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How and where will agents ship software?

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Re: How and where will agents ship software?

#51

Post by imiric »

stillpointlab wrote: post #42

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 kin…

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.

Re: How and where will agents ship software?

#52

Post by mjsweet »

imiric wrote: post #51
stillpointlab wrote: post #42

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 kin…

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 tha…

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.

Re: How and where will agents ship software?

#53

Post by ksri »

stopachka wrote: post #43
achierius wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you mind sharing the code, as well as prompts if you're comfortable? I'm trying to sample anecdata to help re-baseline my intuition on these things.

> as well as prompts if you're comfortable? This made me wonder: can I share Claude Code's conversation history? Turns Claude stores them. So I made a full-stack "snippet" app with Claude and Instant. You can: 1. Upload jsonl files 2. Share them in a nice UI (Going meta) here's the first conversation I had with Claude in order to build it: https://claude-code-viewer.vercel.app/view/c4ca91ac-9624-40f... After I deploy…

Claude code now has an /export command for this use case. You can run it from within a session.

Re: How and where will agents ship software?

#54

Post by stillpointlab »

imiric wrote: post #51
stillpointlab wrote: post #42

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 kin…

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 tha…

> Wouldn't his firm be better served by website builders like WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, etc

My understanding is the majority of his work is on WordPress. It's worth noting this is a partnership with 100+ clients, 5+ full time employees. They do television commercials, websites, banner ads, social media campaigns, etc. He is a partner at the firm and while he calls himself "non-technical" he does have experience with website design (HTML/CSS) and the administration of WordPress and databases.

To be clear: he was already delivering these kind of custom solutions to clients using contract programmers. He is well aware of requirements like authentication (in fact, our last conversation he mentioned a project he was working on that did just that). But previously, the cost of custom work was too high in some cases, since bringing on a contract programmer for certain kinds of projects pushed the budget out of range for the client. Vibe coding is opening up a new avenue for custom built functionality that was previously too expensive.

> I hope that he has the wisdom and humility

I notice this kind of thing frequently. I mean, who is lacking humility here? Someone thinking they have all of the facts, offering advice and "Why don't you just ..." kind of thinking based on assumptions. If you really think you can diagnose issues and offer advice based on the quick comment I made, you should reassess your own humility before recommending it to others.

Re: How and where will agents ship software?

#55

Post by stopachka »

ksri wrote: post #53
stopachka wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> as well as prompts if you're comfortable? This made me wonder: can I share Claude Code's conversation history? Turns Claude stores them. So I made a full-stack "snippet" app with Claude and Instant. You can: 1. Upload jsonl files 2. Share them in a nice UI (Going meta) here's the first conversation I had with Claude in order to build it: https://claude-code-viewer.vercel.app/view/c4ca91ac-9624-40f... After I deploy…

Claude code now has an /export command for this use case. You can run it from within a session.

TIL, thank you!

Re: How and where will agents ship software?

#56

Post by dingnuts »

stillpointlab wrote: post #54
imiric wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tha…

> Wouldn't his firm be better served by website builders like WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, etc My understanding is the majority of his work is on WordPress. It's worth noting this is a partnership with 100+ clients, 5+ full time employees. They do television commercials, websites, banner ads, social media campaigns, etc. He is a partner at the firm and while he calls himself "non-technical" he does have experience wi…

not to be rude, but WordPress is already a well known target for a lot of malicious behavior; assuming someone non technical is safely extending it with LLM generated authentication code is something that causes me, an industry professional, a certain amount of alarm

Re: How and where will agents ship software?

