What I like is how most such vibed tools - self-aware how ubiquitous they are - don't try to capture audience or offer paid services. Everything is suddenly available without logins, share via a simple url, self-hosting is expected. While AI diminishes the power, influence and recognition of creators, I find it overall a great democratizing force in software.
> keeping it up-to-date with its dependencies etc.
not if the software is functional today, and doesn't require interacting with third party systems (like this tinylittleoffice suite).
By the time the underlying infrastructure (like browser compatibility, or self-hosting OS becoming obsolete) fails, you're likely no longer using it anyway.
The "documents" seem exportable in text format, and in any case, potentially salvageable with another vibe-coded tool if such need arise.
Therefore, the original author is no required to maintain it.
That's a rosy eyed view. users running outdated code not getting security fixes are sweet honeypots for modern automated llm-backed mass exploitation machine long before something obviously fails for you.
you'll be spending tokens on getting it maintained, and if you don't spend enough you get pwned by guys who do. who exactly is winning in this scenario?
OSS maintainedness should not at all be taken for granted. If you need something maintained by pros and security experts, that more accurately describes commercial software. FOSS as it stands, with the exception of some (but nowhere near all) major lynchpin projects, is done by volunteers in their spare time.
A lot of OSS gets supported by foundations, selling consulting or additional services, donations, maintainer's dayjobs, and people's pride in their work and desire to help
I am placing your time of digital fruition in the 00’s or later? Not bashing, but we bought floppies in the 80s with software with no updates. Cool kids got their software from Oh No More Warez + keygen in the early 90s. That went online in the late 90s.
Always online, internet of shit and perma update crap came at that same time, first for the OS and later for everything. Oh, plus two decades of using shady Russian software for virus scanning. Shit went up, update everything became everywhere and everyday. Plus gigabyte frameworks for functionality that was kilobytes before.
My point in cursing too much? (Sorry, mentally screaming FUD here.) That tiny code projects, even without an active maintainer, in the LLM-era are probably a lot more secure when run by the people they target (we run containers, and sandboxes, the cool kids run immutable distros). This is democratizing software, and it has the great feel of old.
Please everyone, vibe code tiny project with tiny codebases everyday. Dump them on GitHub in a free tier. Make so many that the people have a free choice again! And go watch Cliff Stoll again for that hacker energy!
Spending tokens to search for vulnerabilities in commonly used software makes sense because the payoff is large - hack once, exploit many.
However for unique, bespoke software (vibe-coded or not), the payoff is as small as a single endpoint. You’ve found an exploit in MikesOwnOfficeSuite and now have access to Mike’s PC. You’ve got to spend the same tokens again to find an exploit in SuesAwesomeOfficeApps. It still might be worth it in a spear-phishing scenario.
if everyone vibe coded their own offices it would be a heaven for big tech llm operators lining up their pockets of course, but the idea was that Mike is using something vibe-coded by somebody else. just target TinyLittleOffice and get everyone using it
This is the part managerial and marketing types don't understand. Their expectation is usually that "since its a computer system (sic) the tech team will support it from now on".
patching dependencies correctly was one of the first agentic coding tasks llm solved 100%. you will need to dedicate a session once a year to to such patches. Or community of vibe coders will do it for you .
That has always been the case with anything self-hosted. Otherwise you're putting a lot of faith in an upstream maintainer to actually put in the effort which they may or may not be doing.
That word is so misused in this context, it is now bereft of meaning. “Democratisation” does not mean that a person without a skill can now achieve a result. A local pastry shop which makes cakes to order does not “democratise” baking. LLMs do not “democratise” software, anyone with access to a computer could already build and host any of these tools.
“Democratisation” is the word shady actors want to put in our heads to make us not think of the bad parts. Like how countries with “democratic” and “people's republic” in the name are the least democratic. If you have to keep repeating how democratising you are, you aren’t at all.
Technically anyone could write a full book or transcribe them before the printing press came around, but it certainly was a democratizing force for publishing when it was invented. The democratization is in the scale and leverage available to the average person.
That's my point exactly. The average person could not take an idea from conception to a publishable program, and now they can. I'm actually surprised it fits as well as it does metaphors being imperfect and all that.
> The average person could not take an idea from conception to a publishable program
Of course they could, they just had to learn how, and that’s the point. There was no “gatekeeping”¹ and there was nothing “undemocratic”² about it. The information was already ample and freely available to all. Those who had the means (a computing device) before have the means now and the opposite isn’t true (you still need access to a computing device to prompt and a server to host the things which need hosting).
¹ You didn’t use that word, but it’s a common argument in these conversations.
² For something to be “democratising”, what came before had to be undemocratic.
> Don't give me that "everyone died at 25 and ate mud" BS.
No one has said that. You’ve already demonstrated you are arguing in profound bad faith (in all three of your comments) so forgive me if I choose to not engage you any further in your quest for a “gotcha” moment. You can keep your internet points.
Language evolves. What is certainly true is that the scribal class of people who could program has had its gates of entry almost deleted, and people, without sacrificing a meaningful part of their available time, can build tools to solve their problems.
To me, this is democratization.
Sure anyone could have, but that's always a scale.
Of course. My objection is that the word democratisation was specifically chosen to manipulate us. That’s what bad actors do, they pick positive words to describe bad things so it’s hard to argue against them.
