[sebastiennight]

I was looking for this comment.

A non-technical family member is working on a tech project, and giving them Lovable.dev with Supabase as a backend was like complete magic. No amount of fiddling with terminals or propping up postgres is too little.

We technical people always underestimate how fast things change when non-technical users can finally get things done without opening the hood.

[asnyder]

Back in the day we'd call this phase a design and workflow prototype as to not have to deal with all the technical components until the actual flow and concept is done.

Feels we're skipping these steps and "generating" prototypes that may or may not satisfy the need and moving forward with that code into final.

One of the huge benefits of things like Invision, Marvel, Avocode, Figma, etc. was to allow the idea and flow to truly get its legs and skip the days where devs would plop right into code and do 100s of iterations and updates in actual code. This was a huge gain in development and opened up roles for PMs and UI/UX, while keeping developer work more focused on the actual implementation.

Feels these generate design & code tools are regressing back to direct-Code prototypes without all that workflow and understanding of what should actually be happening BEFORE the code, and instead will return to the distractions of the "How", and its millions of iterations and updates, rather than "What".

Some of this was already unfortunately happening due to Figma's loss of focus on workflow and collaboration, but seems these AI generation tools have made many completely lose sight of what was nice about the improved workflow of planning, simply because we CAN now generate the things we think we want, doesn't mean we should, especially before we know what we actually want / need.

Maybe I'm just getting old, but that's my .02 :).

[_zoltan_]

there is no need to this tedious, boring phase which you miss, especially since it still requires a significant of coding effort (eg to stitch a backend to figma).

you can vibe code a fully working UI+backend that requires way less effort so why bother with planning and iterating on the UI separately at all?

anybody who actually knows what they are doing gets 10x from these tools plus they enable non-coders to bring ideas to the market and do it fast.

[asnyder]

That's always been the justification to skip this phase :). Tools have just changed. One-person to small-team wonders that could code and build directly made the same arguments.

My point isn't to stitch things to Figma, that's abhorrent to me as well. My point is to not get bogged down on the implementation details, in this case an actually working DB, those tables, etc, but rather less fidelity actual full flow concepts that can be generated and iterated.

Then that can be fed into a magic genie GPT that generates the front-end, back-end, and all that good jazz.

[namaria]

If the effort to produce websites goes tends to zero, the value of websites will surely tend to zero. Either issues with security and maintainability will be a break on this tendency or we will get to a point where generating a custom website will be something trivial that will be done on demand.

The thing is, the cost of producing websites is already pretty low, but the value of websites mostly derives from network effects. So a rising flood of micro crud saas products will not be likely to generate much added value. And since interoperability will drive complexity, and transformer based LLMs are inherently limited at compositional tasks, any unforeseen value tapped by these extra websites will likely be offset by the maintainability and security breaks I mentioned. And because there is a delay in this signal, there is likely to be a bullwhip effect: an explosion of sites now and a burnout in a couple of years in which a lot of people will get severely turned off by the whole experience.

[gdilla]

If you need a website that needs prototyping in 2025, you're probably doing it wrong (eg launch on insta or something). But anyway, you can vibe iterate, and not just small iterations, but wholesale different value props and approaches, so why not. it's tangible, easier to test, and you get more meaningful feedback. I do this and it's 3-4x faster than working with a designer. And to be sure, we're not making websites, but protyping features into a saas app to test with users and ourselves.

[bluesnowmonkey]

The value of Amazon.com is not the cost to produce the HTML and JavaScript you see when you visit that website. It is a component of the Amazon business, and to Amazon it is extremely valuable, and to everyone else it would be almost worthless.

If someone has the idea for the next Amazon, as well as everything else you need beyond the idea, and tools like Supabase and Lovable allow them to get it off the ground, those tools are incredibly valuable to that person.

If someone’s ideas are worthless, their websites will be worthless.

[biztos]

Don’t get me wrong, I love Supabase, but

> you can vibe code a fully working UI+backend

…is gonna bring a lot of houses crashing down sooner or later.

[joshstrange]

I couldn't agree more. "Vibe coding" is pretty cool, but it's not sustainable at least with with current technology. You're much better off being a knowledgeable developer who can guide an an LLM to write code for you.

One thing I will agree on though is that LLMs make it easier to iterate or try ideas and see if they'll work. I've been doing that a ton in my projects where I'll ask an LLM to build an interface and then if I like it I'll clean it up and or rebuild it myself.

