6 ms·

With sufficiently advanced vibe coding the need for certain type of product just vanishes. I needed it, I quickly build it myself for myself, and for myself on

With sufficiently advanced vibe coding the need for certain type of product just vanishes. I needed it, I quickly build it myself for myself, and for myself only.

keyle 7mo ago
I built a jira with attachments and all sorts of bells and whistles. Purrs like a kitten. Saas are going extinct. At least the jobs that charged $1000 a day to write jira plugins.
- ivan_gammel 7mo ago
  Some minor UX enhancement SaaS of the most recent VC-funded wave will do. Maybe those who forgot how to invest in R&D and spent last 20 years just fixing bugs. There’s plenty of SaaS on the market that offers added value beyond the code. Data brokers. Domain experts, etc. Even if homemade solution is sometimes possible, initial development costs are going to be just one of several important factors in choosing whether to build or to buy.
- pydry 7mo ago
  jira is a perfect example of an abysmal product that was marketed well.
  - xp84 7mo ago
    Yes, it seems like it got to some tipping point around 2013 where so many product and management people were familiar with it, and from there it became this “industry standard” that management always wanted everyone to use. Also though, I feel like being attached to Confluence helped it because there is a lot less competition in the world of documentation wikis than there is in task management.
- 101008 7mo ago
  SaaS are not going exctinct. This reminds me of the LinkedIn posts saying they clone Slack in two hours, copying the UI, etc. Yeah, if you think Slack is private chat rooms then you should use IRC for your company. One of the most valuable things about Slack is the ecosystem: apps, API support, etc. If you need to receive notifications from external apps (like PageDuty or Incident.io or something like that), good luck expecting them having a setup for your own version of the app. Yeah, some of them provide webhooks (not all of them), but in the end you have to maintain that too...
  - advancespace 7mo ago
    [dead]
lacedeconstruct 7mo ago
I dont want that though, I want someone to spend much more time than I can afford thinking about and perfecting a product that I can pay for and dont worry about it
- hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm 7mo ago
  If we could return to one-off payments without dark patterns I would agree. Hopefully at least the software that rely on grift will start to vanish.
- kami23 7mo ago
  And some people do, both things can be true. I'd rather make a tool just for me that breaks when I introduce a new requirement and I just add into it and keep going.
  - kjksf 7mo ago
    The statement wasn't: "no one ever vibe codes an alternative to product X" It was: "With sufficiently advanced vibe coding the need for certain type of product just vanishes." If a product has 100 thousand users and 1% of them vibe codes an alternative for themselves, the product / business doesn't vanish. They still have 99 thousand of users. That was the rebuttal, even if not presented as persuasively and intelligently as I just did. So no, it's not the case of "both things being true". It's a case of: he was wrong.
    - GorbachevyChase 7mo ago
      At some point there will be market consequences for that kind of behavior. So where market dynamics are not dominated by bullshit (politics, friendships forged on Little St James, state intervention, cartel behavior, etc.) if my company provides the same service as another, but I replaced all of the low quality software as a service products my competitor uses with low quality vibe coded products, my overhead cost will be lower and that will give me an advantage.
- jsdalton 7mo ago
IAmGraydon 7mo ago
This is a pipe dream and “sufficiently advanced” is doing a lot of heavy lifting. You really think people would rather spin up and debug their own self-made software rather than pay for something that has been tested, debugged, and proven by thousands of users? Why would anyone do that for anything more than a very simple script? It makes zero sense unless the LLM outputs literally perfect one-shot software reliably.
- user34283 7mo ago
  It makes sense if you want bespoke software to do a specific job in a way best suited to your workflow. Could you do the same in eg. Photoshop? Maybe, but even if, you would need to learn how.
  - program_whiz 7mo ago
    Photoshop is a good example -- not that I agree with everything in the app, but just to design all the interactions properly in photoshop would take hundreds of hours (not to mention testing and figuring out the edges). If your goal is a 1-to-1 clone why not use Krita or photoshop? With LLM you'll get "mostly there" with many many hours of work, and lots of sharp edges. If all you need is paint bucket, basic brush / pencil, and save/load, ok maybe you can one-shot it in a few hours... or just use paint / aesprite...
- niemandhier 7mo ago
  Perplexity just launched a tool that builds and hosts small bespoke tools. I tried it works wells. I can do the same thing in my Linux machine, but even my 12 year old now can get perplexity to build him a tool to compare ram prices at different chinease vendors.
  - qsera 7mo ago
    Yes, LLMs can be a better search tool.
- djaro 7mo ago
  In which case, if LLMs can perfectly one shot simple programs, creating and maintaining a really advanced program would presumably be very cheap since it could just one shot every feature. So instead of generating new image editing programs for every task, why not pay $10/month for the guy who spent a week guiding an LLM into making ultra photoshop with every feature Ill ever need?
sieste 7mo ago
Related anecdote: My 12yo son didn't like the speed cubing online timer he was using because it kept crashing the browser and interrupted him with ads. Instead of googling a better alternative we sat down with claude code and put together the version of the website that behaved and looked exactly as he wanted. He got it working all by himself in under an hour with less than 10 prompts, I only helped a bit putting it online with github pages so he can use it from anywhere.
- WarmWash 7mo ago
  I don't think people are grasping yet that this is the future of software, if by no metric other than "most software used is created by the user".
  - qsera 7mo ago
    >most software used is created by the user You really believe that?
    - zahlman 7mo ago
      That wasn't being claimed, just proposed as the direction we're headed.
      - qsera 7mo ago
        Another user had already written what I had in mind when I responded to your comment.. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47387570 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47387570
    - WarmWash 7mo ago
      Yes, because the current software paradigm (a shed/barn/warehouse full of tools to suite every possible users every possible need) doesn't make sense when LLMs can turn plain English into a software tool in the matter of minutes.
      - 7mo ago
jcgrillo 7mo ago
How many products are actually like that? If I could easily replace github, datadog/sentry/whatever, cloudflare, aws, tailscale that would be great. In my view building and owning is better than buying or renting. Especially when it comes to data--it would be much better for me to own my telemetry data for example than to ship it off to another company. But I don't think you (or anyone) will be vibecoding replacements for these services anytime soon. They solve big, hard, difficult problems.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- CuriouslyC 7mo ago
  Github is on the chopping block as a tool (it's sticky as a social network). The other stuff not so much. The things that are going away are tools that provide convenience on top of a workflow that's commoditized. Anything where the commercial offering provides convenience rather than capabilities over the open source offerings is gonna get toasted.
  - jcgrillo 7mo ago
    Even at recent levels of uptime I think it would be very difficult to build a competing product that could function at the scale of even a small company (10 engineers). How would you implement Actions? Code review comments/history? Pull requests? Issues? Permalinks? All of these things have serious operational requirements. If you just want some place to store a git repository any filesystem you like will do it but when you start talking about replacing github that's a different story altogether and TBH I don't think building something that appears to function the same is even the hard part, it's the scaling challenges you run into very quickly.
    - WarmWash 7mo ago
      The future is narrow bespoke apps custom tailored for exactly that one single users use case. An example would be if the user only ever works with .jpg files, then you don't need to support any of the dozens of other formats an image program would support. I cannot stress enough how many software users out there are only using 1-10% of a program's capability, yet they have to pay for a team of devs who maintain 100% of it.
zer00eyz 7mo ago
https://xkcd.com/1205/ https://xkcd.com/1205/ (is it worth the time matrix) LLM's change the calculus of the above chart dramatically.
matwood 7mo ago
Products where the only value was the code are definitely under pressure. But, how many products are really like that? I suggest everyone look up HALO that’s so popular in investing right now, and start looking at companies with the assumption that the value of the code is zero so what other value is there. There’s often a lot more there than people realize.

