Can you not 1-shot prompt an agent to build an equivalent piece of software for yourself?

ChuckMcM 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I believe your question answers itself, if you could do this then people would[2]. The next question might be 'What prevents the current LLM based coding tools from being able to do this?"

Now there has always been software that people have used that they "could" write for themselves but they didn't because they didn't want to maintain it. Seems like things that are like that would be good candidates for this right?

But this question shares at least a spiritual geneology with the response to some new startup code that does some thing, and the comment here is "Gee, I can't believe that got this funded, I could write that in a weekend."

The problem is, there are many things that are easy to describe but difficult to pin down, and reality is complicated. So many times I've gone into a project thinking it would be "easy" only to start uncovering layer after layer that are much more involved than I expected.

So no, you cannot '1-shot prompt' pretty much any significant software, and that goes doubly true if it affects your life in any potentially devastating way.

One of the things I'm constantly amused by[1] is the Solitaire program on iOS that is clearly being vibe coded these days because it comes up with daily challenges like 'win a hand in -2739551 moves'. Like no human would ever write code that screwed up basic math but LLMs do it all the time.

[1] Obviously I am easily amused :-). But it is sort of the 'pelican riding a bike' test where you can easily tell what a human would do vs what an LLM does.

[2] EDIT: another commentator says they vibe coded it in a weekend. That would support the hypothesis that the application could be at lease a small number of shots vibe coded. That said, I'd love to see that code and the prompts that led to it.

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ares623 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

So many one shot opportunities and yet so few actual links

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bdangubic 6 hours ago | parent [-]

A lot of people use "one-shot" things not to sell it or provide links but for personal usage and to replace tools etc they used to pay for (as few did in this thread).

	▲	ares623 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Hmm right. Personal usage I can get behind. But if I had a coworker/employee just constantly finding ways to one-shot tools we're paying for I'd be pretty miffed. If that's all they're doing why are they even there. Just use their salary to pay for the services at that point.

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mingus88 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Go ahead and vibe code your payment system. What could go wrong?

	▲	skinfaxi 7 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Harvest is a stripe wrapper with time keeping. They are not suggesting to vibe code stripe.
	▲	dhosek 7 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		I’ve found that while vibe coding can be effective, anything with complexity takes more than a 1-shot prompt to get there. The amount of work that comprises a single scrum story is about the right amount to do with a single prompt and even that requires some review and revision. So 1-shot your payment system, hell no, but writing a payment system without writing code is possible although I would think it still would take enough time that I wouldn’t choose that over a reasonably priced SaaS.
	▲	neya 6 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Come on now, we need a blog post blaming the LLM model when this happens. It always crackw me up when people want to vibe code finance related applications. Let's not devoid ourselves of entertainment, please.