I doubt that I'll ever use Figma to design, it's just too foreign to me. But LLMs let me work in a medium that I understand (code) while iterating quickly and trying ideas that I would never attempt because I wouldn't and be sure if they'd work out and it would take me a long time to implement them visually.

Really, that's where LLMs shine for me. Trying out an idea that you would even be capable of doing, but it would take you a long time. I can't tell you how many scripts I've asked ChatGPT or similar to write that I am fully capable of writing, but the return on investment just would not be there if I had to write it all by by hand. Additionally, I will use them to write scripts to debug problems or analyze logs/files. Again, things that I am perfectly capable of doing but would never do in the middle of a production issue because they would take too long and wouldn't necessarily yield results. With an LLM, I feel comfortable trying it out because at worst I'd burn a minute or two of of time and at best I can save myself hours. The return on investment just isn't there if it would take me 30 minutes to write that script and only then find out if it was useful or not.

[namaria]

LLMs are better search. Google burned down the house to keep itself warm and held off on LLMs until it was inevitable and are now pulling up ahead. This is the logical conclusion. LLMs will be monetized and enshitified by ads.

[sakesun]

Soon, some free smart LLM code generators will stop generating certain outputs and instead suggest using commercial components that have paid for promotion.

[whstl]

The whole point of Supabase is not needing to vibe code the backend part.

PostgREST is quite boring, open source, proven tech.

[codr7]

So they say; I still haven't seen any high quality vibe coded software, and I'm pretty sure I never will.

[Aeolun]

I’ve seen tons of low quality successful software (concur anyone). Clearly being well built is not a requirement for success.

[ethbr1]

I'd split the difference and say the cons that low quality software creates only matter sometimes.

E.g. Concur is primarily feature-complete and will only ever need to evolve gradually.

So the drawbacks of being brittle, kludged-together, and incapable of making rapid feature changes doesn't really matter.

In some other products, that matters a huge deal.

So the tl;dr is, as always, optimize for the things that actually matter for your particular situation.

[itissid]

This can only be true of some products. Often there are a lot of concerns like privacy, white labeling, legal consequences that need to be considered _before_ you vibe code.

[giantrobot]

> We technical people always underestimate how fast things change when non-technical users can finally get things done without opening the hood.

This is good and bad. Non-technical users throwing up a prototype quickly is good. Non-technical users pushing that prototype into production with its security holes and non-obvious bugs is bad. It's easy for non-technical users to get a false sense of confidence if the thing they make looks good. This has been true since the RAD days of Delphi and VisualBasic.

[sally_glance]

Knowing the industry I'm pretty sure they will all push those AI prototypes to production - because they did the same with non-AI prototypes before. Now the question is once they inevitably pull in experienced folk for maintenance, refactoring and debugging, will it be easier or harder than working with that retired solo devs spaghetti codebase?

[giantrobot]

From looking at "vibe coding" tools their output is about the quality of bad body shop contractors. It's entirely possible for experienced devs to come in and fix it.

I think there's going to be the same problems as there are fixing bad body shop code. The companies that pushed their "vibe code" for a few dollars worth of AI tokens will expect people to work for pennies and/or have unreasonable time demands. There's also no ability to interview the original authors to figure out what they were thinking.

Meanwhile their customers are getting screwed over with data leaks if not outright hacks (depending on the app).

It's not a whole new issue, shitty contractors have existed for decades, but AI is pushing down the value of actual expertise.

[sally_glance]

Yeah, the current trend has lots of parallels to the low code/no code trend we had a couple of years back and the workflow engine trend we had about 15 years back... I'm curious why you think it would push down the value of engineering hours though, that didn't even happen in the past.

[nyarlathotep_]

> From looking at "vibe coding" tools their output is about the quality of bad body shop contractors.

Genuinely, it's a lot better.

[namaria]

I think this is just another correction. The software market is worth several trillion dollars now. Enterprise is pushing against the rise in labor costs. It will backfire as it did every single time and in a few years competent developers will be worth their weight in platinum.

For nearly 50 years now, software causes disruption, demand drives labor costs, enterprise responds with some silver bullet, haircuts in expensive suits collect bonuses, their masters pocket capital gains, and the chicken come home to roost with a cycle of disruption and labor cost increases. LLMs are being sold as disruption but it's actually another generation of enterprise tech. Hence the confusion. Vibe coding is just PR. Karpathy knows what he's doing.

