Now I build all sorts of apps for my farm and organizations I volunteer for. I can pound out an app for tracking sample locations for our forage associations soil sample truck, another for moisture monitoring, a fleet task/calendar/maintenance app in hours and iterate on them when I think of features.

And git was brand new when I left the industry, so I only started using it recently to any extent, and holy hell, is it ever awesome!

I'm finally able to build all the ideas I come up with when I'm sitting in a tractor and the GPS is steering.

Seriously exciting. I have a hard time getting enough sleep because I hammer away on new ideas I can't tear myself away from.

I'm not sure how you can claim this on the footer of every page when you're vibe coding these calculators.

I’m not an AI hater but I do see this as evidence of LLMs being susceptible to chasing trends as much as people.

Next.js with server rendered React is not a stack that an experienced web developer would have recommended for a “clean” solution to a collection of financial calculators. It’s the answer you’d get if you asked for the stack that’s trending the most lately.

Creating a polished, usable app is just so much work, and so much of it isn't fun at all (to me). There are a few key parts that are fun, but building an intuitive UI, logging, error handling, documentation, packaging, versioning, containerization, etc. is so tedious.

I'm bewildered when I read posts by the naysayers, because I'm sitting here building polished apps in a fraction of the time, and they work. At least much better than what I was able to build over a couple of weekends. They provide real value to me. And I'm still having fun building them.

I now vibe coded three apps, two of them web apps, in Rust, and I couldn't write a "Hello World" in Rust if you held a gun to my head. They look beautiful, are snappy, and it being Rust gives me a lot of confidence in its correctness (feel free to disagree here).

Of course I wouldn't vibe code in a serious production project, but I'd still use an AI agent, except I'd make sure I understand every line it puts out.

While you can't do anything about (other peoples') interfaces, you can absolutely do something for ads. You can install an ad-blocker on your browser. This is not just for you, OP, it's for everyone: get an ad blocker. Your experience of the internet will be radically changed.

I am reminded of this anytime I sit at someone else's computer who doesn't have an ad blocker, or whenever I see internet conversations complaining about ads; I wonder "what ads"? Then I remember: the ads I'm blocking.

So do yourself a big, warm, fuzzy favour and make the internet better for you. Block ads today.

Choose your own ad blocker, obviously.

What, you thought this was an ad for a specific ad blocker, didn't you? Nah, any one will do. Just block bloody ads.

The years "away" gave me an unusually clear picture of what problems actually need solving vs what's technically interesting to build. Most devs early in their careers build solutions looking for problems. Coming back after working in a specific domain, I had the opposite - years of watching people struggle with the same friction points, knowing exactly what the output needed to look like.

What I'd add to the "two camps" discussion below: I think there's a third camp that's been locked out until now. People who understand problems deeply but couldn't justify the time investment to become fluent enough to ship. Domain experts who'd be great product people if they could prototype. AI tools lower the floor enough that this group can participate again.

The $100 spent on Opus to build 60 calculators is genuinely good ROI compared to what that would have cost in dev hours, even for someone proficient. That's not about AI replacing developers - it's about unlocking latent capability in people who already understand the problem space.

I have a similar experience but its moreso AI lets me build my side projects I only have time to research on, not much time or energy to actually code. I get to review the code and have Claude inspect it (most people I feel dont have Claude do code audits) and tell me where theres bugs, security issues, etc. I do this routinely enough.

The key shift for me: I used to spend hours stuck on syntax, fighting with build systems, or searching StackOverflow for obscure errors. Now that friction is mostly gone. The actual thinking - what to build, how the pieces fit together, what edge cases matter - is still entirely human. But the translation from "I know what I want this to do" to "working code" is dramatically faster.

The compound interest calculator is a good example of something that would've felt like a weekend project a few years ago but probably took you a couple of hours. That's the unlock - not that AI writes code for you, but that the tedious parts stop blocking the interesting parts.

What surprised me most was how much architectural intuition I'd retained even after years away. The fundamentals don't decay as fast as the syntax knowledge.

For myself, I’ve always enjoyed “getting my hands dirty” with code, and the advent of LLMs have been a boon. I’m retired from 34 years of coding (and managing), and never skipped a beat. I’ve released a few apps, since retiring. I’m currently working on the first app that incorporates a significant amount of LLM assistance. It’s a backend admin tool, but I’ll probably consider using the same methodology for more public-facing stuff, in the future.