#57

Post by stillpointlab »

dingnuts wrote: post #56
stillpointlab wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wouldn't his firm be better served by website builders like WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, etc My understanding is the majority of his work is on WordPress. It's worth noting this is a partnership with 100+ clients, 5+ full time employees. They do television commercials, websites, banner ads, social media campaigns, etc. He is a partner at the firm and while he calls himself "non-technical" he does have experience wi…

not to be rude, but WordPress is already a well known target for a lot of malicious behavior; assuming someone non technical is safely extending it with LLM generated authentication code is something that causes me, an industry professional, a certain amount of alarm

Your comment isn't rude, but it is a bit close to concern trolling. (as in, "the action or practice of disingenuously expressing concern about an issue in order to undermine or derail genuine discussion.") "Won't somebody think of the local plumbers website!"

There is an assumption being made here that isn't being made explicit: the only way that malicious behavior can be avoided is by paying a programmer. Is that a valid assumption? Or the less strong: a plugin is less secure if developed by a coding agent when compared to any possible programmer. Is that a valid assumption? Aren't all of the well-known issues in WordPress plugins the fault of programmers?

What I feel in these comments isn't a genuine attempt to engage but rather Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) writ large.

Also, for what it is worth, the most recent project he developed was using React, Tailwind and Postgres (which he called "Post ... something?"). It was very work-flowy (user uploads a doc, it goes into a queue for manual review, once approved it is converted and uploaded to Google Docs, an email is sent, etc). I asked him if he had investigated any workflow builders and he said no, he just vibe coded it. It's also worth noting that he is paying for QA, I think that existed already in house for his other projects. Well, actually what he said was "it is currently in testing", so I can't confirm if it is professional QA.

Re: How and where will agents ship software?

#58

Post by stillpointlab »

stopachka wrote: post #48
stillpointlab wrote: post #42

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 kin…

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] htt…

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.

Re: How and where will agents ship software?

#59

Post by imiric »

stillpointlab wrote: post #54
imiric wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tha…

> Wouldn't his firm be better served by website builders like WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, etc My understanding is the majority of his work is on WordPress. It's worth noting this is a partnership with 100+ clients, 5+ full time employees. They do television commercials, websites, banner ads, social media campaigns, etc. He is a partner at the firm and while he calls himself "non-technical" he does have experience wi…

> Vibe coding is opening up a new avenue for custom built functionality that was previously too expensive.

I'm not debating that. What I am arguing for is for using these new tools smartly and conservatively, because they have and will continue to produce low quality software in hands of inexperienced developers. It's easy to be misled by their confident tone and the overhyped marketing around them into thinking that they're able to do things they realistically cannot. Those best practices you say that customers don't care about are precisely what help prevent quality issues from impacting them, regardless of the software complexity. Vibe coding throws all of that out the window. It's tempting to cut corners to keep the cost of projects down, but ignoring well established software development practices is not a safe way to do it.

> If you really think you can diagnose issues and offer advice based on the quick comment I made, you should reassess your own humility before recommending it to others.

I'm not offering advice. I'm going by what you said, and voicing a concern that the apparent utility of LLMs has some important caveats. I don't particularly care about your friend's firm nor their customers. What I do care about is that the widespread adoption of vibe coding is doing more harm than good to the software industry and society at large, which will have destructive consequences in the near future.

Instead of engaging with this argument and filling in any details I might be missing, you chose to attack me personally, which says more about you than me.

Re: How and where will agents ship software?

#60

Post by NitpickLawyer »

stopachka wrote: post #43
achierius wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you mind sharing the code, as well as prompts if you're comfortable? I'm trying to sample anecdata to help re-baseline my intuition on these things.

> as well as prompts if you're comfortable? This made me wonder: can I share Claude Code's conversation history? Turns Claude stores them. So I made a full-stack "snippet" app with Claude and Instant. You can: 1. Upload jsonl files 2. Share them in a nice UI (Going meta) here's the first conversation I had with Claude in order to build it: https://claude-code-viewer.vercel.app/view/c4ca91ac-9624-40f... After I deploy…

> It thought we had a `$startsWith` modifier. Right now we only have $like. But `$startsWith` is a great idea, we may just implement it real quick!

Haha, that's great. Turns out that "hallucinations" are just things that make sense in context, and that can translate to feature requests from our agents :)

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