Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | close2's commentslogin

Purely reasoned rant of vibe coded clones.

Here are 2 quotes, which give you a pretty good idea about the whole article:

> They’re spending minimum $2K to vibe code a Photoshop competitor when Affinity Photo is free and Photoshop costs $200 a year. Not very smart economics.

and

> Instead of hurling hate speech and bile at thousands of software engineers who lead innovation at large companies (Adobe, Autodesk, Maxxon, Celsys, and others), show them some gratitude for their efforts. They are the engineers who innovate and everyone else follows.


Heh - good choices. Seems like a poorly reasoned article then.

Accepting the premise of 2000$ spent (I doubt it), the author completely forgets that the collectively saved amount far exceeds the 200$ of a single subscription.

Anyway, if I worked at Adobe, or any company with roughly the same business model, I definitely would feel nervous about now. And I still feel sympathy for the devs. But let’s be honest, Adobe principally benefits its shareholders and other dead weight, not so much the developers.


There’s no way you or anyone else actually thinks that first point is rational right?

That price comparison makes no sense. Users aren’t each paying $2,000 to use the alternative. It’s already paid and now free to use. People can chip in some money and time to contribute and build off the existing work to improve it.

How could anyone read that and think that’s a good point?


So Jensen was right and math is not needed any more ?

You know, like you can vibecode the thing once for a fixed price and then many people ca use it for free, for ever.


You forgot about "if you use discord your are a pedophile"

I suspect most of these projects are started by people who get Claude Code at work, and just want to make sure that they spend all of their tokens before the weekly reset. In that case, cost is not relevant.

The project the blog post is attacking is Artcraft, spearheaded by HN's most vocal AI evangelist zealot. He's stated that he's financing the thing with the revenue from his $3, no $4, no $5M/year AI image generator.

Which is why the salient part of the post is "Unless your intention is just to generate headlines and promote an AI business." Because that's exactly what this is. A cynical scheme to draw attention to his commercial services.


I am surprised this hasn't already existed.

Switchdev is 12 to 15 years old. I can't follow you

they do contain strong magnets which are, IMO, worth salvaging.


A long time ago I would collect the magnets before discarding. Then it occurred to me that I've never had any use for them, so they were just more junk in a box.

They're cool, but I don't bother anymore - usually when I need neodymium magnets I need a specific size or shape anyway.


You are left behind. That's like saying: "I am using punch cards for programming and I feel left behind as others are using real-time IDEs" You don't need to vibe code (and even this is only a matter of time as llms become better and better), but not using AI at all will definitely leave you behind.


As an AI user you're not that different from the punch cards programmer.

You're more like a cobbler who adopted some new electrical tools for their craft, and feel smug against backwards cobblers using manual tools, while in the meantime the newer versions of those tools in the form of factory automation move in to make the whole craft obsolete.


This analogy may well be very apposite.

But what is that cobbler supposed to do during that time? He can keep his head above water using the machine, suspecting the factory is coming for him too or ... he can refuse to modernise and fail now as others outperform him?

"Stop the factory being built" is not within his power.


>But what is that cobbler supposed to do during that time?

Optimally? Move to the best available trade that appears not to be deprecated for a good 50 years in the future, and in which they'd hire someone of his background.


And this is why I’m considering retraining as an electrician :)


"Becoming an engineering manager will leave you unemployed"


It very well may. Quite a few among those that have been fired because of AI (or at least, with the companies claiming AI as the cause).


Citation needed?

Sure you can churn out more code with a LLM, but is it good code? Is it correct? If being left behind means I don't ship slop, I'll gladly bow out.


At the very least, AI can review all the code you have written. You can still reject every suggestion, but in the worst it will just slow you down. No citation needed for that. If an AI were to truly confuse you sufficiently to accept a wrong suggestion based on phony logic, then it just shows you didn't grok the logic deeply in the first place. (Which is a helpful finding for the second iteration.)

You didn't say if you did, but just in case if you truly never had a serious look at LLM tools, you really need to step up. Never even trying something like Claude Code borders on negligence nowadays.

AI is still a bubble, but pretty much every software developer having a hard-dependency on these companies nowadays, is was sustains it. It sucks, but currently there is no realistic way around it.

Exceptions apply for data protection reasons, obviously don't upload all your personal data and business-critical intellectual property into some 3rd-party AI tool.


Interesting, that some words don't start with the letter they represent.


I wonder how much tokens and time where used for the verifying part. Maybe GLM 5.2 instantly found the "solution" to read the screen pixel by pixel, but it could also have been a major token and time consumer.


Hi, author here, I cannot give an exact number for how many token the verification step took, but the verification GLM 5.2 ran was very stupid and definitely a waste of time. It read the pixel color data to try and verify the scene rendered properly. Which is really bad. Opus opened the game in a Playwright browser and took screenshots to verify the actual image. Which helped a lot.

Pro tip: You could use a multi-modal model to verify images as a subagent spawned by GLM 5.2, to get around this issue.


That's a dumb way to do it, it should just write the frame buffer to a PNG instead of taking screenshots. I guess you can't take the dumb web developer ways out of these models at the end of the day.


I could be wrong but I believe this is a non-vision model. Please weigh in to correct me bc I would love to be wrong


GLM 5.2 is text only, not multi modal. And Opus is multi modal.


I've also written a controller for those slave clocks. Instead of an ESP32 I used an ESP8266. [1] and [2]

An even earlier version used an atmega and was powered from batteries [3]

Those slave-clocks are pretty loud. Both versions have a way to pause the clock.

https://gitlab.com/close2/nebenuhr https://gitlab.com/close2/nebenuhr_hardware https://github.com/close2/nebenuhr


Nice, i will add link to your project to my GH :)

I see you solving +- same problem but a bit different way + my board have OLED to show the status and also that you supporting work on battery and i was not doing that. Another different i found that you using custom hw board. I was thinking about this initally, but later decided that motor driver is the best match here. This would work (with a small changes) with 24v version as well, but will require different hardware (custom h-bridge?) for the 60V version.


Consider applying for YC's Winter 2027 batch! Applications are open till November 2.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: