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Show HN: I quit coding years ago. AI brought me back

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Re: Show HN: I quit coding years ago. AI brought me back

#331

Post by Workaccount2 »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #321

>> The problem? Every compound interest calculator online is terrible. Ugly interfaces, ads covering half the screen, can't customize compounding frequency properly, no year-by-year breakdowns. I've tried so many. They all suck. While you can't do anything about (other peoples') interfaces, you can absolutely do something for ads. You can install an ad-blocker on your browser. This is not just for you, OP, it's for e…

Using an ad blocker just shifts the cost of creating/providing content onto people not using ad blockers.

The enshitification of the internet is largely driven by people ad blocking, as is incentivizes more click bait, more ads, and sloppier cheap content.

For engineering/software related content, the impact is immense since the audience is largely people ad blocking. I won't name names, because they fear backlash from their "ad block is awesome" audience, but some well known youtubers in the hard nerdy tech space report 40-50% of views they receive no compensation for.

So you can evangelize how great it is to not have to compensate for content, but don't think it's some kind of everyone wins victory. It's just a cost shift onto someone else, which largely manifests as bad content being needed to cover costs.

The correct approach is paying for what you use, and avoiding ad-supported content to send the message that you want a paid option.

Re: Show HN: I quit coding years ago. AI brought me back

#332

Post by sirtaj »

agentultra wrote: post #325

Sorry for yucking into everyone's yum here but... did we miss an opportunity here as programmers to provide simpler tools for people to build simple applications for themselves? Since when did "average" people have time to set up a CI pipeline, agents, MCPs, and all the rest needed to get vibe coded apps to work become the "simple" way for non-programmers to use computers to mush some data together for their small bu…

Visual Basic scratched this itch for anyone who was willing to spend roughly the time learning it as, say, becoming basically proficient at Excel. But the ship appears to have sailed for that kind of RAD development.

Re: Show HN: I quit coding years ago. AI brought me back

#334

Post by Workaccount2 »

This is great, but it misses one thing:

The software paradigm is changing.

People don't need a calculator website anymore. They can just prompt their own AI account to generate whatever calculator they need in the moment. I already have a few pinned in my favorites that I use often.

That is the real promise of AI driven software. Bespoke tiny apps available to anyone whenever they simply just ask for it.

Re: Show HN: I quit coding years ago. AI brought me back

#335

Post by bwat49 »

agentultra wrote: post #325

Sorry for yucking into everyone's yum here but... did we miss an opportunity here as programmers to provide simpler tools for people to build simple applications for themselves? Since when did "average" people have time to set up a CI pipeline, agents, MCPs, and all the rest needed to get vibe coded apps to work become the "simple" way for non-programmers to use computers to mush some data together for their small bu…

LLMs are far more flexible in what you can create, opening up many niche use cases for non programmers (or those with very limited programming experience).

For example, I use LLMs for one specific thing, making plugins for an app I use (which need to be written in javascript/typescript). No code tools wouldn't be of any use to me here.

No code tools put you in a box that limits what you can create, whereas LLMs allow you to code pretty much anything (though of course how far you can get does depend on having at least some technical ability/knowledge).

Re: Show HN: I quit coding years ago. AI brought me back

#336

Post by internet2000 »

agentultra wrote: post #325

Sorry for yucking into everyone's yum here but... did we miss an opportunity here as programmers to provide simpler tools for people to build simple applications for themselves? Since when did "average" people have time to set up a CI pipeline, agents, MCPs, and all the rest needed to get vibe coded apps to work become the "simple" way for non-programmers to use computers to mush some data together for their small bu…

> Sorry for yucking into everyone's yum here but... did we miss an opportunity here as programmers to provide simpler tools for people to build simple applications for themselves?

It's not that programmers should've made tools with training wheels, but that the regular programmer tools exploded in complexity. Microservices, Kubernetes, etc. Not saying those don't have their places, but they've made programming less approachable.

