. Maybe there are (or will be) cloud only features, but for the basic service there isn’t as much lock-in as something like AWS.
cpursley 2y ago
None of these are expensive if they help you ship products that solve problems that customers are willing to pay for.
dvt 2y ago
Heroku is the OG "vibe coding" platform and, honestly, it was awesome. The first platform where you could deploy with one CLI command, sure it was expensive, but for years it was my favorite place to prototype or MVP stuff.