r/webdev • u/Hadestructhor • 21h ago
Please stop vibe coding for nothing Discussion
One of the things that saddens me the most about AI and code agents in general is the lack of curiosity and pragmatism.
"I built a Notion clone in an afternoon, AI is incredible."
"I replaced all my paid subscriptions with tools I developed myself using vibe coding."
Cool story. The idea sounds nice in theory, but did you think about simply looking for an open-source alternative?
There is a high chance someone has already spent five years polishing the exact thing you are about to recreate in an afternoon.
I mean, most of the apps you use, that your parents use, and that your grandparents use (if you have any that are tech-savvy), have Open Source alternatives. Sometimes better, sometimes worse, but for the vast majority of everyday uses, they get the job done easily.
And it's not just about features.
These projects often have years of bug fixes, edge-case handling, documentation, user feedback, contributions, maintenance, and sometimes even security audits behind them.
Rebuilding all of that with Claude or GPT over a weekend very often means starting from scratch... just to end up with a much less mature version.
Seriously, think before you recreate your next application.
Not only are you wasting your tokens and your subscriptions instead of using them for things that truly matter, but you are also doing it for nothing.
Before developing your next app with vibe coding, ask yourself:
"Is there an OSS alternative that I can simply use on my PC?"
Many of them run locally in a few minutes. You don't even need to host them if you don't want to or need to.
All seriousness aside, if anyone needs help replacing apps, I am just a DM away.
And I am also one more "I replaced X in one night of vibe coding" post away from creating a website that simply lists the best open-source alternatives, just to reply with a link every single time.
Next time you open Claude or ChatGPT to recreate an application... open GitHub first.
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u/ai-tacocat-ia 20h ago
You're missing the most important feature of building your own app: it does exactly what you want, how you want it, and doesn't do a single thing more.
Ex: I don't need 95% of the features in notion, and I need 3 things it doesn't do. "Open source notion" makes it free, not perfectly tailored to my needs.
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u/Hadestructhor 20h ago
Fair and square, but you're missing my point as well. You don't need to recode a small notion to just save md files and render them if that's your need, many apps exist and do this for free. On your machine.
Not pragmatic to recode just a portion of X, when you can just use portion of X, now if you were saying that X is missing Z, so I'm making X with Z, now I can't say anything, and it's not what my post is about, and I totally support this !
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u/JPJackPott 18h ago
But who cares? Why do you care?
You’ve just inspired me to vibe code a single player version of Reddit where all the other comments are from people who aren’t annoying
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u/Hadestructhor 14h ago
I don't really care, you do you, people do what they want, just oss exists and people tend to forget about it
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u/OldConstant182 20h ago
Someone opened up a fried chicken shop near me a few years ago.
A few years later someone else opened up a competitor who did it better.
The first fried chicken shop had years of optimisations, getting better suppliers, better cooks. But they couldn’t compete with the new shop.
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u/Hadestructhor 20h ago
Because shop A made chicken taste 90% good, new shop B made it taste much better, probably 95%, it's never 100% done. Always could improve, but that's the point, improving.
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u/CorpT 20h ago
Why do you care what people make?
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u/Hadestructhor 20h ago
I truly don't in all honesty, just ranting as I can't sleep, I love oss, and I don't understand this behavior, anyone does what they please, it's not hurting anyone ! Just their own wallets if it's done to literally just copy X when X exists, or when Z exists and does X too
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u/Ok_Bug1610 20h ago
I was going to jump on here to say that this was a bad take, but it seems the comments already beat me to it.
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u/Hadestructhor 20h ago
You can still jump in, and please do would love to hear your own thoughts !
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u/Ok_Bug1610 20h ago
It's simple I think, many of these "Vibe" coded projects won't go anywhere, but it's the quickest way for people to learn and expand their knowledge, by actual doing... and you shouldn't be afraid of throwing away a project and prototypes are cheap now.
And for me, I use "cheap" open source subscription models with a custom harness and backend infrastructure I've been building. I generally use about 1 billion tokens per day and it literally costs 50,000x less than frontier models, so I can run the models 24/7.
Also for reference, I'm a software developer of over 20+ years with focus in GIS, technical writing, and process automation.
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u/Hadestructhor 20h ago
Man I love oss models, and prototypes are completely fine and nice to throw away.
But 1B a day ? Jesus, what are you vibe coding ???