Re: Show HN: I quit coding years ago. AI brought me back

#337

Post by meetingthrower »

SPICLK2 wrote: post #261
meetingthrower wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vibecoder here. I don't think so. I am a PE investor, and we are using it in our small portfolio companies to great effect. We can make small little mini-apps that do one thing right and help automate away extra work. It's a miracle. Simply wouldn't have been done before. I think we'll see an explosion of software in small and midsize companies. I admit it may be crappy software, but as long as the scope is small - w…

>an explosion of software in small and midsize companies For me, that is nightmare fuel. We already have too much software! And it's all one framework or host app version update away from failure.

But this nightmare is ALREADY true, except that software is a spreadsheet. Or a piece of paper on someone's desk. Or an email that someone is supposed to send every day.... Yes it's an absolute nightmare to maintain if you built a fortune 500 off of it. But for a 100 person company that is 95% blue collar workers, this is fine. And better.

Re: Show HN: I quit coding years ago. AI brought me back

#338

Post by sodafountan »

solumunus wrote: post #59
j1436go wrote: post #56

Happy for everyone who enjoys it. For me it's the opposite: AI everywhere sucks the joy out of it and I'm seriously starting to consider a career shift after roughly 10 years of writing code for a living.

There seems to be two camps of people: those who love the coding and those who love delivering value/solutions. I am in the latter camp. The happy consumer and the polished product is what gives me satisfaction, the code is just really a vehicle from A to B. It’s a shame for anyone in the first camp who wants a career.

And yet, there's still room for people who love to code to do great work. Look at bun for instance https://bun.com/. It's a JavaScript runtime that dramatically improves on the performance of node.js to the point where it will likely completely deprecate it in the coming years. It does so many things right out of the box, but it's essentially just an incremental improvement in the development world.

I think AI-augmented development will lead to faster and vastly improved software over the years. This isn't just a space that's being disrupted on the maker/creator side of developing software. And from a makers/creators point of view, you wouldn't even need to keep up with the latest trends like performance, AI should just know which libraries are the best to use to develop your solutions.

Re: Show HN: I quit coding years ago. AI brought me back

#339

Post by meetingthrower »

svieira wrote: post #259
meetingthrower wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vibecoder here. I don't think so. I am a PE investor, and we are using it in our small portfolio companies to great effect. We can make small little mini-apps that do one thing right and help automate away extra work. It's a miracle. Simply wouldn't have been done before. I think we'll see an explosion of software in small and midsize companies. I admit it may be crappy software, but as long as the scope is small - w…

> excel sheets Funnily enough, Excel is the quintessential example of a fourth generation language, IDE, and database and it's the only one aside from SQL which actually succeeded from its time period. It's software, just like what you're building now, and just like what you're building now there are good points and bad points about it. The tradeoffs are different between the JS / Python code you're likely spinning u…

100% correct. Wonderful and we will still use it for most use cases. But for stuff where it is just not needed or should be automated, we can now make some amazing tools. (Just like the VBA coders of old.)

Re: Show HN: I quit coding years ago. AI brought me back

#340

Post by sarchertech »

aenis wrote: post #256
djeastm wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you not fear that future/advanced AI will be able to look at a vibe-coded codebase and make sensible refactors itself? That's my worry. Might be put off a few years, but still...

But its already the present. For what I am vibing my normal work process is: build a feature until it works, have decent test coverage, then ask Claude to offer a code critique and propose refactoring ideas. I'd review them and decide which to implement. It is token-heavy but produces good, elegant codebases at scales I am working on for my side projects. I do this for every feature that is completed, and have it mai…

> I thought I was a decent good coder, programmer and architect. Now, I find the code Claude/Opus 4.5 generates for me to be in general of higher quality then anything I ever made myself.

I have about the same experience as you do and experience using Opus 4.5.

If this is true, you weren’t a very good programmer. There’s much more to code quality than refactoring working code.

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