6 ms·
Old and new apps, via modern coding agents
- luciana1u 3mo ago[flagged]
- skinfaxi 3mo agoThis is a very humbling thought, thank you.
- echelon 3mo agoThe humbling thought should be all the blue collar workers on r/vibecoding demoing their apps and games. And then realizing they put together something that would have taken you a few days to do. The supply of software is about to go way up, and that's going to massively impact demand unless every firm on earth is clamoring for more. We're going to see if Jevons paradox holds true, or if wages get impacted drastically.
- satvikpendem 3mo agoOnly if you're working on a client consulting model perhaps, and not even then necessarily. There are lots of reports of vibe coded apps not holding up in production so they should be treated as prototypes. It's similar to the outsourcing trend where people reverted back to using in house talent once they realized how terrible most of the produced software was. The only difference is AI models get better but it remains to be seen if they can get to such an end to end stage that they can autonomously deploy to prod and diagnose any issues without human intervention. There have been some paths to that but I haven't seen it end to end yet.
- reinitctxoffset 3mo agoEvery time I wrote software that I was personally motivated to have and kept at it until it reached a comfortable equilibrium of utility, scope, and quality and then stopped? No one paid me. Every time someone paid me to write software it was some combination of 1. not that interesting of a problem 2. no real utility i could see or touch, useful in some abstract way of making a number go up 3. involved a constant, painful maintenance burden 4. involved incident management of one kind or another 5. involved a long tail of details with no unifying principle other than a lot of implicit legacy constraints and stakeholders whose involvement waxed and waned with no seeming rhythm.. I'm a big fan of the new capability, it opens up new regimes of performance and correctness and capability for what I can achieve, that in turn grinds me up against math and theory that I had thus far been able to avoid, it's pushing me up the ambition ladder hard and that's a good thing. But the change is a change in degree not in kind at least in the vibecode regime: it was always relatively fun and relatively easy to do one small program with modest requirements around defect rigor that had a big legible "oh cool!" surface that I didn't have to maintain. Fable doesn't seem any better than Opus at grinding detail work in the bowels of a compiler, but it sure can make an iPhone-scoped platform game with a bunch of bugs in it in a single shot? If there's a job where you get paid for doing fun, high defect, "oh wow!" factor one-off software that you can immediately disavow any responsibility for? Fuck man, I should have had that job before Fable got that job.
- slopinthebag 3mo agoMost of the stuff demoed on r/vibecoding are trivial programs, and they’re often buggy and full of holes. If that’s the type of software you produce then yes, you’ll probably be impacted. Thankfully that isn’t the majority of software. It’s kind of like saying wedding photographers will be impacted because of the people posting on r/iPhoneography. Seems kind of silly doesn’t it.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- weikju 3mo ago> It’s kind of like saying wedding photographers will be impacted because of the people posting on r/iPhoneography. Seems kind of silly doesn’t it. I don’t know how it is all around the world but where I live, the photography is part of the whole packaged wedding plan and there’s no choice/option BUT to use one, guaranteeing their (expensive) service and job, regardless of what people can produce on their own. OTOH, it’s probably better to have someone neutral there who can take pics rather than eat/drink/cry and whatever else people do at weddings ;)
- skipkey 3mo agoSo I've now shot 4 weddings. The first one happened because a friend of my wife had their photographer bail on them 4 days before the wedding, so they were in a bind. I didn't know what I was doing, but I had a prosumer canon Digital Rebel SLR that I mostly used to do wildlife photography, and some good quality lenses. It took me a good 40 hours to generate the final output in photoshop out of the couple of thousand photos I took. Based on what we produced on the first one I've been asked to shoot 3 additional weddings by friends, none of them large, involved productions, using better equipment. The last one I probably took a thousand photos and it took about 10-12 hours to process. Researching, I found out that I could have outsourced the processing for pennies a photo, which is what I'm assuming a lot of wedding photographers do now. But based on what I was doing (delete blurry/bad, color balance, pleasing crop, select the best photos for a book, put the rest on a drive), I suspect I could get that down to a few hours with an AI workflow after I worked out the kinks. I'm not a professional, but I suspect I'd be ahead of the average wedding photographer after I worked that out.
