Minimum Vibable Product… I’ll see myself out now
know what’s great for MVPs? language specific frameworks like ruby on rails.
runs like dog shit, but you can have a full fledged app in days or weeks instead of months.
AI can’t do that.
vibe coding is trash for MVPs… it’ll get you there, but as always the achilles heel of vibe coding is maintenance and bugs
vibe coding is great for a POC, but the defining difference between a POC and an MVP is that a POC is made to be thrown out, doesn’t have to work all the time (you can say “ah yup just need to give it a kick” when you’re showing it off and manually intervene)
vibe coding is good to show a basic, unmaintainable, non-production version of a feature of function, but then you need to take that and manually build it into your MVP - perhaps by copying some minor parts of the POC, but verifying every step
Even before that, it’s great for bouncing abstract ideas around for how you might go about defining that POC.
I just want to say that the V in this specific MVP wasn’t Viable
Damn, you really shouldn’t say that people of colour are made to be thrown out. That’s fucked up (/s)
or “oh yup, just need to give it a kick”
My experience working with a vibe coder hired by one of our clients is actually that’s it great for MAXIMUM VP, as in a viable product made up of just under 40k lines of typescript, plus 90+ Node libraries for an app that amounts to a login page, a Square payment gateway and a user settings page (it’s seriously just a signup page for a coastguard and weather alerts service that the rest of our team built in Python and Rust). It crashes if it can’t talk to a database server that hosts no actual databases. It crashes if it doesn’t have the Square API secrets as envars, but the LLM also hard coded them into the API calls. It actually crashes if you try to run it any way other than “npm run dev” (so I srsly set up a service that runs it as npm run dev, as the ubuntu user).
For the first time ever I did some vibe coding this week. I needed what amounts to putting a file in a folder and watch until a file in another folder appears, with a monitoring utility.
I was very impressed with the definition phase. It was a back and forth about the spec until it was what I wanted. I then let it built.
This was quite interesting. It set up a scaffold, wrote tests and ran the tests, fixing errors as it went, then went on to finalize the app. Magic.
Finally it was done, so I go in to play with it. Riddled with bugs. Try to get it to fix them. More bugs. End to end spend a morning doing all this until I gave up and manually wrote what I need in about an hour.
Conclusion: Vibe coding is a complete waste of time. Worse: in the wrong hands it is dangerous. You need to be a pretty damn good programmer to assess the output, and if you are, why the fuck would you use it in this manner?
It reminds me a bit about the no-code/low-code evangelism of some years ago. To the novice it looks magical and a world of possibilities, and the road to riches. But in reality you can only use those things if you have decent programming skills, otherwise it’s a path nowhere.
Need a quick demo? Sure, this might help the novice. Want something for production? Get a professional.
The thing about low code is the successful products in that field have their blocks built by experienced teams. I’ve heard of setting up low code apps via LLMs and that almost makes sense. They can only do as much damage as a bad project manager cosplaying a solution engineer, scrapping the whole exercise isn’t too bad, and they can be a nice demo for the client.
And these guys are coming to take our jobs. Watvh your back. /s
I don’t want to be that guy, but ‘s is for possession, or when it is short for “is”, like what’s or how’s being what is and how is. Just a plain s for plural, never ‘s. I don’t get how so many people get this wrong, it’s not that hard.
OP should have vibecoded the title, chatbots know how to use apostrophes.
There is technically a rule that allows for 's, and acronyms are one of the possible uses
Link, let’s see the security. 🤣 https://x.com/eito_miyamura/status/1966541235306237985
What the fuck is vibe coding?
it’s an allegory for using AI for development is akin to coding with a vibrator up your ass.
sure it’s fun and easy, but the end result is you smell like shit and you’re unable to work after you’ve been caught.
I laughed so hard at this
Telling an AI agent to code an app without knowing what the code does.
the most important thing then is to make a flashy website, and try to unleash that monstrosity unto the world
Minimum, sure.
Viable …
I going to point out the V wasn’t for Viable
It took me a minute to realize that “MVP” means “most valuable player” to most people.
Apparently I’ve been in tech far too long, and care about sports far too little.
I was looking at open-source app builder toolkits the other day and they’re all “ask an AI to build garbage” wrappers. There were way fewer options for toolkit-style visual app builders because those can’t be loosely slapped together in a couple weekends.