[sally_glance]

50 years might be overstating it a bit, lookup tables/hash maps were a novelty back then and available compute resources increased by many orders of magnitude... So maybe we actually had some real enablers in the meantime. My gut feeling is the current AI hype is at least as revolutionary as search engines, marketplaces or social networks (not like recommendation engines or block chain). Though not as revolutionary as the loom or electricity

[yieldcrv]

I don't think its bad enough

Even us entrepreneurially minded technical devs cut corners on our personal projects that we just want to through a Stripe integration or Solana Wallet connect on

And large companies with FTC and DOJ involved data breaches just wind up offering credits to users as compensation

so for non-technical creators to get into the mix, this just expands how many projects there are that get big enough to need dedicated UX and engineers

[kangaroozach]

This suggests a strong need for AI powered code security review and patching as a compliment to Agentic coding platforms. Ideally, in parallel to your coding, it could scan your GitHub and output specific tasks for the Agentic AI to perform for you.

[sebastiennight]

> Non-technical users pushing that prototype into production with its security holes and non-obvious bugs is bad.

I beg to differ. Non-technical users pushing anything into production is GREAT!

For many, that's the only way they can get their internal tool done.

For many others, that's the only way they might get enough buyers and capital to hire a "real" developer to get rid of the security holes and non-obvious bugs.

I mean, it's not like every "senior developer" is immune from having obvious-in-retrospect security holes. Wasn't there a huge dating app recently with a glaring issue where you could list and access every photo and conversation ever shared, because nobody on their professional tech team secured the endpoints against enumeration of IDs?

[somebehemoth]

What about users who sign up for these insecure apps and have their data and possibly their identity stolen due to the misplaced trust? That this already happens is no excuse to encourage even less security by encouraging novices to believe they are experts.

I agree it is great that more people can build software, but let's not pretend there are zero downsides.

[conductr]

This is a contrived situation. Most of the apps in discussion see little to no use and go dead soon after launch. The vast majority are collecting little data of negligible risk.

If a user is confident enough about a no name company that they give them enough info to make identity theft a possibility, it was only a matter of time before a spammer/phishing attack gets them anyway

[Capricorn2481]

> Most of the apps in discussion see little to no use and go dead soon after launch

That's not convincing. Of the apps that do get used, the vibe-coded ones will likely be unsafe.

> If a user is confident enough about a no name company that they give them enough info to make identity theft a possibility

That's completely unrelated. You can give a company very little information. Any of it being leaked is unacceptable. You can find a lot from an email, or a phone number.

People are taught, by CNBC, by suits, by hacks, that you can trust the apps on your commercials and it will be fine. It likely won't be, and your response is exactly why. Many of you are apathetic to the idea of doing right by people.

So people are manipulated, and some of them are elderly and don't even understand how computers work. This is reason enough to care about what they are exposed to, not say "let's burn it all down with shitty vibe-coding because users are dumb anyway."

We're supposed to be better than this.

[conductr]

> Of the apps that do get used, the vibe-coded ones will likely be unsafe.

What's the threat though. As in, what's at risk. A leaked email address? Probably. Enough info to have your identity stolen as prior commenter had mentioned. Probably not.

> That's completely unrelated.

Umm, no, it's related due to the prior commenter claiming that was the risk in their contrived situation from prior post mentioning identity theft.

> Any of it being leaked is unacceptable. You can find a lot from an email, or a phone number.

Everyone's email has already been leaked somewhere. It's not private data. This is like saying your bank account number is confidential financial information and ignoring the fact it's printed on every check you write.

> Many of you are apathetic to the idea of doing right by people.

> We're supposed to be better than this.

I object by simply saying I'm just being realistic. Data leaks somewhere, everywhere, sometimes, always. You're choosing to live in a fantasy land where this doesn't happen as if it wasn't the very true state of the world long before vibe coding came along. Sure, it's not my ideal state. But it is the actual state of things. Get real.

[sebastiennight]

My feeling is that this is similar to saying, "non-professional AirBnB hosts are a terrible security nightmare, and the fact that people are not much safer in regulated hotels is no excuse to encourage even less security by encouraging novices to play in the hospitality business".

I agree with you on the downsides.

[namaria]

AirBnB externality is not the safety risk for guests (although I personally ended up in some sketchy situations years ago, I don't use it anymore, mainly because:) the real externality is imposed on the inhabitants of popular tourist destinations.

There was a reason the industry was regulated, and circumventing these reasons with an app has been a net negative to society.