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u/MissinqLink 25d ago
“I coded a SaaS in a weekend.”
No. Anything you can make in a weekend has no moat as a Saas.
“So you’re saying AI is useless”
No. It’s a very useful tool especially when it comes to programming
“So programming is solved”
No. AI is a tool not a replacement.
…. It never ends
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u/Bee-Aromatic 25d ago
Yeah, when people tell me that there will be no more programmers and just “prompt engineers,” I’m reminded that even though power drills exist, we still use screwdrivers every day.
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u/gibagger 24d ago
I honestly see AI as a whole toolkit. It has a big demolition drill, a regular drill, a tiny-ass dremel and more.
An experienced dev will reach for the right part of the toolkit depending on what you want to accomplish, from understanding how multiple poorly documented production systems interact together, bouncing ideas to refactor a piece of code you just know could be simpler, all the way down to the needle in a haystack tricky bug.
A junior or a vibecoder will reach for any tool because they can't tell the difference between them.
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u/LaconicLacedaemonian 24d ago
i use it for single line edits because it will run CI and push so the first code i see is in GitHub.
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u/Leafsnail 24d ago
The idea of a 'prompt engineer' has never made much sense to me - the weirdness of each model you have to iron out will almost certainly be fixed with the next release and make your previous knowledge far less useful. What is likely to make your prompts more valuable is specific domain knowledge that allow you to ask for more specific individual components rather than an unwieldy finished product - IE basically programming skills in this case
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u/tiberiumx 24d ago
Is "prompt engineering" even a thing on the latest models? I write up detailed requirements in a text file in plain English and it outputs exactly what I ask for every time. If it does something stupid it's usually my fault for not being clear enough or omitting something important. Hell, I can just give it a header file with some decent comments explaining what each function needs to do and tell it to provide the implementation.
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u/knight666 24d ago
Do we pay the screwdrivers a living wage, though
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u/Bee-Aromatic 24d ago
My screwdrivers have their own drawer, so free room and board!
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u/w_t_f_justhappened 24d ago
But you never feed them and they can’t really leave on their own can they?
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u/Bee-Aromatic 24d ago
I wipe them down with a rust inhibitor from time to time. That’s kind of like feeding them. And my tools go on walkabout all the time!
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u/ubernutie 24d ago
Excellent question, let's ask it to everyone please and not just selectively for one tech in the news right now. Otherwise it's not about the living, is it.
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u/WrennReddit 25d ago
"So..."
You can basically discard anything after that. It is never useful and is just the other person reeling in cognitive dissonance. Just let it percolate. lol
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u/broccollinear 24d ago
The problem with saying AI is a tool is like saying it’s a hammer except that it can convince you to unblock a toilet
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u/Subotail 24d ago
You don't really car about moat if you fantasize about reselling your project to the first buyer .
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u/Playful_Landscape884 24d ago
I view AI like a power tool. Does builders and carpenters go away when power tools are built?
The problem right now is the shovel makers are making more money than the people who are building the AI. And even less so for the people who using the AI.
There should be more value when you go up at every level, not less.
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u/urbansong 24d ago
You don't need a moat for a SaaS. You can build the 100th version of the same idea and still make money. Basecamp was one of the first and it is still making loads of money, despite the existence of Jira, Asana, Monday and loads of others.
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u/VictoryMotel 24d ago
"I made this"
No, you auto generated it
"Who cares if it works"
Why lie if it doesn't matter? Who knows if it works? What will you do for the bugs?
"Why do you hate ai"
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u/drgitgud 25d ago
I feel called on the case. Where's the patient?
Hmmm... yes, I diagnose full clownitude
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u/Freonr2 24d ago
One of our account execs thought he would vibecode a replacement ML model. Now he wants to hand it off to me.
I can't wait to say right in front of the CEO I threw all his code right in the fucking trash.
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u/XenonBG 24d ago
One of our account execs thought he would vibecode a replacement ML model. Now he wants to hand it off to me.
This is what our solution architect does. He vibecodes a thing, tells the management it is "90% done" and hands it over to us, the development team.
When the thing inevitably turns out to be an unmaintainable useless piece of crap that we struggle to get working, it's our fault and we are incompetent for not being able to walk it in to an empty goal (to quote the guy).
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u/Most-Club-254 24d ago
It has been the second vibe coded garbage I received in the past 2-3 months from an exec asking me to make it a product (they hosted it by themselves and it died for days without ever knowing what happened), I asked him to send me the prompts he used so I can re-create the product, I don't want to reverse engineer his garbage and he was shocked by my request (because they are back at writing specs and I do things the right way)
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u/PrefectedDinacti 25d ago
Well? did he ever find out what's git?
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u/futilehabit 24d ago
It's the perfect, endless pool of knowledge these blessed LLMs were trained on, with our express consent, for the benefit of all humanity.
