[HN Gopher] Show HN: Vibe coding a bookshelf with Claude Code
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Show HN: Vibe coding a bookshelf with Claude Code
Author : balajmarius
Score : 247 points
Date : 2025-12-29 13:22 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (balajmarius.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (balajmarius.com)
| kingkongjaffa wrote:
| This is lovely, claude code is a great tool for creating software
| for a user of 1. Personal software that runs locally (or on your
| own website in your case) and works exactly you want without it
| doing anything you don't want.
|
| One-off scripts and single page html/css/js apps that run locally
| are fantastically accessible now too.
|
| As someone who doesn't code for a living, but can write code, I
| would often go on hours/day long side quests writing these kind
| of apps for work and for my personal life. I know the structure
| and architecture but lack the fluency for speedy execution since
| I'm not writing code everyday. Claude code fills that speed gap
| and turned my days/hours long side quests into minutes for
| trivial stuff, and hours for genuinely powerful stuff at home and
| at work.
| kgthegreat wrote:
| I wrote about how I think about the separation of intent and
| execution here : https://bikeshedding.substack.com/p/the-agency-
| continuum
| spicyusername wrote:
| These are the perfect size projects vibe coding is currently good
| for.
|
| At some point you hit a project size that is too large or has too
| many interdependencies, and you have to be very careful about how
| you manage the context and should expect the llm to start
| generating too much code or subtle bugs.
|
| Once you hit that size, in my opinion, it's usually best to drop
| back to brainstorming mode, only use the llm to help you with the
| design, and either write the code yourself, or write the skeleton
| of the code yourself and have the llm fill it in.
|
| With too much code, llms just don't seem able yet to only add a
| few more lines of code, make use of existing code, or be clever
| and replace a few lines of code with a few more lines of code.
| They nearly always will add a bunch of new abstractions.
| solumunus wrote:
| > make use of existing code, or be clever and replace a few
| lines of code with a few more lines of code
|
| You can be explicit about these things.
| auggierose wrote:
| Yes. It is called programming.
| solumunus wrote:
| Using agents is programming. Programming is done with the
| mind, the tapping of keys isn't inherent to the process.
| batshit_beaver wrote:
| Unfortunately IDEs are not yet directly connected to our
| minds, so there's still that silly little step of
| encoding your ideas in a way that can be compiled into
| binary. Playing the broken telephone game with an LLM is
| not always the most efficient way of explaining things to
| a computer.
| solumunus wrote:
| Of course not. It's a tool.
| cube2222 wrote:
| I agree with you as far as project size for _vibe-coding_ goes
| - as-in often not even looking at the generated code.
|
| But I have no issues with using Claude Code to write code in
| larger projects, including adapting to existing patterns, it's
| just not vibe coding - I architect the modules, and I know more
| or less exactly what I want the end result to be. I review all
| code in detail to make sure it's precisely what I want. You
| just have to write good instructions and manage the context
| well (give it sample code to reference, have agent.md files for
| guidance, etc.)
| OptionOfT wrote:
| > I know more or less exactly what I want the end result to
| be
|
| This is key.
|
| And this is also why AI doesn't work that well for me. I
| don't know yet how I want it to work. Part of the work I do
| is discovering this, so it can be defined.
| xur17 wrote:
| I've found this to be the case as well. My typical workflow
| is:
|
| 1. Have the ai come up with an implementation plan based on
| my requirements
|
| 2. Iterate on the implementation plan / tweak as needed,
| and write it to a markdown file
|
| 3. Have it implement the above plan based on the markdown
| file.
|
| On projects where we split up the task into well defined,
| smaller tickets, this works pretty well. For larger stuff
| that is less well defined, I do feel like it's less
| efficient, but to be fair, I am also less efficient when
| building this stuff myself. For both humans and robots,
| smaller, well defined tickets are better for both
| development and code review.
| cube2222 wrote:
| Yeah, this exactly. And if the AI wanders in confusion
| during #3, it means the plan isn't well-defined enough.
| blks wrote:
| Sounds like so much work just not to write it yourself.
| aurareturn wrote:
| These are the perfect size projects vibe coding is currently
| good for.
|
| So far... it's going to keep getting better to the point until
| all software is written this way.