- theturtletalks 3mo agoPersonal software is the future and a person building software for themselves tends to withstand enshittifcation. That's why I love when people open-source projects they love and are passionate about and I will always choose them over proprietary ones. People always argue "well, Slack and Notion have distribution and the product isn't everything." Ok and? The person making it for themselves doesn't necessarily need distribution for it to be valuable. In fact, it's even more attractive that way.
- piker 3mo agoBasic economics still holds. There will be firms investing loads of time and money into specific, winning approaches and folks using custom builds will be competed away by them.
- theturtletalks 3mo agoThose firms investing time and money may make a good product at first, but it will slowly get worse as they try to recoup their costs and make a profit. The person making the open-source alternative may do the same, but I can fork it and go on my merry way if they do.
- superb_dev 3mo agoThe supply of software has already gone up, and most of the new stuff is close to useless
- stronglikedan 3mo agoThis may have been true six months ago, but I doubt it holds water today.
- qup 3mo agoIn my very small business, the supply of software has gone up (I'm building things), and they're custom to my business--so highly useful. Moreso than any off the shelf product could hope to be.
- echelon 3mo agoSaaS is dead. Everything is going to be brought in house.
- toyg 3mo agoUntil someone will figure out that, according to some spreadsheet, outsourcing it all would result in Big Savings That Would Help The Share Price, and the carousel will start again. Capitalism will capitalism.
- qup 3mo agoNot everything, but a lot. I don't anticipate replacing my payroll company, for instance.
- jbs789 3mo agoSame experience here. I’m able to grow the business faster for sure.
- apitman 3mo agoI've vibe coded multiple apps that I now use regularly throughout the day. I doubt I could sell them, but they are very useful to me.
- larme 3mo agoBefore LLM there has already been Fields medalist[0] who creates professional software[1]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Hairer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Hairer [1]: https://www.hairersoft.com/ https://www.hairersoft.com/
- dist-epoch 3mo agoI'm waiting for the reverse, coding agents asking Terry Tao if the proof they plan working on is worthy of a Fields Medal
- LastTrain 3mo ago[dead]
- clickety_clack 3mo agoWe thought it would level us all up to equal the best of us, but instead it has leveled them down to within our reach.
- pizzaballs 3mo ago[flagged]
- wffurr 3mo agoNice balanced perspective there at the end: "as such [LLM-coded interactive] supplements are not mission-critical to the core of the paper, I again feel that the downside risk of using guided interaction with LLM agents to generate such visualizations is acceptable." It's a tool. Good for some things but not others and generally not to be trusted.
- an0malous 3mo ago> and generally not to be trusted There are many AI bulls who adamantly disagree and cite Tao’s statements about LLMs for mathematical proofs as an example of how advanced and autonomous these systems already are
- irishcoffee 3mo agoStatistical gradient descent token vomiter. We can all say it together. Nothing about this is advanced or autonomous.
- CuriouslyC 3mo agoThis is like saying humans are a self contained electron transport system, nothing special or advanced about that, just a scaled up nematode.
- abecedarius 3mo agoThe same AIs are doing math research now, you know. At what point do you stop explaining it all away?
- satvikpendem 3mo agoThey never will, because it seems to be a psychological effect among humans via the AI effect (see my sibling comment).
- satvikpendem 3mo ago[dead]
- geeewhy 3mo ago[dead]
- jgalt212 3mo agoThe more Terry talks about AI, the more I'm starting to feel like Terry may have some undisclosed conflicts of interest. https://www.reddit.com/r/mathematics/comments/1tryyw7/terence_taos_promotional_video_for_openai/ https://www.reddit.com/r/mathematics/comments/1tryyw7/terenc...
- nmfisher 3mo agoOr he just finds it an incredible time-saving tool to help him do more maths.
- perching_aix 3mo agoThe well-known shadowy bias and conflict of interest of "I just enjoy experimenting with this new thing".
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- perching_aix 3mo agoI do not think he's shilling; I think you misread the tone of my comment. Added an extra word now to maybe make the intent clearer. That said, I do think "honeymoon phases" are a real source of bias. But then I don't think he's going through one of those either. He's been trying to leverage these models for a while now after all. He might still be under a more general "tech adoption trend" bias, but at that point I'd say the lines become a bit blurry.