With sufficiently advanced vibe coding the need for certain type of product just vanishes. I needed it, I quickly build it myself for myself, and for myself only.

keyle 7mo ago

I built a jira with attachments and all sorts of bells and whistles. Purrs like a kitten. Saas are going extinct. At least the jobs that charged $1000 a day to write jira plugins.

ivan_gammel 7mo ago
Some minor UX enhancement SaaS of the most recent VC-funded wave will do. Maybe those who forgot how to invest in R&D and spent last 20 years just fixing bugs. There’s plenty of SaaS on the market that offers added value beyond the code. Data brokers. Domain experts, etc. Even if homemade solution is sometimes possible, initial development costs are going to be just one of several important factors in choosing whether to build or to buy.
pydry 7mo ago
jira is a perfect example of an abysmal product that was marketed well.
- xp84 7mo ago
  Yes, it seems like it got to some tipping point around 2013 where so many product and management people were familiar with it, and from there it became this “industry standard” that management always wanted everyone to use. Also though, I feel like being attached to Confluence helped it because there is a lot less competition in the world of documentation wikis than there is in task management.
101008 7mo ago
SaaS are not going exctinct. This reminds me of the LinkedIn posts saying they clone Slack in two hours, copying the UI, etc. Yeah, if you think Slack is private chat rooms then you should use IRC for your company. One of the most valuable things about Slack is the ecosystem: apps, API support, etc. If you need to receive notifications from external apps (like PageDuty or Incident.io or something like that), good luck expecting them having a setup for your own version of the app. Yeah, some of them provide webhooks (not all of them), but in the end you have to maintain that too...
- advancespace 7mo ago
  [dead]

lacedeconstruct 7mo ago

I dont want that though, I want someone to spend much more time than I can afford thinking about and perfecting a product that I can pay for and dont worry about it

hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm 7mo ago
If we could return to one-off payments without dark patterns I would agree. Hopefully at least the software that rely on grift will start to vanish.
kami23 7mo ago
And some people do, both things can be true. I'd rather make a tool just for me that breaks when I introduce a new requirement and I just add into it and keep going.
- kjksf 7mo ago
  The statement wasn't: "no one ever vibe codes an alternative to product X" It was: "With sufficiently advanced vibe coding the need for certain type of product just vanishes." If a product has 100 thousand users and 1% of them vibe codes an alternative for themselves, the product / business doesn't vanish. They still have 99 thousand of users. That was the rebuttal, even if not presented as persuasively and intelligently as I just did. So no, it's not the case of "both things being true". It's a case of: he was wrong.
  - GorbachevyChase 7mo ago
    At some point there will be market consequences for that kind of behavior. So where market dynamics are not dominated by bullshit (politics, friendships forged on Little St James, state intervention, cartel behavior, etc.) if my company provides the same service as another, but I replaced all of the low quality software as a service products my competitor uses with low quality vibe coded products, my overhead cost will be lower and that will give me an advantage.
jsdalton 7mo ago

