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Old and new apps, via modern coding agents

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Re: Old and new apps, via modern coding agents

#131

Post by recursivedoubts »

acbart wrote: post #79
recursivedoubts wrote: post #40

Building visualizations with LLMs has been a major boost for my CS classes: 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.mont…

Regarding the changes to your grading weights: https://acbart.github.io/2026/04/19/proctored-grades/ Sounds like 50/50 for the distribution? That means you are okay with a student getting a 40% across all your quizzes and then passing the class with a C-?

That's not me, but I do weight 50/50.

My experience is that no students get a C- except for students who blow the first part of the class and try to work back. I usually work a deal out with them anyway.

Re: Old and new apps, via modern coding agents

#132

Post by clickety_clack »

luciana1u wrote: post #2

Terry Tao using coding agents to build apps means we're one step away from a Fields Medalist asking an LLM why his Docker container won't start, just like the rest of us.

We thought it would level us all up to equal the best of us, but instead it has leveled them down to within our reach.

Re: Old and new apps, via modern coding agents

#133

Post by jbs789 »

qup wrote: post #109
superb_dev wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The supply of software has already gone up, and most of the new stuff is close to useless

In 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.

Same experience here. I’m able to grow the business faster for sure.

Re: Old and new apps, via modern coding agents

#134

Post by weikju »

slopinthebag wrote: post #93
echelon wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 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 drasticall…

Most 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.

> 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 ;)

Re: Old and new apps, via modern coding agents

#137

Post by gopalv »

the__alchemist wrote: post #104
Aurornis wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using 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.

What format do you have it build? PNG? Svg? Open document drawing? I am interested.

I mostly use HTML, but it is much more flexible than what you would assume if you leverage some standard formats instead of building everything from scratch.

Mermaid, Graphviz and friends but in HTML pages.

Sometimes it is turning other things into perfetto.dev format for multi-machine tracking (like turn a build process into the same format as Chrome traces).

If you need more flexibility, you end up reaching for p5.js and three js (rather, tell the model to use it).

Once you're touching distance from WebGL, the equivalent of something you make can start looking like something from ciechanow.ski over a single weekend.

Re: Old and new apps, via modern coding agents

#139

Post by skipkey »

weikju wrote: post #134
slopinthebag wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most 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.

> 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,…

So 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.

Re: Old and new apps, via modern coding agents

#140

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

novaRom wrote: post #124
lacedeconstruct wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How 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

Have 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…

> 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.

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