- sega_sai 3mo agoWhen it comes to coding, non-programmers do not have to be in a defensive position worried that their job is under risk, instead they just see a great tool that saves them time, especially doing boring coding like dashboards, visualizations, interactive web-pages, or doing experiments that they otherwise would not have time for.
- muragekibicho 3mo agoThe article's awkward opening statement proves it wasn't written by AI. I have been interested in machine-assisted ways to do and teach mathematics from as far back as 1999, when I started coding several applets in Java 1.0, both for my complex analysis and linear algebra courses, to visualize various mathematical objects I was interested in (such as honeycombs or Besicovitch sets).
- 484994949595 3mo ago[dead]
- cindyllm 3mo ago[dead]
- chumzygood 3mo ago[flagged]
- koe123 3mo agoI am far from a mathematician but I am excited by the possibilities of using AI for generating more math. Math in my mind exists purely in the world of forms, and cannot be appropriated for profit, but is downstream to everything else. I am keen to see what this enables.
- lioeters 3mo agoIt may be a question of perspective, but in my mind mathematics is upstream to everything else, including physics, biology, etc. And it doesn't just exist in the human mind or the "world of forms", as in Platon's realm of ideas. It's more fundamental than that, closer to the foundation from which all existence emerges. Our reality is like a shadow of a shadow, a fleeting illusion, compared to the eternal reality that gives birth to all lesser realities. As for profit, there's a reason why governments and AI companies are hiring philosophers and mathematicians. It's not to make the world a better place for everyone, or to encourage the progress of human knowledge; but to gain cutting-edge advantages over their competitors. Same reason why theoretical physicists were prized before/during the Second World War.
- lanstin 3mo agoI have never seen a profitable enterprise that doesn’t have a core of people good at math defending the maximum money behavior. A lot more people graduate with math degrees than can get jobs in research maths, but finance, operations research, insurance companies, logistics, all can hire a lot of them. As a software engineer with a math degree, I find that some of software is like math, but not very often like research math and relatively few of my colleagues have math degrees.
- alansaber 3mo agoI always enjoy these "domain expert has fun using AI to do something in their domain" articles. But it's always a hobby project, never something serious.
- cma 3mo agoBut he's also using AI for formally verified math and for ideas in solving math problems. The part about it being ok because it is a supplement just means ok that these aren't formally verified and may have bugs, and may also mean ok to not credit the AI for the paper as it is just a visual supplement and not the main work.
- rsfern 3mo agoTerry Tao has actually been one of the more prominent voices in the math community exploring AI for cutting edge mathematical discovery. This particular post is a bit softer but he has also written a lot about using AI assistance for serious core research Nov 2025: https://terrytao.wordpress.com/tag/artificial-intelligence/ https://terrytao.wordpress.com/tag/artificial-intelligence/ https://academy.openai.com/public/blogs/terence-tao-ai-is-ready-for-primetime-in-math-and-theoretical-physics-2026-03-06 https://academy.openai.com/public/blogs/terence-tao-ai-is-re...
- dboreham 3mo agoSerious things tend to be long and tedious and potentially full of proprietary information.
- lanstin 3mo agoOpen science has plenty of long and tedious articles.
- jebarker 3mo agoWhat makes this a hobby project? He’s a university professor so developing teaching material is part of his job.
- indymike 3mo agoThat is how it starts, trust is built on hobby projects.
- vatsachak 3mo agoUsing LLMs to generate dashboards is probably their most productive use case
- lanstin 3mo agoAnd then to write installers so your coworkers who aren’t liking instructions like “then make a gpg key and install pinentry-mac” can use the extremely useful vibe coded dashboards to make the prod site transparent and viewable, digestible to eyes.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- apitman 3mo agoI don't think it's dashboards specifically, I think it's things that require a relatively small amount of code that fits in the context window and is easy to iterate on using natural language.
- suwapat 3mo agoLLM will do very good job in pure mathematics since it don't need the senses to logically understand/conclude a given topic.
- jdw64 3mo agoHis website using mathematical knowledge is refreshing. There's a small UI bug, but personally, I wish more educational materials were this rich in audiovisual content.
