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This is a massive business opportunity for whoever owns the market. I have a friend who owns a small/medium sized marketing firm. They typically manage social

This is a massive business opportunity for whoever owns the market. I have a friend who owns a small/medium sized marketing firm. They typically manage social media and advertising for local businesses (butchers, plumbers, NPOs, etc.). A major cost center for them is dev. They can generally handle developing assets (images, videos, text copy) and publishing them (Facebook, YouTube, Instagram) but if they need any kind of interactivity (even basic forms or CRM-like stuff) they used to hire programmers. This friend is now "vibe coding" the simple interactivity that previously they had to outsource. In the last few months he has pitched, won and crucially delivered simple apps for a few clients. We're not talking complex web apps, it's mostly CRUD forms and basic workflows, the kind you see people go on about using n8n on Twitter. He's talking to me these days about React, Tailwind, DNS and all of that stuff. His clients don't know, or care, how he delivers. The local butcher doesn't know about "best practices" or whatever. He just cares that if someone signs up for his newsletter that he gets a notification and that person gets his weekly meat deals email. His firm is picking up more and more complex projects like these and saving a huge amount on costs. Turn-key services that enable guys like him are going to reap the rewards.

stopachka 1y ago
It has been really interesting to see how non-technical people use agents. My girlfriend shipped a full-stack on the app store [1]. She was only familiar with basic HTML. Now she's building out an inspiration tracker that has file uploads, weekly todos, search, categories. There's a lot more ideas and people who would love to put in effort to give to the world, then there are expert programmers to build them. [1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/go-deeper/id6745434359 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/go-deeper/id6745434359
- stillpointlab 1y ago
  Congrats to your girlfriend! Actually shipping their own app is a feat that many programmers never achieve, instead spending their entire lives working on projects for others. I'm going to jump on this to think aloud about the unlock this ability gives the world for customized apps. My neighbor is a landscaper and he is constantly complaining to me about invoicing software. He has gone through 10+ apps trying to find one that fits his particular set of requirements. He was telling me recently that he spent several phone calls with a developer who had shipped an iOS app that was close to what he needed trying to explain what he wanted. He knows I am a programmer and is always hinting that I should develop an app that would meet his requirements. But I know better. Invoicing/scheduling software is really difficult, especially to appeal to everyone. Each small business has so many tiny requirements that are specific to their business and their personality. You can't just have one piece of software that appeals to everyone, that meets all of the requirements, without it becoming bloated and complicated. And if I built to his particular requirements, I would have exactly 1 customer, which isn't sustainable as a business (I mean, he wants to pay ~20/month). But now we have a world where that kind of highly customized software will be possible. As more and more LLM-ready building blocks emerge, custom software may become the norm rather than the exception.
  - stopachka 1y ago
    > As more and more LLM-ready building blocks emerge, custom software may become the norm rather than the exception. Heck yeah. This would be a very cool world to live in.
- mieubrisse 1y ago
  I'm super into this idea. Programmers (us) used to be gatekeepers... and that's less true now. It means my salary goes down, but also means that the world is going to build more, cooler stuff quicker.
  - stopachka 1y ago
    > the world is going to build more, cooler stuff quicker. Absolutely > It means my salary goes down We may find ourselves surprised. It's true that some part of our skills will no longer be valuable, but I wouldn't be surprised if other parts became 10x more valuable.
imiric 1y ago
That's great, and kudos to your friend. Just two things: - Wouldn't his firm be better served by website builders like WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, etc.? These services have enabled millions of less technical people to create and publish websites for decades now. Most of them support a large ecosystem of plugins and 3rd-party tools that make adding interactivity such as forms and CRMs a breeze. I mean, it's great that your friend is enjoying getting into web development, and that LLMs are helping him, but I reckon he would be much more productive and deliver more value to his customers by using one of the established services on the market. Unless the projects require some bespoke solutions, or mobile apps, but it doesn't sound like it. - What happens when one of his customers asks for authentication, session management, a comment system, payments, or something non-trivial or sensitive like that? If all requirements are trivial as you say, then a web site builder could handle it, but if they stop being trivial, then he is bound to run into issues. LLMs will happily generate non-trivial code, but there are high chances that it will contain security issues or bugs that someone inexperienced won't be able to spot and fix. So what happens then? He will deliver a seemingly working site to his customers with security issues and bugs, and it will only be a matter of time for them to be exploited. It doesn't matter that his customers don't know or care about "best practices". They surely care about a functioning product that doesn't leak or mishandle their customer data. These issues could be mitigated or avoided by hiring an experienced developer. So I hope that he has the wisdom and humility to determine when a developer is still required and pay for them, instead of relying on the false confidence provided by LLMs. Or he could take the time to actually learn to program and adopt best practices instead of vibe coding, which sounds like he would be interested in doing anyway.
- mjsweet 1y ago
  Wordpress is dead. I officially logged into Wordpress for the last time six weeks ago. I’m currently migrating a bunch of my sites over to Next.JS. Claude has vibed the best SEO, E.E.A.T., CRO (CXL best practice), WCAG 2.0, and schema.org compared to any site I’ve ever built in Wordpress. The audits OPUS was creating for each of these areas are astonishing. I’m simply migrating them across to Next.JS and hosting them on Netlify. I haven’t paid for any premium plugins to get these sites up and running; I just used Claude Max 100. I won’t be renewing the AUD$3500 in Wordpress ecosystem subscriptions after they run out this year. For my gardening business (I’m now a professional gardener), I’ve integrated a job route scheduling tool with Claude Code. This tool calculates travel times between my gardening jobs and provides basic CRM functionality for my clients. It uses the Google Distance Matrix API, and my week is laid out like a Kanban board. For my new gardening website, I’ve created dozens of new service pages over the last ten days. I’ve also created a local admin dashboard that ingests my 1200 or so before and after pictures. This dashboard provides a neat interface to match before and after “pairs,” extracts the EXIF data, calculates the suburb, and allows me to tag by job type. It then moves the photos (stripped of EXIF) into the Next.JS public folder with AVIF and WebP versions and a JSON file that specifies their content. Claude then uses the JSON to build custom gallery components for each service page. None of this was conceivable for me two months ago. I’m primarily building static JamStack sites that are secure. Is Wordpress secure? I don’t think so. I’ve done many months of work in the last twenty-one days. Have I saved myself $50k by doing all this with Claude Code? No, because that was never an option previously. I understand your concerns about false confidence, and I genuinely respect that perspective. I backed out of Firebase Studio a while ago because I lacked confidence in Gemini’s ability to create safe and functional Firebase rules. However, the landscape is changing, and the new interface for CMS systems will no longer be the traditional wp-admin. Instead, it will be a user-friendly chat agent with a robust system prompt for building websites, forms, basic workflow rules, business logic, and authentication. Although I’m not a programmer, I have experience as a digital producer, which has given me a good understanding of toolchains. If I were a startup envisioning the next generation of CMS, I would be actively working on it and developing it as quickly as possible.

