Even if there is a "fully vibe-coded" product that has real customers, the fact that it's vibe-coded means that others can do the same. Unless you have a secret LLM or some magical prompts that make the code better/more efficient than your competitions, your vibe coded product has no advantage over competition and no moat. What actually matters is everything else -- user experience (which requires hours of meetings and usability studies), integration with own/other people's products, business, marketing, sales etc, much of which you can't vibe code your way to success.
But that's precisely why you don't hear about these products: the creators don't disclose that they were vibe-coded, because if they do, that invites competition.
I personally know of four vibe-coded products that generate over $10k/mo. Two of them were made by one friend, one was made by another, and the last one by my cousin. None of these people are developers. But they are making real money.
I'm afraid your numbers are not any more informative or useful than mine.
I think you are strawmanning what "vibe coders" do when they build stuff. It's not simple one-shot generation of eg twitter clones, it's really just iterative product development through an inconsistently capable/spotty LLM developer. It's not really that different from a product manager hiring some cheap developer and feeding them tasks/feature requests. By the way, competitors can hire those and chip away at your moat too!
> Unless you have a secret LLM or some magical prompts that make the code better/more efficient than your competitions, your vibe coded product has no advantage over competition and no moat
This is just not true, and you kind of make my point in the next sentence: many companies competitive advantages come from distribution, trust, integration, regulatory, marketing/sales, network effects. But also, vibe coding is not really about prompts so much as it is product iteration. Anybody product can be copied already, yet people still make way more new products than direct product clones anyway, because it's usually more valuable to go to market with stronger, more focused, or more specialized/differentiated software than a copy.
It's very difficult to unseat those incumbents, especially those with strong network effects.
Plus the people that work in those larger companies are not at the edge of AI coding at all and not motivated to rock the boat
> People on larger companies are not at the edge of AI coding
False Microsoft is all in with Copilot, and I can't believe the company that created Copilot doesn't use it internally, I'd rather say they should be the ones that would know how to master it! Yet no better vscode, still bloated teams etc etc
Not according to a Zed team member, in these very comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46522437
It's a fair question how much AI is accelerating the development of Zed, but I can say that I've been impressed with the speed they are shipping at.
Why do you assume that Microsoft would focus on building a better (to you) VSCode or less bloated Teams?
I assume they'd use Github Copilot to make a more profitable VSCode and Teams, which doesn't require focusing on speed and bloat.
Oh, and remember, the iPhone was revolutionary but it was diffused so slowly into the greater economy, the impact on global GDP was basically negligent. Actually, almost all the perceived grandiose tech jumps did not magically produce huge GDP gains overnight.
When it comes to objectivity, people with your line of thinking is what I try to avoid, as it is clear you feel threatened by the progress of coding tools. That link doesn't change much about what I said, or for that matter, what you said. You were commenting on the lack of a killer app, and I just said it may be diffusing slowly in different ways.
You are fixating on the "whole narrative" because you feel threatened - rightfully so, but again, that type of hyperbole doesn't belong in a constructive and grounded conversation about the impact AI may or may not have.
see "How much work can be fully delegated to Claude?": "Although engineers use Claude frequently, more than half said they can “fully delegate” only between 0-20% of their work to Claude"
There won't be anything like you're asking for, even the vendors themselves (they'll be the most positive and most enthousiastic about using it) can't do this with them.
Obviously there's improvement in the models and tooling, but the debate seems very artificial.
However, I think the biggest thing is the replacement of products. We are in a place where he talked about replacing two products his wife was using with custom software. I personally have used LLMs to build things that are valuable for me that I just don't have time for otherwise.
And funnily enough there are products and tools that are essentially less bloated slack/discord. Have you heard of https://stoat.chat/ (aka revolt) or https://pumble.com/ or https://meet.jit.si/? If not I would guess it's for one of two reasons: not caring enough about these problems to even go looking for them yourself, or their lack of "bloatedness" resulting in them not being a mature/fully featured enough product to be worth marketing or adopting.
If you'd like to see a product mostly made with agents/for agents you can check out mine at https://statue.dev/ - we're making a static site generator with a templating and component system paired with user-story driven "agentic workflows" (~blueprints/playbooks for common user actions like "I need to add a new page and list it on the navbar" or "create a site from the developer portfolio template personalized for my github").
I would guess most other projects are probably in a similar situation as we are: agentic developer tools have only really been good enough to heavily use/build products around for a few months, so it's a typical few-month-old project. But agents definitely made it easier to build.
The people who actually pay for slack and discord (eg enterprises that need workplace chat app and decided to go with the "gold standard", consumers with discord servers and such) need the features/tradeoffs choosing featuers over efficiency causing that bloat. They just don't all need the exact same set of those features as the other customers. So because customers are willing to pay for all these features the product tries to ship all of them and becomes bloated.
> Every person I talked to that uses Excel hate how slow it is
But do they make the purchasing decisions behind using Excel?
To be clear I am not really arguing that bloat/overly enterprisey products are good. What I mean that you don't see the world exploding with more elegant products now with agents for the same reason you didn't see the world exploding with them before agents either: the people who pay for those products and build them for a living are not incentivized or necessarily even rewarded for choosing to make them more efficient or elegant when there are other things that customers are asking for with more $$$ behind them.
For one thing most enterprises and many individuals have an Office 365 subscription to access Office programs which are less offensive than Excel so they aren't going to save any money by dropping Excel.
On top of it the "killer" would probably not be one product aimed at one market but maybe a few different things. Some people could use "visual pandas" for instance, something that today would be LLM-infused. Other people could use a no-code builder for calculations. The kind of person who is doing muddled and confused work with Excel wouldn't know which "killer" they needed or understand why decimal math would mean they always cut checks in the right amount.
We should expect the decreased difficulty of creating software to drive down prices.
And here we go again, if difficulty has been decreased so much, where are the fixes or the products?
Still early, but iterating really fast!
Opus was out only few months, and it will take time to get this new wave to market. i can assure you my team become way more productive because of opus. not a single developer but an etnire team.