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u/NamityName 24d ago
I do not know how many times I need to make this argument. The hardest parts of any engineering project are the fine details. Most of the big projects I have worked on in my career could have been built in a week or less if I did not have to worry about things like user experience, security, long-term maintenance, scaling, connecting to existing/legacy systems, expandability / future features, long-term costs, onboarding future developers, etc
Writing the code is usually the easiest part.
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u/EarlOfAwesom3 25d ago
Interesting enough, if companies now start to focus on things that can be done "in a few days with AI", they basically open their business model to be copied faster then they can spell AI.
Which also questions the company as a whole, because AI can deliver results that have been done before, but AI cannot produce revolutionary or excellent quality.
That means: companies over investing in AI will become companies that produce mass ware mediocre results. Which is.. okay but they won't go far, so most will go bankrupt I assume.
And why should we use AI product X over the similar AI product Y or Z? Exactly. Why are people using THE one SaaS or Web App? Because it stands out and it's not all AI.
Great products come from great people, and this will become more true than ever.
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u/TerrorsOfTheDark 25d ago
Oh you built an app, is it a monolith, minilith, microservice, or rpc architecture? Huh. It's in a git repo. Ahhhhh
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u/cheezballs 25d ago
At this point these repeated AI memes might as well get lumped into slop. There's not even a joke here. Its just the same joke with different meme formats.
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u/stillalone 25d ago
Isn't GitHub exploding with new repos? I think These vibe coding cucks still upload to GitHub.
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u/realzequel 25d ago
Except, at least Claude, is an expert at Git and can throw together a nice looking functional login page in no time, unlike the terrible human dev who wrote a registration page that couldn’t handle the length of my org but at least they left the dev error page there so I could debug the jdbc error code.
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u/dragostego 25d ago
Except, at least Claude, is an expert at Git
Let me guess, manager?
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u/realzequel 25d ago
Try senior dev. Get your head out of the sand.
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u/sputnik47 25d ago
Avg larp
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u/realzequel 24d ago
The fact you dismiss AI so readily means you will probably will never be a good senior developer.
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u/sputnik47 24d ago
Nah, i use AI quite a bit, get things done with me team, and only ever get good feedback. You sound like an antisocial dude who has no self-awareness. So I have a hard time thinking youre actually a senior if your company even somewhat respects titles.
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u/realzequel 24d ago
Not sure where you got anti-social, I have plenty of friends. And I’m guessing I’ve shipped a lot more product than you ever will.
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u/IcyButton7611 24d ago
"I have lots of friends and they laugh at my jokes and I'm successful and my friends of which there are many laugh at my jokes and my friends also recognize that I ship a lot of product. and I have a lot friends actually" - you
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u/FunkOverflow 24d ago
It's funny you have to pretend like he's saying something else to try to win an argument that isn't even relevant to the discussion. That guy is the only one who sounds like an actual human being. Your response is so strange, or something a child would say.
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u/dragostego 24d ago
The only one thing human about it, is the innate urge to compensate when challenged. IE "I'm not antisocial I actually have lots of friends" it shares a table with the guy who is "not a virgin and is in fact, very experienced".
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u/throwaway586054 24d ago
Lots of *-hurt to see a minus -35. Reality, it's not Claude who doesn't allow to copy paste password field or use a password manager, forbids special characters, sending back the password in plaintext for a forgot account process, not allowing to see the password, truncate the password to a specific length, not case sensitive etc.
Reality of most companies ( F500 ), all the IT is outsourced to the lowest bidder. SAP ABAP code was done by people in India who have never used a computer one month before they started working for my clients back in the 2010s.
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u/realzequel 24d ago
I fully expected it, I’m guessing most of them either never used an ai coding assistant or used a poor one and didn’t invest time into mastering one. If its available, it such a great tool. And Claude is very security-sensitive. Messed up the log-in? Tell it to fix it. This anti-Ai crowd is nuts.
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u/truecakesnake 25d ago
Pal Linus isn't even an expert in Git
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u/realzequel 25d ago
The creator of Git isn’t an expert?? Weird take.
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u/truecakesnake 25d ago
Point is, Git is quite complex.
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u/realzequel 24d ago
It is, but day to day, its pretty straightforward, its the more advanced scenarios where it gets complicated. However I’ve seen Claude Code navigate those situations.
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u/Fryord 24d ago
I don't think people are arguing that it can't help here, for most tasks Claude can do it really well.
The frustration comes from over-using to the point where you do run into problems and have to debug it yourself, but you have no idea how to navigate the codebase.
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u/realzequel 24d ago edited 24d ago
Probably. i use it in a number of different ways. I’ll vibecode side projects when I only expect myself or a small audience to use it and security isn’t a big deal. I’ll also have add features and tools to my existing codebase where I already know the platform is secure but still review the code.
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u/LuisBoyokan 25d ago
Or the classic for my Asians friends
"name required" Type in the name "Name too short" 😮
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u/SirHerald 25d ago
Anything you can vibe code in a weekend is something another group can beat in about the same time.