Same here.
Creating a polished, usable app is just so much work, and so much of it isn't fun at all (to me). There are a few key parts that are fun, but building an intuitive UI, logging, error handling, documentation, packaging, versioning, containerization, etc. is so tedious.
I'm bewildered when I read posts by the naysayers, because I'm sitting here building polished apps in a fraction of the time, and they work. At least much better than what I was able to build over a couple of weekends. They provide real value to me. And I'm still having fun building them.
I now vibe coded three apps, two of them web apps, in Rust, and I couldn't write a "Hello World" in Rust if you held a gun to my head. They look beautiful, are snappy, and it being Rust gives me a lot of confidence in its correctness (feel free to disagree here).
Of course I wouldn't vibe code in a serious production project, but I'd still use an AI agent, except I'd make sure I understand every line it puts out.
I can understand you don't want to spend effort for throwaway code.
That isn't going to cut it. You need to understand the problem domain, have a deep design taste to weigh current and future demands, form a conceptually coherent solution, formalize it to code, then feed back from the beginning. There is no prompt giving your AI those capabilities. You end up with mediocre solutions if you settle for understanding every line it spits out. To be fair, many programmers don't have those capabilities either, so it also a question of quality expectations.I believe you can use LLMs as advanced search and as a generator for boilerplate. People liking it easy are also being easy with quality attributes, so anyone should be self aware where they are on that spectrum.
> Creating a polished, usable app is just so much work, and so much of it isn't fun at all (to me).
Then don’t do it. No one is forcing you. Are you also going to complain that building airplanes and ensuring food safety are too much work and not fun for you? Not everything needs to be or should be dumbed down to appeal to lowest common denominator.
Alternatively, go work at a company where you’re part of a team and other people do what you do not enjoy.
> I'm sitting here building polished apps in a fraction of the time
No, no you are not, guaranteed. “Polishing” means caring about every detail to make it perfect. If you’re letting the LLM make most of it, by definition it’s not polished.
This is coming across as the "hobby police" here telling everyone what they can and can't do... I'm sure it wasn't meant that way but it reads that way.
The airplane company wont let you vibe code their systems anyway, and rightly so. the rest of us can just do whatever we like.
> Then don’t do it. No one is forcing you.
No one is also keeping me from doing what I want to spend my time with on my days off.
> Are you also going to complain that building airplanes and ensuring food safety are too much work and not fun for you?
No, because this isn't remotely comparable to weekend hobby projects. What a weird question.
> No, no you are not, guaranteed. “Polishing” means caring about every detail to make it perfect. If you’re letting the LLM make most of it, by definition it’s not polished.
I guess we have different definitions of "polished" then.
> No, because this isn't remotely comparable to weekend hobby projects.
I agree. But those also don’t need:
> intuitive UI, logging, error handling, documentation, packaging, versioning, containerization, etc. is so tedious.
Some of that, sure, but not all of it. Either it’s a weekend hobby project or it’s not, and your description is conflating both. A hobby is something done for fun.
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Thanks.
This is such a... unique angle. Of all the things to get angry at AI for, web crawlers and the impact on cloudflare outages are the ones that really grinds your gears?
Not unique at all. eg a few days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46608840
>> so much of it isn't fun at all
thats why it was valuable.
All things worth doing are hard.
He said fun, not easy. Sometimes it's precisely doing brainless stuff over and over again that becomes hard, like writing a template displaying a table of your results or implementing filter and pagination on a web app. I don't feel like I'm growing anymore when doing those things. Or even for some tests. Or when you need a Bash script automating menial stuff. (Still you could find new perspective on things.)
> Sometimes it's precisely doing brainless stuff over and over again that becomes hard, like writing a template displaying a table of your results or implementing filter and pagination on a web app.
I always have a hard time taking this complaint seriously, because the solution is absolutely trivial. Write a snippet. Have you really been out there, year after year, rewriting the same shit from scratch over and over? Just make a snippet. Make it good and generic and save it. Whenever you need to do something repeated on a new project, copy it (or auto-expand if you use it that often) and adapt. Snippet managers are a thing.
Or better yet, refactor your app so it doesn't require so much boilerplate - surely if you're doing the same thing over and over again you can just extract it into it's own function / method and abstract over it.