alt Hacker NewsVibe code to production perhaps not, but vibe code for regular personal use doesn’t seem out of the realm of possibility already.
Unless there is inherent complexity in the problem (and assuming subscriptions don’t get pricey soon) I can see nontechnical people getting into designing their own apps.
It makes me think of 3d printing. A lot of people got into 3d modeling because of it. And a lot of people publish cute baubles 3d models (analogous to vibe coded ai wrappers?) but there is genuinely useful stuff that people not in the fabrication or 3d design industry create and share, some even making money off of it.
I just can’t think of a way saas margins will stay as high as they are now.
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3d printing is something I think about. LLMs do their best work against text and 3d printers consume gcode. I’ve had sonnet spit out perfectly good single layer test prints. Obviously it won’t have the context window to hold much more gcode BUT…
If there was a text based file format for models, it could generate those and you could hand that to the slicer. Like I’ve never looked, but are stl files text or binary? Or those 3mf files?
If Gemini can generate a good looking pelican on a bicycle SVG, it can probably help design some fairly useful functional parts given a good design language it was trained on.
And honestly if the slicer itself could be driven via CLI, you could in theory do the entire workflow right to the printer.
It makes me wonder if we are going to really see a push to text-based file formats. Markdown is the lingua franca of output for LLMs. Same with json, csv, etc. Things that are easy to “git diff” are also easy for LLMs…
I don't disagree with the premise, but I still can't think of a SaaS that I'm paying for that I can replace. And I have many subscriptions.