- recursivedoubts 3mo agoBuilding visualizations with LLMs has been a major boost for my CS classes: https://htmx.org/essays/universities-and-ai/#demos-visualizations-are-cheap https://htmx.org/essays/universities-and-ai/#demos-visualiza... Many visualizations that I have always wanted but just didn't have the time to build, I now have. To give an example, I wanted a simplified 8-bit computer to complement the 16-bit teaching computer I use and designed this in a few days with the help of claude: https://bdp.cs.montana.edu/ https://bdp.cs.montana.edu/
- nojvek 3mo agoThis is v cool. When I did my microcontroller class with lecturer hand drawing an 8-bit computer, the registers, memory, instructions on the white board, it was v cool to understand how things worked under the hood. Wondered if someone could make more simulations for what was being taught. Teaching is about deciphering a thing into it's components and seeing how they interact. Vibe coded simulations are a great tool for that.
- Aurornis 3mo agoUsing LLMs to build out the nice-to-haves that I’ve always wanted but never had time for is one of their great use cases. Visualizations are a perfect use case for this because they don’t have to be perfectly architected, maintainable code. Getting to the correct visual output is good enough, and LLMs excel at iterating something until it looks right.
- atrettel 3mo agoI agree that visualization does not need to be perfect. One issue is that "correct visual output" depends on your expertise level. A visualization that is good to teach undergrads may be frustratingly bad to experts and researchers. Standards like "looking right" depend on the audience's ability to spot nuances and how focused they are on the fine details. If you want a visualization to work for the range of people from beginners to experts, you do need to focus a bit more on what it means for something to "look right" for multiple audiences, since the errors in the fine details may hinder a visualization's usefulness for more advanced audiences.
- haebom 3mo ago[dead]
- onionsential 3mo ago[flagged]
- semiquaver 3mo agoThere is infinite latent demand for software, most especially outside the traditionally software-focused spaces. If LLMs stopped improving today it would take us 10 years to catch up to the new software-writing abilities that have become available. This is a great illustration of that fact.
- apignotti 3mo agoRunning legacy educational Java applets, especially around math and physics, has been a longstanding popular use case of our CheerpJ Applet Runner extension, running Java bytecode in the browser via WebAssembly. I am not sure how to feel about agents solving the problem via proper modernization. It's certainly positive that students will be able to interact with this content in a modern and more accessible way, but the educational use case for our product, although not commercially important, has always been a source of pride. https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/cheerpj-applet-runner/bbmolahhldcbngedljfadjlognfaaein https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/cheerpj-applet-runn...
- luciana1u 3mo ago[flagged]
- thejazzman 3mo agoi'd imagine when microwaves first came out chefs were genuinely excited? it's pretty insanely magical to observe ... at first.
- r_lee 3mo agoI wouldn't be surprised if that was actually more common than one might think
- red75prime 3mo agoPeople are so confident that this just-a-tool will hit its limits any day now...
- nozzlegear 3mo agoPeople are so confident that this not-just-a-tool will show signs of ASI/AGI any day now...
- red75prime 3mo agoYep, I'm fairly certain that general learning algorithms acting upon an ANN (which is fairly general too, see the universal approximation theorem) can reach and surpass performance of the human brain. As we have approximately zero evidence that the human brain contains "magic," that is something that can't be modeled by an ANN of a practically feasible size. (I know about chaotic processes that can't be modeled precisely. The "magic" here would be the brain using such a process to make useful decisions. "Useful" not in a sense of a mixed strategiy. You can roll dice to do that.) But, no, it's not "any day now." The required size and structure of the ANN is to be determined.
- nozzlegear 3mo agoI think it's a giant leap of faith to go from "there's no evidence that the human brain contains magic" to "ANNs will achieve AGI and we just need to monkey with the parameters to get there." You've ruled out the supernatural, but don't account for mundane limitations like energy, training data, memory or the architecture. That theorem you referenced tells us a sufficiently wide network can (quoting from Wikipedia) "approximate any continuous function to any desired degree of accuracy" – but it doesn't give us any bound on the sample complexity or the energy required. That is to say, just because the theorem says it's technically possible doesn't mean it's literally possible.
