There’s a big gap between reality and the influencer posts about LLMs. I agree with you that LLMs do provide some significant acceleration, but the influencers have tried to exaggerate this into unbelievable numbers.
Even non-influencers are trying to exaggerate their LLM skills as a way to get hired or raise their status on LinkedIn. I rarely read the LinkedIn social feed but when I check mine it’s now filled with claims from people about going from idea to shipped product in N days (with a note at the bottom that they’re looking for a new job or available to consult with your company). Many of these posts come from people who were all in on crypto companies a few years ago.
The world really is changing but there’s a wave of influencers and trend followers trying to stake out their claims as leaders on this new frontier. They should be ignored if you want any realistic information.
I also think these exaggerated posts are causing a lot of people to miss out on the real progress that is happening. They see these obviously false exaggerations and think the opposite must be true, that LLMs don’t provide any benefit at all. This is creating a counter-wave of LLM deniers who think it’s just a fad that will be going away shortly. They’re diminishing in numbers but every LLM thread on HN attracts a few people who want to believe it’s all just temporary and we’re going back to the old ways in a couple years.
> I rarely read the LinkedIn social feed but when I check mine it’s now filled with claims from people about going from idea to shipped product in N days (with a note at the bottom that they’re looking for a new job or available to consult with your company).
This always seems to be the pattern. "I vibe coded my product and shipped it in 96 hours!" OK, what's the product? Why haven't I heard of it? Why can't it replace the current software I'm using? So, you're looking for work? Why is nobody buying it?
Where is the Quicken replacement that was vibecoded and shipping today? Where are the vibecoded AAA games that are going to kill Fortnite? Where is the vibecoded Photoshop alternative? Heck, where is the vibecoded replacement for exim3 that I can deploy on my self hosted E-mail server? Where are all of the actual shipping vibecoded products that millions of users are using?
I found one example of this going very wrong on reddit the other day -
https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1rckopd/huntarr...
One redditor security reviews a vibe coded project
Wow, great example, and great example of what these fakers do when called out. Summary:
The maintainer, instead of listening to the security researcher and accepting feedback about his development process, instead:
1. Denied the problem
2. Censored discussion of the problem
3. Banned the people calling out the problem
...and then when the security issues were posted more publicly and got traction...
4. Made the subreddit private
5. Wiped and deleted his account
6. Wiped and deleted the GitHub repo
7. Took the project's web site off the web
Absolutely wild and unhinged behavior.
holy fuck this is awesome.. I haven't laughed this hard in a while
I agree with your general point but ... "Where are the vibecoded AAA games". A game dev team is typically less than 15% programmers. Most of the team are artists, followed by game designers. Maybe someday those will be replaced too but at the moment, while you can get some interesting pictures from stable-diffusion techniques it's unlikely to make a cohesive game and even prompting to create all of it would still take many person years.
That said, I have had some good experiences getting a few features from zero to working via LLMs and it's helped me find lots of bugs far easier than my own looking.
I can imagine a vibe coded todo app. I can also kind of imagine a vibe coded gIMP/Photoshop though it would still take several person years, prompting through each and every feature.
> Where are all of the actual shipping vibecoded products that millions of users are using?
Claude Code and OpenClaw - they are vibecoded. And I believe more coming.
Claude Code is not vibecoded, it is made using Claude Code but it is not vibecoded using Claude Code.
But it's like crypto then, good for buying other crypto, or illegal stuff.
Also people are using CC for the cheap access to the model, otherwise they'd be using opencode.
Yeah, I really wonder if someone would trust to do their taxes in a vibe-coded version of Turbotax...
Do you really need Turbotax? Just feed it the tax code, your financial data, and the relevant forms and it should be good to go. Now we have freed up the labor of accountants so they can go be productive in another segment of society. /s
I regret only having one upvote for this.
I note that games are mostly art assets and things like level design, and players are already happy to instantly consign such products to the slop bin.
The whole thing is "market for lemons": app stores filling with dozens of indistinguishable clones of each product category will simply scare users off all of them.
"I come from a state that raises corn and cotton and cockleburs and Democrats, and frothy eloquence neither convinces nor satisfies me. I am from Missouri. You have got to show me."
>Many of these posts come from people who were all in on crypto companies a few years ago.
This is ditto my observation. There seems to be a certain "type" of people like this. And it's not just people looking for work.
My guess is either they have super low critical thinking, a very cynical view of the world where lies and exaggeration are the only way to make it, or something more pathological (narcissism etc).
The "type" is simply the get-rich-quick schemers.
I have a relative who was late to crypto, late to drop shipping, late to carbon credits, but is now absolutely all-in on AI as his ticket out. It honestly depresses the hell out of me trying to talk to him because everything is about money and getting rich.
People like this don't care about underlying technologies or learning past the most basic surface level of understanding.
Day 7 of using Claude Code here are my takes...
“Day 7" would be amazing - all that I see YouTube recommending is "I tried it for 24 hours"
I was listening to an "expert" on a podcast earlier today up until the point where the interviewer asked how long his amazing new vibe-coded tooling has been in production, and the self-proclaimed expert replied "actually we have an all-hands meeting later today so I can brief the team and we will then start using the output..."
The “store on the chain” thing turned out to be a fad in terms of technology, even though it made a lot of money (in the billions and more) to some people via the crypto thing. That was less than 10 years ago, so many of us do remember the similarities of the discourse being made then to what’s happening now.
With all that said, today’s LLMs do seem so provide a little bit more value compared to the bit chain thing, for example OCR/.pdf parsing is I’d say a solved thing right now thanks to LLMs, which is nice.