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joshstrangeyesterday at 6:59 PM0 repliesview on HN

In my experience, AI/Vibe-coded tools crumble under their own weight given enough iterations and even faster if there is no (real) developer in the loop overseeing/planning/reviewing.

I think that _developers_ might be reaching for more LLM-built tools instead of SaaS in some cases and I also can believe that plenty of people _think_ they are vibe-coding up alternatives to SaaSes they pay for but I think those people are going to have a bad time when it eventually collapses (the tool they made, not talking about the AI bubble).

I'm not anti-LLM (not in the slightest) and you can sometimes (it's not a given) get to 80-90% of an existing product/service with vibe-coding or LLM-assisted development but that last 10-20% (and especially that last 1-5%) are where it gets hard. Really hard.

It's the typical "you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially"-mentality IMHO. I feel this myself all the time, even before LLMs, "Oh, I could clone this easily!" and in many cases I could or even did... or at least I cloned the easy/basic/happy-path version that eschewed a whole slew of features I didn't need/care for. But then the complexity started to set in. [0]

I have the same feeling for things I'm not even trying to clone, just build from scratch. I put together a cookbook for friends and family recently and used LLMs to help write essentially a static site generator to read my JSON data I created (some with the help of LLMs) and render it out as HTML (which I then turned into a PDF). My mind started to run with "Hmm, could I create a product out of this? It was relatively easy to get started..." but then reality set in and I remembered all the little tweaks I had to do (shorten a title here, reduce padding there, etc to make everything fit and look good). Sure, I got 80% of the way there in the first or second iteration of it using LLMs but there was plenty of massaging that had to happen to turn it into something usable that I could send to a printer.