Numerous comments on the “impossibly small” bit in the title. It makes me wonder if it was put there as a bit of tongue in cheek, less as a brag. E.g. The “it doesn’t have to be that big” Microdot web framework (which I honestly first thought had something to do with Microdot anti theft devices that they put on cars around me).

Elsewhere on HN right now is a post about a dermatologist vibecoding an app for skin stuff. I view the “need/use ai for coding” as an indictment against how complex software development has become. What I think we marvel at is the surprise that sometimes reall can be just that simple. 99% of the people who are using Django/flask/etc don’t really understand how they work under the hood all that well. And so it’s always an “is that all??” moment when we do these “back to the basics” exposé’s where we show that 80% of our needs are covered by something simple and understandable.

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bdcravens 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

> Elsewhere on HN right now is a post about a dermatologist vibecoding an app for skin stuff. I view the “need/use ai for coding” as an indictment against how complex software development has become.

There's a reason why, in the late 90s and early 2000s, people were able to jump out of non-technical careers into development using languages like ASP and ColdFusion. There were some shortcomings of the stacks of the day, but functionally, the ability to meet many business cases really hasn't changed since those days.

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____tom____ 5 days ago | parent [-]

Not to mention Visual Basic.

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mschuster91 5 days ago | parent [-]

... and Excel and Access. So much shadow IT got developed because Excel (+VBA, which is almost as powerful as regular VB6, including calls to the native win32 DLL API) is present everywhere, and Access is pretty widespread as well.

	▲	kitd 4 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> shadow IT I read somewhere that the number of Excel "programmers" is an order or magnitude larger than all professional programmers in all other languages put together. Makes you wonder which is the "shadow IT"!
	▲	ropable 4 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I got my start in professional software development by building an multi-user Access shadow-IT database application that made heavy use of VBA. It only worked because it had a couple of active users at any time, and I left that workplace with documentation consisting of a half-page of bullet points. I know for certain that it was still in usage four years after I left, though God know how long it kept operating in the end. Notwithstanding that shadow IT is the bane of my existence these days, I sometimes need to be reminded of how far a motivated individual can come when they have access to adequate tools and information.

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chuckadams 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

One other way to look at it is that software is realizing enough of the dreams of reusability that cobbling together scripts at such a high level with only the smallest understanding is finally becoming possible. I'm not going full Pangloss here, development is still a massive clusterfuck in many places and probably always will be by its nature, but the frontiers have pushed waaaaay back since I got started.

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naasking 5 days ago | parent [-]

Reusability is a big part of it, but I also think languages are just a lot more abstract and expressive these days, so fewer lines of code goes further. Empirically, error count is correlated with lines of code, as are hallucinations, so the ideal language for AI coding is the most abstract and expressive language that will get you there.

	▲	Andrex 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		> so the ideal language for AI coding is the most abstract and expressive language that will get you there ...JavaScript? (half joking)