Don't you think their is an opposite of that effect too?

I feel like I can breeze past the easy, time consuming infrastructure phase of projects, and spend MUCH more time getting to high level interesting problems?

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JohnMakin 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I am saying a lot of the time these type of posts are a nonexistent problem, a problem that is already solved, or just thinking about a "problem" that isn't really a problem at all and results from a lack of understanding.

The most recent one I remember commenting on, the poor guy had a project that basically tried to "skip" IaC tools, and his tool basically went nuts in the console (or API, I don't remember) in one account, then exported it all to another account for reasons that didn't make any sense at all. These are already solved problems (in multiple ways) and it seemed like the person just didn't realize terraformer was already an existing, proven tool.

I am not trying to say these things don't allow you to prototype quickly or get tedious, easy stuff out of the way. I'm saying that if you try to solve a problem in a domain that you have no expertise in with these tools and show other experts your work, they may chuckle at what you tried to do because it sometimes does look very silly.

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rickandmorty99 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I'm building an education platform. 95% is vibe coded. What isn't vibe coded though is the content. AI is really uninspiring with how to teach technical subjects. Also, the full UX? I do that. Marketing plan? 90% is me.

But AI does the code. Well... usually.

People call my project creative. Some are actually using it.

I feel many technical things aren't really technical things they are simply a problem where "have a web app" is part of the solution but the real part of the solution is in the content and the interaction design of it, not in how you solved the challenge technically.

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dormento 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> or just thinking about a "problem" that isn't really a problem at all and results from a lack of understanding

You might be on to something. Maybe its self-selection (as in people who want to engage deeply with a certain topic but lack domain expertise might be more likely to go for "vibecodable" solutions).

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JohnMakin 4 hours ago | parent [-]

I compare it to a project I worked on when I was very junior a very long time ago - I built by hand this complicated harness of scripts to deploy VM's on bare metal and do stuff like create customizable, on-the-fly test environments for the devs on my team. It worked fine, but it was a massive time sink, lots of code, and was extremely difficult to maintain and could have weird behavior or bad assumptions quite often.

I made it because at that point in my career I simply didn't know that ansible existed, or cloud solutions that were very cheap to do the same thing. I spent a crazy amount of effort doing something that ansible probably could have done for me in an afternoon. That's what sometimes these projects feel like to me. It's kind of like a solution looking for a problem a lot of the time.

I just scanned through the front page of the show HN page and quickly eyeballed several of these type of things.

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dormento 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Yeah, the feeling that hits when you finally realize you spent THIS MUCH EFFORT in a problem and you realize you can do more with less.

> I made it because at that point in my career I simply didn't know that ansible existed

Channels Mark Twain. "Sorry for such a long letter, i didn't have the time to make it shorter."

	▲	skydhash 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		This is why I make it a goal to have a very good knowledge about the tools I use. So many problems, can be solved by piping a few unix tools together or have a whole chapter in the docs (emacs, vim, postgres,…) about how to solve it. I write software when the scripts are no longer suitable.

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ByThyGrace 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I've read opinions in the same vein of what you said, except painting this as a good outcome. The gist of the argument is why spend time looking for the right tool and effort learning its uses when you can tell an agent to work out the "problem" for you and spit out a tailored solution.

It's about being oblivious, I suppose. Not too different to claiming there will be no need to write new fiction when an LLM will write the work you want to read by request.

	▲	JohnMakin 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It's a reasonable question - I would probably answer, having shipped some of these naive solutions before, that you'll find out later it doesn't do entirely what you wished, is very difficult/impossible to maintain, has severe flaws you're unable to be aware of because you lack the domain expertise, or the worst in my opinion, becomes completely unable to adapt to new features you need with it, where as the more mature solutions most likely already had spent considerable amount of time thinking about these things. I was dabbling in consulting infrastructure for a bit, often prospects would come to me with stuff like this "well I'll just have AI do it" and my response has been "ok, do that, but do keep me in mind if that becomes very difficult a year or two down the road." I haven't yet followed up with any of them to see how they are doing, but some of the ideas I heard were just absolute insanity to me.

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kshacker 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

we need a stackoverflow "dupe" structure, something meme-worthy

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gspr 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I do believe you, but I have to ask: what are these incredibly tedious "easy, time consuming parts of projects" everyone seems to bring up? Refactoring I can see, but I have a sense that's not what you mean here.

	▲	lebuin 2 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		[delayed]
	▲	sigbottle 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		That's actually a great point. I feel like unless you know for sure that you will never need something again, nothing is disposable. I find myself diving into places I thought I would never care about again ALL the time. Every single time I have vibe coded a project I cared about, letting the AI rip with mild code review and rigorous testing has bit me in the ass, without fail. It doesn't extend it in the taste that I want, things are clearly spiraling out of control, etc. Just satisfying some specs at the time of creation isn't enough. These things evolve, they're a living being.