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PeterFBell | 5 months ago

I have been coding on and off (more off than on) for 47 years. I kinda stopped paying attention when we got past jquery and was never a fan of prototypical inheritance. Never built anything with tailwind, Next.js, etc. After spending some time writing copy, user stories and a design brief (all iterative with ChatGPT) cursor one shot my (simple) web app and I was live (once I'd spent a couple hours documenting my requirements and writing my copy) in 20 minutes of vibe coding.

I've been adding small features in a language I don't program in using libraries I'm not familiar with thhat meet my modest functional requirements in a couple minutes each. I work with an LLM to refine my prompt, put it into cursor, run the app locally, look at the diffs, commit, push and I'm live on vercel within a minute or two.

I don't have any good metrics for productivity, so I'm 100% subjective but I can say that even if I'd been building in Rails (it's been ~4 years but I coded in it for a decade) it would have taken me at least 8 hours to have an app where I was happy with both the functionality and the look and feel so a 10x improvement in productivity for that task feels about right.

And having a "buddy" I can discuss a project with makes activation energy lower allowing me to complete more.

Also, YC videos I don't have the time to watch, I get a transcript, feed into chatGTP, ask for the key take aways I could apply to my business (it's in a project where it has context on stage, industry, maturity, business goals, key challenges, etc) so I get the benefits of 90 minutes of listening plus maybe 15 minutes of summarizing, reviewing and synthesis in typically 5-6 minutes - and it'd be quicker if I built a pipeline (something I'm vibe coding next month)

Wouldn't want to do business without it.

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majormajor|5 months ago

How do you deal with security for web stuff? I wouldn't host anything vibe-coded publicly because I'm not enough of an expert in web/frontend to even double-check that it's not generating some giant holes.

atonse|5 months ago

The same way you do security for manually written code. Rigorously. But in this case, you can also have AI also do your code reviews and suggest/write unit tests. Or write out a spec and refine it. Or point it to OWASP and say, look at this codebase and make a plan to check for these OWASP top 10.

And have another AI review your unit tests and code. It's pretty amazing how much nuance they pick up. And just rinse and repeat until the AI can't find anything anymore (or you notice it going in circles with suggestions)