| spzb wrote:
| I've got a bridge to sell you
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| It seems like it's approaching a horizontal asymptote to me,
| or is at the very least concave down. You might be describing
| a state 50 years from now.
| anthonypasq wrote:
| sonnet 3.7 was released 10 months ago! (the first model
| truly capable of any sort of reasonable agentic coding at
| all) and opus 4.5 exists today.
| rabf wrote:
| To add to this: the tooling or `harness` around the
| models has vastly improved as well. You can get far
| better results with older or smaller models today than
| you could 10 months ago.
| aurareturn wrote:
| It seems like progress is accelerating, not slowing down.
|
| ARC AGI 2:
| https://x.com/poetiq_ai/status/2003546910427361402
|
| METR: https://metr.org/blog/2025-03-19-measuring-ai-
| ability-to-com...
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Improved benchmarks are undeniably an improvement, but
| the bottleneck isn't the models anymore, it's the context
| engineering necessary to harness them. The more time and
| effort we put into our benchmarking systems the better
| we're able to differentiate between models, but then when
| you take an allegedly smart one and try to do something
| real with it, it behaves like a dumb one again because
| you haven't put as much work into the harness for the
| actual task you've asked it to do as you did into the
| benchmark suite.
|
| The knowledge necessary to do real work with these things
| is still mostly locked up in the humans that have
| traditionally done that work.
| rvz wrote:
| Air traffic control software is not going to be vibe-coded
| anytime soon and neither is the firmware controlling the
| plane.
| A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote:
| I will be perfectly honest. Given what I am seeing, I fully
| expect someone to actually try just that.
| aurareturn wrote:
| Sure it will. But they will be tested far more stringently
| by both human experts and the smartest LLM models.
| blks wrote:
| Considering how much work at Boeing is given to consultants
| and other third party contractors (eg famous MCAS), some
| piece of work after moving through the bowls of multiple
| subcontractors will end up in the hands of a under-
| qualified developer who will ask his favourite slop machine
| to generate code he doesn't exactly understands purpose of.
| croes wrote:
| Successfully building an IKEA shelf doesn't make you a
| carpenter.
| exe34 wrote:
| no, but I have furniture. it's important to keep sight of
| the end goal, unless the carpentry is purely a hobby.
| whattheheckheck wrote:
| What's the job title and education requirements for
| designing the supply chain and engineering of the ikea
| furniture?
| exe34 wrote:
| I don't know, I don't work at IKEA. Sorry.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Sure, but that's basically the same as saying that we'll have
| human-equivalent AI one day (let's not call it AGI, since
| that means something different to everyone that uses it), and
| then everything that humans can do could then be done by AI
| (whether or not it will be, is another question).
|
| So, yes, ONE DAY, AI will be doing all sorts of things (from
| POTUS and CEO on down), once it is capable of on-the-job
| learning and picking up new skills, and everything else that
| isn't just language model + agent + RAG. It the meantime, the
| core competence of an LLM is blinkers-on (context-on)
| executing - coding - according to tasks (part of some plan)
| assigned to it by a human who, just like a lead assigning
| tasks to human team members, is aware of what it can and can
| not do, and is capable of overseeing the project.
| mellosouls wrote:
| Engineering code now is not just binary, it's a spectrum from
| vibe-coding through copilot-style (design and coding
| assistance) to your help-with-design-only to no-AI.
|
| The capabilities now are strong enough to mix and match almost
| fully in the co-pilot range on substantial projects and repos.
| pranavm27 wrote:
| Reminds me of Ken Miles saying 7000 rpm quote. At what size do
| you think this happens? Whatever is the most relevant metric of
| size for this context.
| pigpop wrote:
| Or you can apply software architecture methods that are
| designed to help humans with exactly the same type of problems.
|
| Once your codebase exceeds a certain size, it becomes counter-
| productive to have code that is dependent on the implementation
| of other modules (tight coupling). In Claude Code terms this
| means your current architecture is forcing the model to read
| too many lines of code into its context which is degrading
| performance.
