“Kills the fun part of coding” - absolutely not! Coding is a lot more fun now that I can move from idea to working prototype in an evening without having to figure out individual libraries, research and learn them etc. The last time I felt this excited / into tech was when I first discovered Ruby on Rails and started using it for projects.
I’ve done several projects that would take months to complete otherwise with “vibes coding”, including: an African fairy tale generator for my daughter, a farm management system for the ministry of agriculture in my country, a Gambian political comic strip creator, a system that generates ten minutes summary podcasts of all my country’s news etc. I’ve also had great success with clients - and got them to sign on much faster - by just putting together a quick demo now that I show them instead of sending a proposal and pitch deck describing what I’ll build for them. It makes them so much more excited and we can make changes almost in realtime.
I’ve noticed a lot in the industry and even on hn, that coders - especially long time ones - tend to “look down” on vibes coding, the same way they did with scripted languages back in the day, and I imagine the same way with compilers. I think this will generally fade out as it becomes industry standard, but in the meantime sometimes I see comments on hn that are so discouraging and cynical it makes me wonder if the person actually tried it out or had just pre judged it. I also think the phrase “vibe coding” is a terrible name, cause it makes it sound like a lazy way of doing things. It’s so much more than that, and lets you think and plan at the idea level. Things like planning your system before you ask it to implement also help a lot.
I think he missed one of the use cases for advertising: providing “free” services to people in the “third world”. I come from west Africa, majority of people can’t afford to pay for Facebook, YouTube, whatsapp etc even though these are their main means of communications. Even if they could afford it (“just a few cents is nothing” to us on here - to these people that’s how much they make in a day), they don’t use traditional banking services and certainly not access to credit and debit cards to make payments. I hate ads too, for all the reasons mentioned in the article. But I don’t see a feasible way to make these services available for the 1 billion plus people I’m describing. Open to ideas.
Does “vibe coding” count :-) I’m from west Africa and lately been very interested in African fairy tales to read to my daughter. Ended up building (
a GPT-backed interface that can insert her in any African story she wants. We also have a list of African queens who’re not famous anymore but did amazing things (look up Queen Nzinga for example). So I’m doing a series of little children’s books about each queen - have them exported to PDF so I can print them out and bind for her: her own little
Collection of fairytales. I plan to put it online later - even if you’re not African I think it’s a great way to explore our history.
This sounds pretty cool. As another commenter asked if you have a write up, I just want to throw my hat in and say, I would enjoy reading a write up what your doing. From the technical bits to a review by your daughter of how well the stories came out.
Thank you. Yes she’s been enjoying them a lot now that we don’t have to repeat the same stories every night :) I’ll share on here once I’m done and also the right up.
Sounds super unique. Please include me too if you do any public follow up? I'd actually enjoy reading those, myself as I've collected folktale collections for years!
Will do. Hn has no way of tagging people or following up though so I’m not sure how to share once I go live. But if you shoot me a message I’ll update you once done. amrangaye at gmail dot com.
Not yet as I’m still finessing it to her needs. She has a problem getting rid of thumb sucking, and finally asked for a fairy tale with a thumb sucking princess who eventually stops sucking her thumb lol. It’s a fun activity and also letting me learn about LLMs.
We've used them to generate stories about our kids and their favourite characters, too. It's a great use case — your approach sounds excellent. Good luck to you!
+1. And “figure out a government ledger” sounds like a friend who would ask why google spend so much money when “it’s just one page with a search box”. Government spending and the amounts involved in budgeting and appropriation etc are far more complex than that, even for small countries.
You don't need to type +1, there's a button for that.
Also, it must not be that complicated since they have already discovered tons of waste. They don't have to understand the whole thing, even 10% might be enough to be useful.
> Also, it must not be that complicated since they have already discovered tons of waste.
You need to be terribly gullible to believe that propaganda nonsense.
You're talking about a bunch of morons who tried to pass off a public health program to fight the spread of AIDS in Mozambique as funding for HAMAS just because they stumbled upon the keyword "Gaza".
> They don't have to understand the whole thing, even 10% might be enough to be useful.
Their goal is to fool gullible morons, the kind who go on online forums parroting "they have already discovered tons of waste" when they don't even know what "waste" is supposed to mean.
> You're talking about a bunch of morons who tried to pass off a public health program to fight the spread of AIDS in Mozambique as funding for HAMAS just because they stumbled upon the keyword "Gaza".
For one, Elon himself said recently this was a mistake, and two, most Americans don't want us fighting the spread of AIDS in Mozambique right now.
> Their goal is to fool gullible morons, the kind who go on online forums parroting "they have already discovered tons of waste" when they don't even know what "waste" is supposed to mean.
I'm hardly a moron, but thanks for killing the discussion. This is why Trump won the election. Anytime someone on the left is questioned at all, they jump to insults. Everyone is tired of it. You can go find their daily updates on X [0] where they share their updates. Yes, some of the cuts are politically driven, but this is what the majority of Americans voted for.
“The majority of them don’t even have taste” - by your definition of taste perhaps? :-) just sounds condescending - taste is whatever they like, not what you decide is good to like.
Taste is preferring something over something else. If they listen to any music without any preference (but I doubt it), they effectively do not have a taste.
Only a “laughable debate” and “just the free market” if you haven’t actually had to deal with these insurance companies when you have a health issue and have never paid your dues late. I’m guessing you’re from somewhere in Europe with universal health care?
I'm foreign to the US and no longer work there (Thanks to Trump, literally and directly.)
While I was there... I literally worked for an insurance company. I have also done work for a pharmaceutical company.
The motivation in healthcare in the US is purely profit. It is not like that anywhere else in my experience.
Sidebar: interesting how you typed out the email address (I’ve also seen variations like me at gmail dot com). This worked for spam and phishing crawlers that just did a brute force search across texts. But now that we have LLMs, I’m wondering if this will be effective anymore, since it gets the context as well and is not just a “dumb” regexp search?
Claude didn't require a whole lot of prompt wrangling to get started (also part of the test). Just talk to it like you would normally ("Hey, you know the DnD 5e rules? Could you make me a character sheet to fill out? Ready to play?" etc.)
I’m heavily invested in 1p for years now, but have been impressed by the new Apple Passwords app (in beta) - it’s nowhere near as advanced, but it implements like 90% of what you need including 2FA. I’m sticking with 1p for now but worth watching as well.