- a-dub 3mo agoeven though there's still a lot of work to push things over the finish line, i have enjoyed how much it has reduced the activation energy for starting and finishing "one of these days..." projects!
- mikkolaakkonen 3mo agoThis is amazing!
- novaRom 3mo agoIt's probably a matter of short time until it's possible to disassemble any sophisticated software, rewrite it entirely with better features and usability, generate all needed artifacts, port to any platform. The only moat left is probably remote massive data storage. So if you want to replicate YouTube or TikTok, it's not impossible, but requires a lot more hardware assets than say anything that runs entirely locally (like operating systems or most video games).
- lacedeconstruct 3mo agoHow exactly do you envision this ? you will ask the ai to make youtube but better, people seperate the "what" from the "how" but they have a very complex relationship
- novaRom 3mo agoHave you tried most powerful recent models? You may even don't understand at all "how" - what you get is end result you asked for, verified and tested. I am pretty sure if I can vibe code quite non trivial solution in just say 4-8 hours today, then why will it be impossible say in a year or two to vibe code something at the level of most sophisticated apps and services today? Pretty reasonable expectation taking into account what was possible just a year ago and what you can make today without even understanding "how".
- DaiPlusPlus 3mo ago> then why will it be impossible say in a year or two to vibe code something at the level of most sophisticated apps and services today? Replace "vibe coding" with "outsource to India" and it's the same situation we were in 20 years ago: I remember around the time when YouTube had well-established itself (2009-ish?) and so a cottage-industry mushroomed all selling visual-lookalike YouTube clones, but implemented as monolithic single PHP project or WordPress plugin, using the local filesystem for video file storage (or worse: Base64-encoded text in MySQL, lovely). ...to someone with no prior experience or knowledge how highly-scalable, Google-tier web applications (like the real YouTube) work or are built, these "Me-Too-Tube" sites were indistinguishable from the real thing and as far as they were concerned they were happy with it. Never mind that even if those $25 scripted websites were ever actually scalable, it isn't enough to simply have a video-sharing site; you need to get millions of people to decide to start using it - and that's something which will elude Claude's abilities... possibly forever, I feel.
- botro 3mo agoI wonder if LLMs modify their output when they realize they are interacting with a famous person. By famous I mean someone whose biography is in the training data. All models know a lot more about Terrance Tao than they know about me, when he's working on his projects do the models know they don't need to explain "Besicovitch sets". Since the system prompt likely includes something about not insulting the user, does the LLM modify it's responses if it realizes it's talking to famous politician, like "dont mention the time $politician was cancelled".
- apitman 3mo agoYou could test this by starting your sessions with "I am Terrance Tao"
- vessenes 3mo agoYes. I am NOT famous. But I am in the corpus. In my GPT3 beta tests, I asked it to be first Bill Bradley then Noam Chomski, (a parlor trick that's harder today due to RL), and Bill tried to butter me up based on some work history of mine. Chomsky then said "Man, I hate that guy."
- ashu0x 3mo agoUsing Fable with Anthropic Design skill works every time.
- bradfitz 3mo agoThis post inspired me to have Claude port my 30 year old high school German Java applet game to Javascript, complete with a faked git history: https://github.com/bradfitz/koffer#der-verloren-koffe https://github.com/bradfitz/koffer#der-verloren-koffe Play online at https://bradfitz.github.io/koffer/js/ https://bradfitz.github.io/koffer/js/ So neat seeing ~30 year old code come back alive.
- npalli 3mo agoI laughed at this "but the code complexity became too much for me, and I abandoned the project." even Terry Tao finds some code too complex to write. Really bullish on LLMs expanding code development by a very large group of people who are really smart in some domain but could not get into 'coding'.
- kyleclouthier 3mo agoNice
- guillaume_code 3mo ago[flagged]
- ahdgs 3mo ago[flagged]
- jacobedawson 3mo agoJavaScript: Good Enough for Terry Tao
- redfather918 3mo agoInteresting perspective. One thing I'm curious about is whether modern coding agents are actually better at maintaining older codebases than greenfield projects. In my experience, legacy code often lacks the context that agents need.
- cvanelteren 3mo agoNice write-up!
- fatmacelik6894 3mo ago[flagged]