|
| The solution is the same as it is for humans:
| "Program to an interface, not an implementation." --Design
| Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software (1994)
|
| You have to carefully draw boundaries around the distinct parts
| of your application and create simple interfaces for them that
| only expose the parts that other modules in your application
| need to use. Separate each interface definition into its own
| file and instruct Claude (or your human coworker) to only use
| the interface unless they're actually working on the internals
| of that module.
|
| Suddenly, you've freed up large chunks of context and Claude is
| now able to continue making progress.
|
| Of course, the project could continue to grow and the
| relatively small interface declarations could become too many
| to fit in context. At that point it would be worthwhile taking
| a look at the application to see if larger chunks of it could
| be separated from the rest. Managing the number and breadth of
| changes that Claude is tasked with making would also help since
| it's unlikely that every job requires touching dozens of
| different parts of the application so project management skills
| can get you even further.
| tzs wrote:
| Is vibe architecting a thing too, or is architecting to make
| your vibe coder work better something that the human needs to
| know?
| pigpop wrote:
| Haha, actually yes. You can prompt them to be their own
| architect but I do find it works better when you help. You
| could probably get pretty far by prompting them to review
| their own code and suggest refactoring plans. That's
| essentially what Plan Mode is for in Claude Code.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| I think this limitation goes away as long as your code is
| modular. If the Ai has to read the entire code base each time,
| sure but if everything is designed well then it only needs to
| deal with a limited set of code each time and it excels at
| that.
| kgthegreat wrote:
| While currently taste is what we are banking on the thing humans
| will continue doing but I don't think that will last for long.
| neogodless wrote:
| It is easy to defer to the "taste" of the mathematically mixed
| up assessment of "all internet-recorded human taste" if you
| prefer. And many will choose that. But many others will choose
| to remain in charge of their own taste, as best they can, and
| request that the machines still produce output per their
| bidding.
| MattRix wrote:
| Well no, you just need to tune the taste of the model to
| produce things that humans find appealing. This has already
| happened with the image generation models. I don't see any
| reason it can't happen with these code generation models too.
|
| The whole thing feels a bit like god-of-the-gaps situation,
| where we keep trying to squeeze humanity into whatever
| remaining little gaps the current generation of AI hasn't
| mastered yet.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| yeah there's nothing special about taste most of the time, very
| few people even have a decent sense of it anyway
|
| you can tell by how many people earnestly share AI generated
| images, many are completely tasteless but people don't care
| wiseowise wrote:
| Author has a _great_ taste, you can see it by just visiting
| their website.
| vtemian wrote:
| This nails what vibe coding actually is. The model handles
| execution, but intent and taste stay human. That's where the real
| leverage is.
| felixding wrote:
| Neat. I also used to make a simple "bookshelf" web page each year
| for the books I read, but mine were fully static HTML and nowhere
| near as fancy as this.
|
| Side note: I once wrote about recreating Delicious Library:
| https://dingyu.me/blog/recreating-delicious-library-in-2025
| dewey wrote:
| I was about to post something about Delicious Library. That's
| one of my earlier Mac user memories and it always gave me joy
| to import / organize my books in there even if there's no real
| reason to do it.
| _august wrote:
| Same, I remember being in awe of how well-designed this app
| was.
| pixelmonkey wrote:
| Wow, this is cool. I had COMPLETELY forgotten about Delicious
| Library. That is such a nice look-and-feel for this sort of
| app.
| stevesearer wrote:
| Great project!
|
| Vibe coding has really helped me explore skills outside of my
| comfort zone which can then be applied in combination with other
| existing skills or interests in new ways.
|
| In the case of your project, I imagine that now that you can
| gather data such as books from an image of a bookshelf, you can
| do something similar in infinite other ways.
| bhouston wrote:
| Good job!
|
| I wonder if you could develop this as an add on to Hardcover.app
| - you could fetch people's books, images, and display the
| bookshelf.
|
| All the data seems to be there:
|
| https://hardcover.app/@BenHouston3D/books/read?order=owner_l...
| necromanc wrote:
| This is a brilliant project--small, practical, and high-leverage.
| stevesearer wrote:
| Sometimes when I'm vibe coding I feel like Ender from Ender's
| Game and even though I'm making a stupid web app, I'm actually
| somehow actually winning a battle across the universe.