I am not one to just let an LLM write a whole app or server, unsupervised (I have control issues), but have allowed them to write whole functions, and help me to find the causes of bugs.

What LLMs have given me, is a decreased hesitance to trying new things. I’ve been learning new stuff at a furious rate. My experience makes learning very fast. Having a place to ask questions, and get [mostly] good answers (experience helps me to evaluate the answers), is a game-changer.

> “A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.” –John A. Shedd

[0] https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/thats-not-what-ships...

The author even insists that AI was used because of their poor English, which is the standard excuse on Reddit as well. But clearly, this is not a translation:

> Curious if others have similar stories. Anyone else come back to building after stepping away?

This is bog-standard AI slop to increase engagement.

Look at the blog on their linked site as well. AI-generated posts.

This has been posted here for SEO. This is a business venture.

It's times like this when I think HN needs a post downvote button. Flagging might not be quite appropriate here, but I hate to see this content cluttering up the front page.

Thankfully LLMs are still very stupid. Especially when it comes to security engineering, my specialty, so looks like I have a while yet.

The software paradigm is changing.

People don't need a calculator website anymore. They can just prompt their own AI account to generate whatever calculator they need in the moment. I already have a few pinned in my favorites that I use often.

That is the real promise of AI driven software. Bespoke tiny apps available to anyone whenever they simply just ask for it.

Perhaps if we didn’t have deep layer cakes of frameworks and libraries, people would feel like they can code with or without AI. Feels like AI is going to hinder any efforts to address complexity and justify us living with unnecessary complexity simply because a machine can write the complex, hard to understand, brittle code for us.

It's great to produce something for free but if it wouldn't have been more then a couple of hours work to verify each of these tools, write tests etc. Even better would have been to produce a open source library

That's creating a new inefficient, socially destructive, environmentally damaging hammer because solving the real problem doesn't sell well.

I'll be happy when we solve THAT problem.

You improve over time. I've been programming for 6 years and I still feel like I'm nowhere near others. That's a completely fine and valid thing to feel.

Since when did "average" people have time to set up a CI pipeline, agents, MCPs, and all the rest needed to get vibe coded apps to work become the "simple" way for non-programmers to use computers to mush some data together for their small businesses and neighbors and stuff?

Did spreadsheets, embedded databases, and visual form builders stop working or are lacking in some way?

Or are posts like this astro-turfing LLM posts from companies selling rent to build apps for non-tech folks?

Again, apologize for sounding cynical but it's so hard telling what is genuine these days and I'm genuinely curious how farmers found the time to set up this stuff instead of just using a spreadsheet and a few macros.

If LLMs are covering a gap here maybe there's an opportunity for better, local, lower-tech tooling that doesn't require such a huge tech stack (and subscriptions/rent) to solve simple, tractable problems?

Can definitely understand the reluctance people feel around it. Especially when they’ve invested years into it and have their livelihood on the line

I’m also quite reluctant to publish any of it. Doesn’t feel right to push code I don’t fully understand so mostly personal projects for now

Nit: it seems like the graph for the compound interest calculator should start at year 0 rather than year 1.

Also, it might be nice to have a way to change the starting year to the actual year you want to start (such as the current year).

As others have pointed out, I'm looking at a career shift now. I'm essentially burning out on doing the whole LLM-assisted coding stuff while I still can, earning money on contracts, and then going to step away from the field. I'm lucky that I'm in a position to do so, but I really don't know what the rest of my career looks like.

I'm also now dealing with things that previously would have taken me too long to deal with. For example, I'm actually making a dent in the amount of technical debt I have to deal with. The type of things where previously I maybe wouldn't have taken a week out of my schedule to deal with something that was annoying me. A lot of tedious things that would take me hours/days now can get done in a few prompts. With my bigger projects, I still do most stuff manually. But that's probably going to change over the next months/year.

I'm mainly using codex. I know a lot of people seem to prefer Claude Code. But I've been a happy ChatGPT Plus user for a while and codex is included with that and seems to do the job. Amazing value for 20$/month. I've had to buy extra credit once now.

The flip side of all this is that waiting for AI to do it's thing isn't fun. It's slow enough that it slows me down and fast enough that I can't really multi task. It's like dealing with a very slow build that you have to run over and over again. A necessary evil. But not necessarily fun. I can see why a lot of developers feel like the joy is being sucked out of their lives.