stopachka 1y ago

It has been really interesting to see how non-technical people use agents. My girlfriend shipped a full-stack on the app store [1]. She was only familiar with basic HTML. Now she's building out an inspiration tracker that has file uploads, weekly todos, search, categories. There's a lot more ideas and people who would love to put in effort to give to the world, then there are expert programmers to build them. [1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/go-deeper/id6745434359 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/go-deeper/id6745434359

stillpointlab 1y ago
Congrats to your girlfriend! Actually shipping their own app is a feat that many programmers never achieve, instead spending their entire lives working on projects for others. I'm going to jump on this to think aloud about the unlock this ability gives the world for customized apps. My neighbor is a landscaper and he is constantly complaining to me about invoicing software. He has gone through 10+ apps trying to find one that fits his particular set of requirements. He was telling me recently that he spent several phone calls with a developer who had shipped an iOS app that was close to what he needed trying to explain what he wanted. He knows I am a programmer and is always hinting that I should develop an app that would meet his requirements. But I know better. Invoicing/scheduling software is really difficult, especially to appeal to everyone. Each small business has so many tiny requirements that are specific to their business and their personality. You can't just have one piece of software that appeals to everyone, that meets all of the requirements, without it becoming bloated and complicated. And if I built to his particular requirements, I would have exactly 1 customer, which isn't sustainable as a business (I mean, he wants to pay ~20/month). But now we have a world where that kind of highly customized software will be possible. As more and more LLM-ready building blocks emerge, custom software may become the norm rather than the exception.
- stopachka 1y ago
  > As more and more LLM-ready building blocks emerge, custom software may become the norm rather than the exception. Heck yeah. This would be a very cool world to live in.
mieubrisse 1y ago
I'm super into this idea. Programmers (us) used to be gatekeepers... and that's less true now. It means my salary goes down, but also means that the world is going to build more, cooler stuff quicker.
- stopachka 1y ago
  > the world is going to build more, cooler stuff quicker. Absolutely > It means my salary goes down We may find ourselves surprised. It's true that some part of our skills will no longer be valuable, but I wouldn't be surprised if other parts became 10x more valuable.

