It's interesting how many of the low-effort vibecoded projects I see posted on reddit are on vercel. It's basically the default.
It's interesting how many of the low-effort vibecoded projects I see posted on reddit are on vercel. It's basically the default.
Reddit vibecoded LLM posts are kind of fascinating for how homogenous they are. The number of vibe coded half-finished projects posted to common subreddits daily is crazy high.
It’s interesting how they all use LLMs to write their Reddit posts, too. Some of them could have drawn in some people if they took 5 minutes to type an announcement post in their own words, but they all have the same LLM style announcement post, too. I wonder if they’re conversing with the LLM and it told them to post it to Reddit for traction?
I find that often the developers of these apps don't speak English, but want to target an English-speaking audience. For the marketing copy, they're using the LLM more to translate than to paraphrase, but the LLM ends up paraphrasing anyway.
I think they simply just haven't figured out that the barrier to entry is so low, that no one really cares what their app can do, even if does something genuinely useful.
> For the marketing copy, they're using the LLM more to translate than to paraphrase, but the LLM ends up paraphrasing anyway.
What do you see as the distinction between "translating" and "paraphrasing"? All translations are necessarily paraphrased.
While that’s true, translations often vary in terms of how faithful they are to the source vs how idiomatic they are in the target language. Take for example the French phrase “j’ai fait une nuit blanche”, which literally means “I did a white night”. Clearly that’s a bad translation. A more natural translation might be “I pulled an all-nighter”.
Similarly, “j’ai un chat dans la gorge” probably translates best as “I’ve got a frog in my throat”, even though it’s a completely different animal, it’s an obvious mapping.
Those are fairly simple because they have neat English translations, but what about for example “C’est pas tes oignons”, which literally means “these aren’t your onions”, but is really a way of telling someone it’s none of their business. You could translate it as “it’s none of your business”, or “keep your nose out” or “stay in your lane” or lots and lots of other versions, with varying levels of paraphrasing, which depend on context you can’t necessarily read purely from the words themselves.
I'll preface this by noting that I don't disagree with anything you've said, but I do have some comments:
> Similarly, “j’ai un chat dans la gorge” probably translates best as “I’ve got a frog in my throat”, even though it’s a completely different animal, it’s an obvious mapping.
Those obvious mappings can sometimes be too seductive for the translator's good. One example is that people translating English-loanwords-in-a-foreign-language into English usually can't help but translate them as the original English word.
Another example is that, in China, there is a cultural concept of a 狐狸精, which you might translate as "fox spirit". (The "fox" part of the translation is straightforward, but 精 is a term for a supernatural phenomenon, and those are difficult to translate.) They can do all kinds of things, but one especially well-known behavior is that they may take the form of human women and seduce (actual) human men. This may or may not be harmful to the man.
Because of this concept, the word also has a sense in which it may be used to insult a (normal) woman, accusing her of using her sex appeal toward harmful ends.
Chinese people translating this into English almost always use the word "vixen", which is, to be fair, a word that may refer to a sexy human woman or to a female fox. But I really don't feel that they're equivalent, or even that they have much overlap. (Unlike the situation with English loanwords, I think native speakers of Chinese are much more likely to choose this translation than native speakers of English are.)
> what about for example “C’est pas tes oignons”, which literally means “these aren’t your onions”
The form closest in structure to that would probably be "none of your beeswax", which is just a minorly altered version of "none of your business". I assume the substitution of "beeswax" is humorous and based on phonetic similarity.
As you note, there are multiple dimensions relevant to translating this and several positions you could take along each. For this particular idea, I would say the two most important dimensions are playfulness and rudeness; it's a very common idea and the language is rich in options for both.
> translations often vary in terms of how faithful they are to the source vs how idiomatic they are in the target language. Take for example the French phrase “j’ai fait une nuit blanche”, which literally means “I did a white night”. Clearly that’s a bad translation. A more natural translation might be “I pulled an all-nighter”.
This isn't what I had in mind. Here are some idiomatic translations:
I pulled an all-nighter.
I was up all night.
I didn't get any sleep.
I never got to bed.
I've been up since [something appropriate to the context].
[Something appropriate to the context] kept me up all night.
I wouldn't call any of the first four "more paraphrased" than the others. (The last two might be, if they included extra information.) If these were reports of the English speech of some other person, one of them (or less) would be a quote, and the others would be paraphrases. But as a report of French speech, they're all paraphrases. The first shares a little more grammatical structure with the French, which doesn't really mean much.
For a fairly similar example from my personal life, someone said to me 这是我第一次听说, and my spontaneous translation of it was "I've never heard that before", despite the fact that there is technically a perfectly valid English expression "this is the first I've heard of that".