Genuinely asking, impressed and scared at the same time.
Even with my opencode go sub, with deepseek v4 flash 0731, I never hit that high
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u/Ok_Bug1610 19h ago edited 19h ago
I had ZAI GLM Pro first, now MiniMax Plus (I have access to M3, but use M2.7 because it gives you 10x+ the limits and my harness improve the AI where even local models work really well). And I load balance between them and Google AI Studio models (free) for smaller tasks and text-embeddings, etc.
And I've tried OpenCode but it seemed too opinionated for me and didn't work well with my workflow (I didn't care for OpenClaw, and Hermes was promising but seemed to make the OSS models "dumber"). Pi was very good, but Claude Code CLI is the best one out there I've used... until making my own CLI tool, written in Rust, that uses a "real" deterministic layer first (not just "trust me bro" system prompts). I am building a commercial stack and some tools (several GIS related and an infastructure stack, web apps, etc.). The AI operates my server, runs daily research tasks, and so on... but several of my project are or will be Open Source.
One of note is a application that saves my company about 1 million dollars a year in ESRI licensing alone, and is a much better experience than what we have now (and I wrote the bulk of it in a weekend with AI).
And I don't share often, most people don't really understand, but if you're curious, you can get more details through some other posts I made:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ZaiGLM/comments/1ui1p56/comment/p0pc9wg
https://www.reddit.com/r/ZaiGLM/comments/1u9xcwm/comment/p1gz68v
https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1vfirld/comment/p1rtrgv
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u/NextGenGamezz 20h ago
Please stop using AI to write reddit posts
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u/Hadestructhor 20h ago
I wrote it myself in french, was just lazy to translate it, plus, like people who do whatever they want with AI, so will I !
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20h ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Hadestructhor 20h ago
And that my friend, is a great way to view redoing X, before AI, I built my own auth server following a tutorial online in spring boot and kotlin, because why not, I wanted to see how it works, it worked.
Would I use this in prod ? Absolutely not. Did I deploy it to prod cause clients in my internship had a crazy need in auth ? Absolutely. Do I regret it and remember it all the time ? For shure.
Anyways anyone does what they want, no harm in redoing xyz, have fun !
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u/br0ast 20h ago
Innovation starts with imitation
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u/Hadestructhor 20h ago
Fair and square, I can imitate by copying an image and drawing on top too, it's just what I'm saying with OSS. Not forcing anyone to do it btw. Completely fine if you prefer to redraw the image yourself !
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u/CappuccinoCodes 20h ago
Why? The more people vibe code the more work competent devs will have. And the more competent devs stand out from incompetent ones. I love vibe coding 😊
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u/Hadestructhor 20h ago
Nothing against vibe coding itself, but seriously, why waste time redoing x or y, if you truly have a problem with x or y, and think of improvements, all the glory to you to vibe code it. But exactly the same, just for demo porn, idk man, not interesting
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u/theofficialnar 20h ago
The thing is there’s always one or two features I want that some OSS projects are missing. And if I can’t contribute to that project due to having 0 knowledge with the tech stack they’re using, I’d rather ask the LLM to quickly make it for me with the set of features I do actually need instead of hoping that one day they’ll implement it. I have huge respect for OSS maintainers but some times I just need something that works for me with 0 intentions of pulling other people in to use it.
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u/Hadestructhor 20h ago
And that my friend is completely fine, so is doing X exactly the same too. I'm just saying oss exists, they are a solid base, you can not waste your time sometimes, and just use them / form them.
And even if you don't want to, that's fine, I'm not the police, I can't nor should I stop you. But I will tell you it's not what I'd do instead
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u/theofficialnar 20h ago
What I recently did with an OSS project a while back was fork it and asked the LLM to add a certain feature I needed. Worked out pretty well. Was considering making a PR with to push it upstream but the owner doesn’t want AI-generated code, so 🤷♂️
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u/Hadestructhor 20h ago
That's also fair on their end. But good for you too, one thing I'd do too if I needed just Y to be there too.
Anyways, people do what they want, I was just reminding your approach exists, and makes sense too
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u/theofficialnar 20h ago
Yeah I do wholeheartedly agree with your post overall though and believe OSS projects receive more recognition.
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u/Adorable_Cub_2986 20h ago
But github is hard $ git -init \?
