Minimum Vibable Product… I’ll see myself out now
My experience working with a vibe coder hired by one of our clients is actually that’s it great for MAXIMUM VP, as in a viable product made up of just under 40k lines of typescript, plus 90+ Node libraries for an app that amounts to a login page, a Square payment gateway and a user settings page (it’s seriously just a signup page for a coastguard and weather alerts service that the rest of our team built in Python and Rust). It crashes if it can’t talk to a database server that hosts no actual databases. It crashes if it doesn’t have the Square API secrets as envars, but the LLM also hard coded them into the API calls. It actually crashes if you try to run it any way other than “npm run dev” (so I srsly set up a service that runs it as npm run dev, as the ubuntu user).
For the first time ever I did some vibe coding this week. I needed what amounts to putting a file in a folder and watch until a file in another folder appears, with a monitoring utility.
I was very impressed with the definition phase. It was a back and forth about the spec until it was what I wanted. I then let it built.
This was quite interesting. It set up a scaffold, wrote tests and ran the tests, fixing errors as it went, then went on to finalize the app. Magic.
Finally it was done, so I go in to play with it. Riddled with bugs. Try to get it to fix them. More bugs. End to end spend a morning doing all this until I gave up and manually wrote what I need in about an hour.
Conclusion: Vibe coding is a complete waste of time. Worse: in the wrong hands it is dangerous. You need to be a pretty damn good programmer to assess the output, and if you are, why the fuck would you use it in this manner?
It reminds me a bit about the no-code/low-code evangelism of some years ago. To the novice it looks magical and a world of possibilities, and the road to riches. But in reality you can only use those things if you have decent programming skills, otherwise it’s a path nowhere.
Need a quick demo? Sure, this might help the novice. Want something for production? Get a professional.
And these guys are coming to take our jobs. Watvh your back. /s
Minimum, sure.
Viable …
I was looking at open-source app builder toolkits the other day and they’re all “ask an AI to build garbage” wrappers. There were way fewer options for toolkit-style visual app builders because those can’t be loosely slapped together in a couple weekends.
It took me a minute to realize that “MVP” means “most valuable player” to most people.
Apparently I’ve been in tech far too long, and care about sports far too little.
