One big question I have, in the era of Claude Code (and advancements yet to come) — is why should a hacker submit to using tools behind a SaaS offering … when one can just roll their own tools? I may be mistaken, but I don’t think there is any sort of moat here.
Truly — this is an excellent and accessible idea (bravo!), but if I can whittle away at a free and open source version, why should I ever consider paying for this?
This is exactly what I thought when picking a customer support software last month. After hiring my first support person and being unable to decide between Intercom/Front/HelpScout/Zendesk I finally just vibe coded my own helpdesk in a few days with the just the features I needed - perfectly integrated into my SaaS, and best of all, free.
Doesn't the vibe coded solution just mean you need to spend time maintaining that code that isn't your core business? Unless a bespoke customer support is crucial to it?
Yes, but the cost of building and maintaining code has gone down so fast that it might actually be worth it. Plus, we get bespoke features that we would never get otherwise. And you have to spend developer time maintaining a good integration with an external product anyway.
The cost of maintaining code has absolutely not gone down and every line of code is tech debt
The big issue with AI coding is that is kills the fun part of software development (actually writing code) and just becomes reviewing and understanding code you didn't write
“Kills the fun part of coding” - absolutely not! Coding is a lot more fun now that I can move from idea to working prototype in an evening without having to figure out individual libraries, research and learn them etc. The last time I felt this excited / into tech was when I first discovered Ruby on Rails and started using it for projects.
I’ve done several projects that would take months to complete otherwise with “vibes coding”, including: an African fairy tale generator for my daughter, a farm management system for the ministry of agriculture in my country, a Gambian political comic strip creator, a system that generates ten minutes summary podcasts of all my country’s news etc. I’ve also had great success with clients - and got them to sign on much faster - by just putting together a quick demo now that I show them instead of sending a proposal and pitch deck describing what I’ll build for them. It makes them so much more excited and we can make changes almost in realtime.
I’ve noticed a lot in the industry and even on hn, that coders - especially long time ones - tend to “look down” on vibes coding, the same way they did with scripted languages back in the day, and I imagine the same way with compilers. I think this will generally fade out as it becomes industry standard, but in the meantime sometimes I see comments on hn that are so discouraging and cynical it makes me wonder if the person actually tried it out or had just pre judged it. I also think the phrase “vibe coding” is a terrible name, cause it makes it sound like a lazy way of doing things. It’s so much more than that, and lets you think and plan at the idea level. Things like planning your system before you ask it to implement also help a lot.
Keep your manual Porsche for weekend drives. Get a adaptive cruise lane assist camry for real work.
Every line of code is tech debt, true. Every integration is orders of magnitude more tech debt. The only time an integration wasn't tech debt was when I set up new relic logging.
Yes it's just a wrapper on top of Gmail with Inbox Zero philosophy (each email is a support ticket). I only needed 3 features for my helpdesk:
1. an AI email drafter which used my product docs and email templates as context (eventually I plan to add "tools" where the AI can lookup info in our database)
2. a simple email client with a sidebar with customer contextual info (their billing plan, etc.) and a few simple buttons for the operator to take actions on their account
3. A few basic team collaboration features, notes, assigning tickets to operators, escalating tickets...
It took about 2 days to build the initial version, and about 2 weeks to iron out a number of annoying AI slop bugs in the beginning. But after a month of use it's now pretty stable, my customer support hire is using it and she's happy.
Very cool, thanks. Somewhat related I vibed up a simple docs/support chat bot that uses the markdown files for an astro starlight docs (all of these similar chat bot tools are like $50 a month): https://star-support-demo.vercel.app/en/getting-started
what's the advantage of vibetunnel? And which central server is required? Vibe tunnel still sounds like "ssh into your machine from your phone", or is there something I'm missing?
Not the op, but I think about that. Here's what I came to, for the moment:
* LLM's are lousy at bugs
* Apps are a bit like making a baby. Fun in the moment, but a lifetime support commitment
* Supporting software isn't fun, even with an LLM. Burnout is common in open source.
* At the end of the day, it is still a lot of work, even guiding an LLM
* Anything hosted is a chore. Uptime, monitoring, patching, backing up, upgrading, security, legal, compliance, vulnerabilities
I think we'll see github littered with buggy, unsupported, vibe coded one-offs for every conceivable purpose. Now, though, you literally have no idea what you're looking at or if it is decent.
Claude made four different message passing implementations in my vibe coded app.
I realized this once it was trying to modify the wrong one during a fix. In other words, claude was falling over trying to support what it made, and only a dev could bail it out. I am perfectly capable of coding this myself, but you have two choices at the moment--invest the labor, or get crap. But, then we come to "maybe I should just pay for this instead of burning my time and tokens."
In regards to the duplication of code — yes I’ve found this to be a tremendous problem.
One technique which appears to combat this is to do “red team / blue team Claude”
Red team Claude is hypercritical, and tries to find weaknesses in the code. Blue team Claude is your partner, who you collaborate with to setup PRs.
While this has definitely been helpful for me finding “issues” that blue team Claude will lie to you about — hallucinations are still a bit of an issue. I mostly put red team Claude into ultrathink + task mode to improve the veracity of its critiques.
Thanks! I think the main reason to pay right now would be for convenience. A user wouldn't have to worry about hosting their own frontend/backend and building their own mobile app. And eventually, we want to have different agent providers host their agents for use on our platform, but that's further out.
Correct - but if this is such a game changer in development speed and the market is already validated that this kind of platform is useful then step 1 is build enough of a clone of the platform to start iterating with it and then ... TO THE MOON! It's entirely a having-the-best-vision moat, which is a moat, but one that's principally protected by trademark lawsuits.
The answer here might be: "you're not our market" (which is totally fine! but slightly confusing, because presumably people _using agents like Claude Code_ are ... more advanced than the uninitiated)
Yeah, I would say that most Claude Code users are pretty technical, but I was surprised to see that there's a decent number of non-technical users using Claude Code to completely vibe code applications for their personal use. Those users seem to love tools like Codex (the openai cloud UI one, not the CLI) and things like Omnara, where there's no setup
I mean, you could say this about almost literally any software product ever to be honest. Feel free I guess? People like to pay for convenience and support so they don’t have to build everything themselves.
This doesn't contribute to the conversation ... without further elaboration on what your point is, I'm assuming that you're pointing out that my question is analogous to previous (good to ask!) questions about market and user model for an "eventually very big" application.
Not very enlightening: just because Dropbox became big in one environment, doesn't mean the same questions aren't important in new spaces.
So every time someone comes around with a sentence like 'but if I can whittle away at a free and open source version, why should I ever consider paying for this?', the answer will be that Dropbox thread ;-)
Truly — this is an excellent and accessible idea (bravo!), but if I can whittle away at a free and open source version, why should I ever consider paying for this?