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Your app subscription is now my weekend project

rselbach.com

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Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#81

Post by 0hw0t »

3rodents wrote: post #44

Software is a manifestation of someone’s knowledge of and experience in and ideas about how a thing should work. We learn from the software we use, we benefit from everyone else’s ideas, we benefit from the hundreds and thousands of hours other people put into understanding a problem to design a solution. My workflow is better because of the incremental improvements made by developer after developer year after year.…

Your entire post is self selection bias and survivorship bias.

SWE field is one of the most cognitive dissonant social groups; cries foul at the slightest whiff their free speech and agency is being put upon; seeks to reduce blockers to their productivity, fewer PMs! Less management!

Now complains about users using their machines without having to block on an SWE.

Insert that quote about how someone will not see the obvious if their paycheck relies on them ignoring the obvious.

Here come LLMs and all they can accomplish with a few arithmetical rules instead of the arbitrary semantics of an SWE; watch as SWEs block social evolution away from disrupting software engineers.

As an example; "protected memory", among many other individual software problems, is an access control problem mired in old semantics relative to OS monoliths.

Didn’t see you all halting as you decimated travel agent jobs, retail jobs, etc etc. Technology advancement must now stand still after centuries of evolution? The self selection bias is as obvious as Trump's.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#83

Post by falloutx »

kixiQu wrote: post #82
demorro wrote: post #80

I'm surprised people were paying for software like this, and with subscriptions no less.

Yeah, a little bespoke editor is exactly the kind of thing I'd've been happy to fork over a one-time cost for, but never a subscription. Interesting!

why even pay for that, just use a free model from Opencode, most of them are pretty good for simple tasks. I haven't paid a cent in vibe coding for ages.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#84

Post by pixl97 »

0hw0t wrote: post #81
3rodents wrote: post #44

Software is a manifestation of someone’s knowledge of and experience in and ideas about how a thing should work. We learn from the software we use, we benefit from everyone else’s ideas, we benefit from the hundreds and thousands of hours other people put into understanding a problem to design a solution. My workflow is better because of the incremental improvements made by developer after developer year after year.…

Your entire post is self selection bias and survivorship bias. SWE field is one of the most cognitive dissonant social groups; cries foul at the slightest whiff their free speech and agency is being put upon; seeks to reduce blockers to their productivity, fewer PMs! Less management! Now complains about users using their machines without having to block on an SWE. Insert that quote about how someone will not see the…

>Didn’t see you all halting as you decimated travel agent jobs, retail jobs, etc etc.

You have to remember that SWE's are the same group that screams "communism" the first moment you mention the word union and they should have the right to make as much money as possible with no restrictions.

This of course leads to the obvious lack of self reflection in their responses when something threatens their future income.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#85

Post by pixl97 »

wolfcola wrote: post #69
Shank wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not irrational on the part of the developer -- I've definitely felt this too. The problem comes from the fact that practically everyone has subscription fatigue these days, and each of us probably has only a few pieces of software we truly care about enough to want to support them out of the goodness of our hearts. But everyone wants us to pay $10/mo. It just isn't sustainable from a consumer perspective.

And so the solution is… paying Anthropic $200/mo…

"Man, it kind of sucks that LLM only does one thing and that my compiled applications stop working after I turn off my LLM service"

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#86

Post by pixl97 »

mr_mitm wrote: post #31
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).

Shrug, it's hard to have an open app where everyone wants to add/change something and not have it turn into a Turing machine that attempts to do everything.

Sometimes you just want an app does X and Y, but not A, B and Z.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#87

Post by pixl97 »

theshrike79 wrote: post #60
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…

Depends on how you define "production". People in general would recoil in horror if they knew how many essential operations are backed by a mess of Excel sheets with formulas and VBA nobody understands anymore. All it needs is the maker mindset of being just lazy enough to be bothered by a repetitive task and the courage (and permission) to use an Agentic LLM to figure out a fix for the issue.

Eh, that really depends on how well the LLM understands edge cases of the particular need. Quite often these cases are hidden deep in files nobody understands any longer and will never get in a training set.

You end up with a system that works right up to the moment it doesn't and fails spectacularly and expensively.

This is one of those reasons you always hear about sweeping medical/hospital records systems being upgraded going tens or hundreds of millions over budget. The edge cases are demons.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#88

Post by hahn-kev »

Bishonen88 wrote: post #7
Shank wrote: post #5

First of all, I’m skeptical about these being free. Time isn’t free, and the tokens to make these projects certainly weren’t free. Second of all, all of these SaaS apps that don’t actually have a need for recurring charge probably should be paid one time. I don’t use Loom — I use CleanShot X and it was a one-time $30 payment and has a lot of great features I benefit from. I can’t reimplement it in $30 of tokens or $3…

Most apps rationale for subscriptions is "Ongoing development" without an option like jetbrains etc. to fall back to a perpetual license. In practice, regardless of whether an app needs ongoing development or not, this is the best way to try to guarantee continuous income and make a living off of a project I guess. Perhaps LLM's will force developers/companies to change their stance and to stop users from recreating…

I think that's where technical issues come in. For a web based SaaS app it's not worth the devs time to make multiple versions available. Even for local apps, I would say most of them have some functionality tied to an API and now you're back to running multiple versions of that server.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#89

Post by pixl97 »

lawtalkinghuman wrote: post #55
hahahahhaah wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right but most of the time, in my experience they keep the lights on.

Keeping the lights on is fine. But if they remove a feature I rely on, I can't put it back. If they add a feature I hate, I can't remove it. If they jack the price up, I have no real solution to this. If they move features I rely on from the standard tier to the 5x more expensive pro tier, I have no real solution to this. Why, yes, this is an echo of the old argument for open source software.

Yep. At one point I expected the software I needed to work for a reasonable time range, possibly up to a decade. Best if you could buy it once and use it from then on.

Now crap has turned into revenue sucking subscriptions, at most yearly licensing, feature flutter. And the worst is being bought up by VC/PE and milked for anything useful and thrown away.

Re: Your app subscription is now my weekend project

#90

Post by shadowgovt »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #68
Shank wrote: post #5

First of all, I’m skeptical about these being free. Time isn’t free, and the tokens to make these projects certainly weren’t free. Second of all, all of these SaaS apps that don’t actually have a need for recurring charge probably should be paid one time. I don’t use Loom — I use CleanShot X and it was a one-time $30 payment and has a lot of great features I benefit from. I can’t reimplement it in $30 of tokens or $3…

How are you completely disregarding the data integrity and privacy aspects of rolling your own tools? I vibecode an app that only I use and store data locally. That means my data never leaves my device, I never have to share my email with anyone, never have to enter my credit card info anywhere You buy SaaS and you have to then login, share credit card info, and have your data stored in the cloud somewhere with godkn…

To my mind, this is the huge bit that should not be overlooked.

So much infrastructure is there to support doing "it" in the Cloud, for all definitions of "it." If we can vibe-code bespoke one-offs to solve our problems, a lot of that Cloud interaction goes away... And that stuff is expensive and complicated.

Hypothetically, open source app stores (I'm counting apt here) address this, but then it's someone else's solution to my problem, which doesn't quite fit my problem perfectly.

This approach to software engineering could be what 3D printing is to tangible artifacts (and I mean that including the limits of 3D printing regarding tangible artifacts, but even still.)

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