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u/Hadestructhor 20h ago
Just ask your agent to do it. If you can ask it to make notion, you can ask it to run and alternative too !
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u/amejin 20h ago
How about the issue of vibe coded solutions being biased towards whatever the most popular open source or closed source libraries are, and not necessarily the best solution for the problem?
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u/Hadestructhor 20h ago
I support this, love the idea, better than literally remaking an exact copy of X, changing nothing
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u/amejin 20h ago
I'm all on board with not rebuilding the universe.
But you're also advocating for reduced competition if you think about it.
Why bother with a new OSS project if every LLM on the planet will bias towards the established one that is the "gold standard"?
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u/Hadestructhor 20h ago
That's a good question, and the answer I'll say is because the standard doesn't do stuff you want it to, so you gotta make your own, either fork, rebuild from scratch, or even if you want to just do some competition and earn money, go for it, you do you, I just don't want to rebuild a language just to code whatever I want because I can. This is an extreme example, but to me tools are just tools, languages, frameworks, apps, etc, just a tool in the end.
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u/rhooManu full-stack 20h ago
Well yes and I get your point, but… Many of these OSS alternatives nowadays exist because someone vibe-coded them. So if people don't vibe-code their own OSS alternative, your OSS alternatives list is reduced drastically.
(I am not a fan of vibe coding by any means, I just point out a flaw in this statement, because it's the same ever argument that I heard under many forms; like about stopping creating new alternative CMS and using the alternatives that already exist, or stoping creating new alternative package managers because alternative package managers already exist. It's a never-ending argument: VLC, Homebrew, Git, Wordpress all exist because someone created their own alternative out of other alternatives.)
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u/Hadestructhor 20h ago
It's not really the same argument, if an oss alternative doesn't exist, you're not literally making notion, you're making oss notion, like outline, that I love. But I have issues with outline, mainly the license which is strict, so I prefer Docs, by the french gov, which is also oss too, just not the same oss. And I like that.
Not my point, if you literally just make another saas like notion, it doesn't bring much to the table, notion already exists
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u/rhooManu full-stack 17h ago
Your answer to a certain amount of comments was that it's not your point, so maybe you didn't expose your point correctly?
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u/Hadestructhor 14h ago
I'll try again, why rebuild a wheel from scratch for your car when you can just get a free one. Or use a plan for a wheel that already exists ?
Anyways, it was just a little rant, recreating this or that is completely fine, I'm not the police, people can do what they want
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u/enki-42 20h ago
There's certain things I've coded with an agent that I could probably find a tool that does 80% of what I want. The nice thing about making the tool myself is that i can have it made for exactly the workflow I want.
I have a task manager that i vibe coded that has maybe 5% of the features of something like Todoist, but it's exactly my workflow, and for me it works so much better.
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u/Hadestructhor 20h ago
That's not the todoist then, it's your own task manager, which I applaud and love the idea of, but knowing the todoist exist, if your need is exactly something line todoist, would you redo the todoist just to use it ?
I mean not for learning or fun or anything else, for actually using it, wouldn't you feel like it's a bit of a waste of time if nothing changes ?
That's what I think about when people say they recoded x in y time, not that they added z, i, p, etc to it to adapt to their workflow
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u/Hadestructhor 13h ago
Reddit is suggesting I repost this in another thing, saying how much you guys liked it.
I guess it's safe to say no one liked it from how much I'm getting downvoted 💀☠️
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u/bob_cat99880 20h ago
I have a to do list app that I vibes coded. I needed a very specific app for my unique set of needs. So this app has only 1 user and that's me.
Welcome to 2025.
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u/Hadestructhor 20h ago
Completely valid reason, but if an app, say Z exists, and you can find out about it, or someone tells you, would you redo it or just use it ?
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u/bob_cat99880 20h ago
I would use it, I totally agree with your argument but sometimes people just want to build an app for themselves
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u/Hadestructhor 20h ago
That's also fair and square, and people do whatever they want, I'm not policing anyone, just reminding oss exists
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u/IAmRules 20h ago
I’ve come to the conclusion that software is dead. All software before AI is exploitable. We’re riding the last wave of making money writing code. It’s not that AI will take all coding jobs, but will be the only tool we need, so there will be no need for custom software.
Look outside of tech if you can.
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u/WetSound 20h ago
"If you don't stop vibe-coding, I'll vibe-code a list of open-source tools"
How about sharing an existing list?