Dealing with this pain is urgent. Part of that is investing in robust and fast builds. Build time competes with model inference in the time stuff takes. And another part is working on the UX of this. Being able to fork multiple tasks at once is hugely empowering. And switching between editing code and generating code needs to get more seamless. It feels too much like I'm sitting on my hands sometimes.

I have always found management to be just silly exercise in day full of meetings. I like to make things. I could retrain, but, the salary drop would be very hard. Hope to find one last gig and have enough to retire. I still get that spark of joy when all the tests pass.

AI is eroding the entry barrier, the cognitive overload, and the hyper-specialization of software development. Once you step away from a black-and-white perspective, what remains is: tools, tools, tools. Feels great to me.

Many who are considering a career shift away from software due to 'AI disgust' devoted their lives to developing software because they loved the craft. But with AI churning out cheap, ugly, but passable code, it's clear that businesses never appreciated the craft. I hope these folks find an area outside of SWE that they love just as much.

But once these folks find this area, it would be naive to think they won't use software to scratch their itch. In the same way that people who didn't pursue a career in SWE (because they felt under-qualified) are using AI to solve their problems, these folks will now find their own problems to solve with software, even if at first that is not their intention. They probably won't use AI to write the code, but ultimately, AI is forcing everyone to become a product manager.

$100 seems like a lot. I guess if you think about it compared to dev salaries, it's nothing. But for $10 per month copilot you can get some pretty great results too.

Otherwise it feels deceptive. Which is surprising given we should judge off intentions and not augmentation (like come on guys this is HN FFS).

This guy's not running any ads on the site, hasn't spammed with multiple posts that I've seen. I still think investment funds/modern stock exchanges are needless parasites upon society but that's just my opinion.

https://youtu.be/JJz5D9txeGA

Cool project!

Have you tried this? https://www.investor.gov/financial-tools-calculators/calcula...

Every other day I see ads of companies saying "use our AI and become a millionaire", this kind of marketing from agentic IDEs implies no need for developers who know their craft, which as said above, isn't the case.

Did fucking AI also write your article?

What can I say... If you used a calculator to get an answer for sqrt(2) are you back to doing mathematics? It's simpler and more fun instead of using Newton method. But it's debatable if you are actually working on mathematics problems.

For the same reason things like Image Playground/etc seem magical/appealing to non-artists (myself included): we don't know how to do it ourselves, so it feels empowering.

Or more close to home: it's the same reason that developers are so in love with clicking some buttons in the <insert cloud mega provider> dashboard in spite of the costs, lock-in, more costs, yet more costs, and of course the extra costs.

As with those choosing "cloud" services they don't need, here too there will no doubt be a lucrative market to fix the shit once people realise that there's a reason experts charge the way they do.

Edit: I appreciate the quick turnaround. Apologies.

But these are the kinds of things that pretty much general purpose AI can just oneshot in a single prompt now.

For example, the other day I wanted to know how much caffeine I was taking in based on my coffee intake. So I asked Claude to just build me an app where it would show my current caffeine "load" in my system, and increase it when I pushed a button with the volume of the coffee, and even had real-time decay of the amount of caffeine in my system. One shot.

Anyone can just get these kinds of things made for themselves on-demand. We don't need nice apps anymore, because now software is completely disposable and customized per person. So what is the point of even building these kinds of "fun" tools anymore? Feels like we are essentially doomed to only churn out AI orchestration platforms and fast fashion throwaway b2b sass apps for our coporate overlords now. Lifestyle/small business software companies are basically going to go extinct long term. Just give Sam Altman money and GPT will make whatever you want and who cares if it's actually good or not because you'll just throw it away when you're done. Fast Fashion Software.

AI has taken everything I liked about developing software out of the equation and handed it over to a bot. Now I'm just doing the things that I find mostly annoying (code review, reviewing specs, triaging bugs) and not the things I actually enjoy - writing code and solving problems.

I guess this is what separates some people. But I always explicitly tell it to use only HTML/JS/CSS without any libraries that I've vetted myself. Generating code allows you now not having to deal with it a lot more.

Cool to hear nonetheless. Can we now also stop stigmatizing AI generated music and art? Looking at you Steam disclosures.

This is a revolution, welcome back to coding :)