IAmGraydon 7mo ago

This is a pipe dream and “sufficiently advanced” is doing a lot of heavy lifting. You really think people would rather spin up and debug their own self-made software rather than pay for something that has been tested, debugged, and proven by thousands of users? Why would anyone do that for anything more than a very simple script? It makes zero sense unless the LLM outputs literally perfect one-shot software reliably.

user34283 7mo ago
It makes sense if you want bespoke software to do a specific job in a way best suited to your workflow. Could you do the same in eg. Photoshop? Maybe, but even if, you would need to learn how.
- program_whiz 7mo ago
  Photoshop is a good example -- not that I agree with everything in the app, but just to design all the interactions properly in photoshop would take hundreds of hours (not to mention testing and figuring out the edges). If your goal is a 1-to-1 clone why not use Krita or photoshop? With LLM you'll get "mostly there" with many many hours of work, and lots of sharp edges. If all you need is paint bucket, basic brush / pencil, and save/load, ok maybe you can one-shot it in a few hours... or just use paint / aesprite...
niemandhier 7mo ago
Perplexity just launched a tool that builds and hosts small bespoke tools. I tried it works wells. I can do the same thing in my Linux machine, but even my 12 year old now can get perplexity to build him a tool to compare ram prices at different chinease vendors.
- qsera 7mo ago
  Yes, LLMs can be a better search tool.
djaro 7mo ago
In which case, if LLMs can perfectly one shot simple programs, creating and maintaining a really advanced program would presumably be very cheap since it could just one shot every feature. So instead of generating new image editing programs for every task, why not pay $10/month for the guy who spent a week guiding an LLM into making ultra photoshop with every feature Ill ever need?

sieste 7mo ago

Related anecdote: My 12yo son didn't like the speed cubing online timer he was using because it kept crashing the browser and interrupted him with ads. Instead of googling a better alternative we sat down with claude code and put together the version of the website that behaved and looked exactly as he wanted. He got it working all by himself in under an hour with less than 10 prompts, I only helped a bit putting it online with github pages so he can use it from anywhere.

WarmWash 7mo ago
I don't think people are grasping yet that this is the future of software, if by no metric other than "most software used is created by the user".
- qsera 7mo ago
  >most software used is created by the user You really believe that?
  - zahlman 7mo ago
    That wasn't being claimed, just proposed as the direction we're headed.
    - qsera 7mo ago
      Another user had already written what I had in mind when I responded to your comment.. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47387570 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47387570
  - WarmWash 7mo ago
    Yes, because the current software paradigm (a shed/barn/warehouse full of tools to suite every possible users every possible need) doesn't make sense when LLMs can turn plain English into a software tool in the matter of minutes.
    - 7mo ago

jcgrillo 7mo ago

How many products are actually like that? If I could easily replace github, datadog/sentry/whatever, cloudflare, aws, tailscale that would be great. In my view building and owning is better than buying or renting. Especially when it comes to data--it would be much better for me to own my telemetry data for example than to ship it off to another company. But I don't think you (or anyone) will be vibecoding replacements for these services anytime soon. They solve big, hard, difficult problems.

deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
CuriouslyC 7mo ago
Github is on the chopping block as a tool (it's sticky as a social network). The other stuff not so much. The things that are going away are tools that provide convenience on top of a workflow that's commoditized. Anything where the commercial offering provides convenience rather than capabilities over the open source offerings is gonna get toasted.
- jcgrillo 7mo ago
  Even at recent levels of uptime I think it would be very difficult to build a competing product that could function at the scale of even a small company (10 engineers). How would you implement Actions? Code review comments/history? Pull requests? Issues? Permalinks? All of these things have serious operational requirements. If you just want some place to store a git repository any filesystem you like will do it but when you start talking about replacing github that's a different story altogether and TBH I don't think building something that appears to function the same is even the hard part, it's the scaling challenges you run into very quickly.
  - WarmWash 7mo ago
    The future is narrow bespoke apps custom tailored for exactly that one single users use case. An example would be if the user only ever works with .jpg files, then you don't need to support any of the dozens of other formats an image program would support. I cannot stress enough how many software users out there are only using 1-10% of a program's capability, yet they have to pay for a team of devs who maintain 100% of it.

zer00eyz 7mo ago

https://xkcd.com/1205/ https://xkcd.com/1205/ (is it worth the time matrix) LLM's change the calculus of the above chart dramatically.

matwood 7mo ago

Products where the only value was the code are definitely under pressure. But, how many products are really like that? I suggest everyone look up HALO that’s so popular in investing right now, and start looking at companies with the assumption that the value of the code is zero so what other value is there. There’s often a lot more there than people realize.