It’s fascinating how a community who can clearly see through “think of the children” as the ruse that it is¹ just gobbles up “democratisation” until they choke. Tech people love to believe they’re immune to manipulation, when doing so is the easiest trick in the book. All you have to do is make the problem interesting enough and the critical part of the brain shuts off.
¹ Because of course we should protect children, that’s positive. The issue becomes when bad actors use that as an excuse to promote actions which do not have protecting children as their true intent.
"Democratisation doesn't mean this, and it doesn't mean that...." but you never outline what it does mean, to you. It's a perfect foil to attack others while claiming moral superiority.
Also, I don't recognize your authority to gatekeep word definitions. Here in my little hovel, words mean whatever the general mass of readers think they do.
> We teach the population at the cheapest possible rate; and the aim all the democratization (if we may use the word) of literature proposes to itself in this country, is to store the minds of the many, of the anonymous multitude, with a large portion of valuable, because practically useful, facts. [Meliora, vol. ii, no. 6, 1860]
I’m not sure you understand that quote, or how it (doesn’t) relate to the point.
For one, it even has a parenthetical saying “if we may use the word” meaning the word isn’t being used in it’s proper sense, that’s the whole point of that expression. For another, the quote itself is referring to teaching, as in imparting a skill, and a central point of my comment is that having a skill and having a result done for you are not the same thing. Finally, if you have to go back two centuries to find an example… The countries that I mentioned didn’t even have those names yet, it is clear (if you engage in good faith) that the point regards the modern world and is not a criticism of societies since the dawn of men.
My disagreement is about the usage of the word, not about whether marketers or politicians have used it for other purposes. Sure, using “democratize” to mean “make broadly accessible” has bleached its political force, but that sense has been attested since the late 1700s to the present. Prescriptively, you can argue it shouldn’t be used that way. Descriptively, it has been, for a long time.
> Sure, using “democratize” to mean “make broadly accessible” has bleached its political force
Making and distributing software was already “broadly accessible”. The people who could build and host software before (those with access to computing device) are the same who can do it now.
Of course they could, don’t engage in bad faith and properly steel man the argument. They might not have known how but they could certainly learn and there was absolutely nothing stopping them to do so and crack on. All the resources were already ample and free. They just didn’t want to spend the time on it. Which is fine, not everyone should learn to code, but it’s absurd to claim they couldn’t do it before and can now.
I think that there is something deeper about the disdain for AI than it's raw capitalist consequences. Perhaps it's that we are losing the quintessentially human act of creation to robots.
Was the art the act of typing out code? Everything else, the reasoning, remains in any depth you want. Since the same reasoning produces the sameish code I argue this is not the same as who holds the brush on the canvas.
>If it ever gets a serious user base, might easily sell ads or whatever else.
It would need to offer some pretty valuable features, otherwise I'd just vibecode the same app but without ads lol. What's funny is that I have already vibecoded a similar app for my own usage. It's a bit more complex (integrates with a backend I own), but this is something even a free LLM could easily generate.
>Also, it still costs money to host it, the creator won't eat the cost if it gets up to a serious amount of usage
This is a static app. It's free to host in a number of places. Odds are this is just a GitHub Page. I'd be willing to be the creator's only bill is the domain name.
It's because the creators can't vouch for the work at all and it probably has whack issues. It could be a literal crime to charge for this kind of stuff.
Literal crime seems a bit exaggerated, no? It seems more like the epitome of “move fast, break things”. Folks are moving so fast now that they don’t even bother to try to recoup value for the effort they may have invested anymore.
If that’s a crime, there are a lot of companies that made a lot of money breaking that law.
Your take is worth responding to. See my reply to the similar question. The gist is, move fast and violating patent law is not the same as breaking things. Also it can be illegal to sell products that are broken when there are claims of them... Not being broken. Depends on the situation.
Unfortunately "literal" has come to mean "metaphorical" and descriptivists bully everyone into accepting this (ironically its own form of prescriptivism).
I feel like some people confront their internal dissonance on AI by constructing a fantasy past that never, ever existed.
Zero programmers have ever "vouched" for their work. Everything has bugs and faults and rough edges. Everyone is building stuff that in the end is overwhelmingly code that they didn't write and have never looked at (I mean...do you think that Python script you wrote is "your" code? 99.999% of the runtime is in code you have never looked at).
The "literal crime" just puts the hysterics of this to the next level.
People don't charge for this stuff because in the supply/demand equation, there is basically infinite supply to create fun little things in just a few prompts. Infinite supply means that the ability to charge disappears. This isn't super hard to understand.
And FWIW, infinite supply applies to more and more of the market. I mean, I'm sure people have seen the guy who cloned Photoshop via vibe coding. Again the dissonance there is amazing where people need to believe it's terrible, but as someone who used Photoshop for decades...it's astonishingly good given everything, and iterating rapidly. Similarly, charging to build websites and the like...well, a lot of the market has seen the pricing floor disappear.
It's a rip off of an office suite, the code for said office suite may or may not have came from derivatives of unpermissive licenses, or from patented work(msft has a portfolio of patents for their office products), depending on what the prompts/developer thinks it does and what it actually does could be false advertising or fraud, the list goes on and on. Also gdpr, pcidss. It's a lot safer to make things free when they can't be vouched for and someone's actual ass or reputation is on the line.