What's closer to the grammatical structure of the Chinese? That's hard for me to say. You could analyze 我 as the subject of 听说, and I lean toward that analysis, but my instincts for Mandarin are weak. You might see 我 as being more strongly attached to 第一次, meaning something more like "my first time (to hear ...)" than "I hear (for the first time) ...".
But for whatever it's worth, a word by word literal gloss would be "this is me first time hear".
Between languages with less historical interaction than English and French, it's quite possible that a syntax-preserving translation of some sentence just doesn't exist.
They are not exclusive to reddit. HN has also been full of vibe submissions of the same nature.
It's insane how most of the dev subreddits are filled with slop like this. I've thought the same thing - why can't they even spend 5 minutes to write their own post about their project?
Yeah, in the last 6 to 10 months /r/rust has become littered with this stuff. There's still some good discussion going on but now I have to sort through garbage. The signal to noise ratio is out of whack these days that I generally avoid platforms like Substack, Medium and so on too.
There's a push and pull here, Typescript + React + Vercel are also very amenable to LLM driven development due to a mix of the popularity of examples in the LLMs dataset, how cheap the deployment is and how quick the ecosystem is to get going.
I've done a ton of low-effort vibe-coded projects that suit my exact use cases. In many cases, I might do a quick Google search, not find an exact match, or find some bloated adware or subscription-ware and not bother going any further.
Claude Code can produce exactly what I want, quickly.
The difference is that I don't really share my projects. People who share them probably haven't realized that code has become cheap, and no one really needs/wants to see them since they can just roll their own.
The kind of code, with the kind of quality, that LLMs can output has become cheap. Learning has not, and neither has genuinely well designed, human designed, code. This might be surprising to the majority of users on HN, but once a really good programmer joins your team, who is both really good, and also uses LLMs to speed up the parts that he or she isn't good at, you really learn how far away vibe coders are from producing something worth using.
next, vercel, and supabase is basically the foundation of every vibecoded project by mere suggestion.
If this kind of vulnerability exists at the platform level, imagine how vulnerable all the vibe-coded apps are to this kind of exploit.
I don't doubt the competence of the Vercel team actually and that's the point. Imagine if this happens to a top company which has their pick of the best engineers, on a global scale.
My experience with modern startups is that they're essentially all vulnerable to hacks. They just don't have the time to actually verify their infra.
Also, almost all apps are over-engineered. It's impossibly difficult to secure an app with hundreds of thousands of lines of code and 20 or so engineers working on the backend code in parallel.
Some people are like "Why they didn't encrypt all this?" This is a naive way to think about it. The platform has to decrypt the tokens at some point in order to use them. The best we can do is store the tokens and roll them over frequently.
If you make the authentication system too complex, with too many layers of defense, you create a situation where users will struggle to access their own accounts... And you only get marginal security benefits anyway. Some might argue the complexity creates other kinds of vulnerabilities.
the vibe coders don't know what they don't know so whatever code is written on their behalf better be up to best practices (it isn't)
They’re all shit too. All three decided to do custom auth instead of OIDC and it’s a nightmare to integrate with any of them.
Maybe that's why all these vibe coded slop apps also use Clerk for auth alongside Supabase etc
10 years ago it was Heroku and Three.js.
10 years ago it was Heroku and Ruby on Rails*
but now Ruby on Rails is not a circus like how Next.js is.
see [0]: Rails security Audit Report
[0]: https://ostif.org/ruby-on-rails-audit-complete/
More like 15. By 2016, Rails was supposedly dead and we were all going to be running the same code on the front end and back end in a full stack, MongoDB euphoria.
New one coming in 5 years. Cycle repeats itself.
I don't think so, AIs are going to freeze the tooling to what we have today since that's what's in the training corpus, and it's self reinforcing.
Nah, the good LLMs can generally web search and read documentation well enough that the fact that pre-training isn’t up to the minute is not a serious concern. Badly-documented projects are more of a concern, but they weren’t likely to get much pre-AI usage either.
Another Anthropic revenue stream:
Protection money from Vercel.
"Pay us 10% of revenue or we switch to generating Netlify code."
Wouldn’t Vercel still make money in that scenario since Netlify uses them?
Netlify uses AWS (and Cloudflare? Vercel def uses Cloudflare)
Netlify and Vercel both use AWS. AFAIK neither uses Cloudflare. Vercel did use Cloudflare for parts of its infra until about a year ago though.
Ah, ok. I knew they did use Cloudflare but had no idea they migrated off of it.
Vercel runs on AWS.
Which PaaS are running on their own servers and earning a profit?