imiric 1y ago

That's great, and kudos to your friend. Just two things: - Wouldn't his firm be better served by website builders like WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, etc.? These services have enabled millions of less technical people to create and publish websites for decades now. Most of them support a large ecosystem of plugins and 3rd-party tools that make adding interactivity such as forms and CRMs a breeze. I mean, it's great that your friend is enjoying getting into web development, and that LLMs are helping him, but I reckon he would be much more productive and deliver more value to his customers by using one of the established services on the market. Unless the projects require some bespoke solutions, or mobile apps, but it doesn't sound like it. - What happens when one of his customers asks for authentication, session management, a comment system, payments, or something non-trivial or sensitive like that? If all requirements are trivial as you say, then a web site builder could handle it, but if they stop being trivial, then he is bound to run into issues. LLMs will happily generate non-trivial code, but there are high chances that it will contain security issues or bugs that someone inexperienced won't be able to spot and fix. So what happens then? He will deliver a seemingly working site to his customers with security issues and bugs, and it will only be a matter of time for them to be exploited. It doesn't matter that his customers don't know or care about "best practices". They surely care about a functioning product that doesn't leak or mishandle their customer data. These issues could be mitigated or avoided by hiring an experienced developer. So I hope that he has the wisdom and humility to determine when a developer is still required and pay for them, instead of relying on the false confidence provided by LLMs. Or he could take the time to actually learn to program and adopt best practices instead of vibe coding, which sounds like he would be interested in doing anyway.

mjsweet 1y ago
Wordpress is dead. I officially logged into Wordpress for the last time six weeks ago. I’m currently migrating a bunch of my sites over to Next.JS. Claude has vibed the best SEO, E.E.A.T., CRO (CXL best practice), WCAG 2.0, and schema.org compared to any site I’ve ever built in Wordpress. The audits OPUS was creating for each of these areas are astonishing. I’m simply migrating them across to Next.JS and hosting them on Netlify. I haven’t paid for any premium plugins to get these sites up and running; I just used Claude Max 100. I won’t be renewing the AUD$3500 in Wordpress ecosystem subscriptions after they run out this year. For my gardening business (I’m now a professional gardener), I’ve integrated a job route scheduling tool with Claude Code. This tool calculates travel times between my gardening jobs and provides basic CRM functionality for my clients. It uses the Google Distance Matrix API, and my week is laid out like a Kanban board. For my new gardening website, I’ve created dozens of new service pages over the last ten days. I’ve also created a local admin dashboard that ingests my 1200 or so before and after pictures. This dashboard provides a neat interface to match before and after “pairs,” extracts the EXIF data, calculates the suburb, and allows me to tag by job type. It then moves the photos (stripped of EXIF) into the Next.JS public folder with AVIF and WebP versions and a JSON file that specifies their content. Claude then uses the JSON to build custom gallery components for each service page. None of this was conceivable for me two months ago. I’m primarily building static JamStack sites that are secure. Is Wordpress secure? I don’t think so. I’ve done many months of work in the last twenty-one days. Have I saved myself $50k by doing all this with Claude Code? No, because that was never an option previously. I understand your concerns about false confidence, and I genuinely respect that perspective. I backed out of Firebase Studio a while ago because I lacked confidence in Gemini’s ability to create safe and functional Firebase rules. However, the landscape is changing, and the new interface for CMS systems will no longer be the traditional wp-admin. Instead, it will be a user-friendly chat agent with a robust system prompt for building websites, forms, basic workflow rules, business logic, and authentication. Although I’m not a programmer, I have experience as a digital producer, which has given me a good understanding of toolchains. If I were a startup envisioning the next generation of CMS, I would be actively working on it and developing it as quickly as possible.