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Your app subscription is now my weekend project

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Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#31

Post by mr_mitm »

kylecazar wrote: post #2

Yeah. Part of why this is possible is simply that there are tons of subscription apps out there that were never really justified in requiring a recurring payment and are actually fairly trivial. It used to be that you offer subscriptions only if there are ongoing costs, and a one-time payment if not (utilities, local, etc). SaaS kinda ruined that. I'd welcome a boom in DIY vibe-coded utilities for personal use.

What I fear is a pollution of the open source space with tons of tailored apps that have a lot of overlap, but none of them get meaningful contributions because the maintainer will most likely respond with wontfix to almost everything (if they respond at all).

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#32

Post by ribice »

I did this recently at the company I work at. Someone suggested GitBook, I 'Vibe coded' an internal docs website in under and hour. Does what we need, looks good. Unless the app has a large community/network and is just a SaaS with some offering, it'll be very easy to replace it.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#34

Post by 3D30497420 »

I'm doing something very similar (creating my own apps for personal use), but I'm creating iOS apps primarily.

Here's what bugs me: I cannot permanently install my apps to my iPhone because of Apple's walled garden. I need to reinstall every 7 days and constantly re-confirm that I am a "Trusted" developer.

I know I can pay Apple 100 USD a year for a developer account, but I bought this phone outright 7 years ago, I own it. (Obviously, I clearly don't in this case.) /rant

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#35

Post by zith »

ribice wrote: post #32

I did this recently at the company I work at. Someone suggested GitBook, I 'Vibe coded' an internal docs website in under and hour. Does what we need, looks good. Unless the app has a large community/network and is just a SaaS with some offering, it'll be very easy to replace it.

It's interesting, because a few years ago I would have put this strictly under the "not invented here" fallacy, where we'd now be stuck maintaining another project for the foreseeable future. I used to press pretty hard to avoid it.

Now I wonder if the maintenance cost for this type of internal system has gone down to a level where that is no longer an issue.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#36

Post by 3D30497420 »

philipwhiuk wrote: post #26
Shank wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But as the models get better and the quality of the output will match the quality of the established SaaS but tailor the whole thing to a single user with the ability to make any change they can imagine within minutes, and perhaps deploy to Hetzner and whatnot where they could host all of those apps for a single $5 instead, the exodus will accelerate. I do think you're vastly overestimating people's ability to writ…

It will be interesting to see if Apple/Android provide a platform for vibe-apps. It's somewhat like the Shortcuts system on steroids.

> It will be interesting to see if Apple/Android provide a platform for vibe-apps.

It would be interesting, particularly for Apple, as this would cannibalize fees charged on the App Store. I imagine they could charge for use of the vibe-coding platform, but Apple hasn't been great at figuring out LLMs.

It would be cool if 3rd partly app platform could provide this functionality, but as I noted in another comment, I cannot even install my own vibe-coded apps to my own iPhone. (Without the 100 USD a year developer tax.) So I'm not sure how the architecture would work on iOS.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#37

Post by phyzix5761 »

Has anyone tried, on a large scale, designing the architecture of an application or writing behavioral tests (which effectively is designing the app through testing) and given the LLM the task of writing the implementation details?

Does that work better for maintainability than letting it decide on its own what the architecture should look like?

If so, what is your setup/workflow?

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#39

Post by 3D30497420 »

philipwhiuk wrote: post #23

I think there's still an underestimated burden to vibe-coding an app for a non-software engineer. I'm not recommending my parents vibe-code apps to solve problems, so I think the market is smaller. But Roberto's use-case is definitely more sane than most.

With the current tech, I agree this will still be pretty niche. I'm vibe-coding my own iOS apps, and it still needs a decent understanding of the tech and a willingness to put up with a lot of rough edges.

However, with a proper framework (e.g., a very opinionated design system, the ability to choose from some pre-designed structures/flows, etc.) I could very much see ad hoc creation of software becoming more widespread.

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