| Shadowmist wrote:
| Nobody tell him
| troupo wrote:
| Speaking of SerpAPI: _Why we're taking legal action against
| SerpApi's unlawful scraping_
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46329109
|
| SerpAPI provides a very valuable programmatic access to search
| that Google are hell bent on never properly providing
| mihaibalint wrote:
| I Love the fact that the browser search functionality works in
| the bookshelf.
| samwho wrote:
| I love this, the end result looks so good.
|
| Something you don't really mention in the post is why do this? Do
| you have an end goal or utility in mind for the book shelf? Is it
| literally just to track ownership? What do you do with that
| information?
| balajmarius wrote:
| Thanks! Honestly, there's no big utility behind it. I didn't
| build it to optimize anything or track data, it just felt good
| to make.
|
| I want my website to slowly become a collection of things I do
| and like, and this bookshelf is just one of those pieces.
| AtreidesTyrant wrote:
| I like that it's fun, and that is what AI vibe coding should
| be.
| stanrunge wrote:
| Very very cool. It's surprisingly difficult to find applications
| for organizing reading material, and also to actually read them.
| My current "good enough" solution is just Apple Books, but I've
| been meaning to make a similar application for this :)
| cube2222 wrote:
| That's really cool, and a great use-case for vibe coding!
|
| I've been vibe-coding a personalized outliner app in Rust based
| on gpui and CRDTs (loro.dev) over the last couple days -
| something just for me, and in a big part just to explore the
| problem space - and so far it's been very nice and fun.
|
| Especially exploring multiple approaches, because exploring an
| approach just means leaving the laptop working for an hour
| without my attendance and then seeing the result.
|
| Often I would have it write up a design doc with todos for a
| feature I wanted based on its exploration, and then just launch a
| bash for loop that launches Claude with "work on phase $i" (with
| some extra boilerplate instructions), which would have it
| occupied for a while.
| m-hodges wrote:
| > I decided that 90 percent accuracy was enough.
|
| So many systems are fault-tolerant, and it's great to remember
| that in a world where LLMs introduce new faults. Kudos to OP for
| this mindset; more anti-AI posters would benefit from sitting
| with the idea from time to time.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Agree. We've all had occasional hilarious results when
| interacting with an LLM. If 90% of the interactions produce
| positive results... that's an improvement over my what I've
| come to expect plowing through Google search results.
| asasidh wrote:
| "Claude handled implementation. I handled taste."
|
| This is the right mindset.
| ikamm wrote:
| This is an LLM-ism.
| nindalf wrote:
| This is such a coincidence. I had the same idea a few days ago
| and also vibe coded a library using Claude.
| https://nindalf.com/books. The original version of this was meant
| to encourage me to read more, and I'm pleased to say it
| succeeded. I hit my goal for the year after a couple of lean
| years. I also like looking at my highlights and notes and this UI
| makes it easier to read them.
|
| My experience with Claude was mostly very good. Certainly the UI
| is far better than what I'd come up with myself. The backend is
| close to what I'd write myself. When I'm unhappy I'm able to
| explain the shortcomings and it's able to mostly fix itself. This
| sort of small-scale, self-contained project was made possible
| thanks to Claude.
|
| Other times it just couldn't. The validation for the start and
| end dates it decided was
| z.string().or(z.date()).optional().transform((val) => (val ? new
| Date(val) : undefined)). It looked way too complex. I asked if it
| could be simplified, Claude said no. I suggested
| z.date().optional(). Claude patiently explained this was
| impossible. I tried it anyway, it worked. Claude said "you're
| absolutely right!". But this behaviour was the exception rather
| than the rule.
| tharos47 wrote:
| Do you have the code for your book library ? I wanted to do
| something similar to help me remember the books I read in a
| year too.
| nindalf wrote:
| Which part? I have a python code base
| (https://github.com/nindalf/kindle-highlight-sync) that
| scrapes read.amazon.com for my book highlights. It then
| exports the data into markdown files that are imported by my
| website.
| quinnjh wrote:
| ive been iterating on something very similar as well :D started
| in september and give it 30-60 mins here and there. i ended up
| with rows instead of a horizontal scroll. There definitely hve
| been a handful of times claude made terrible decisions and
| described them as brilliant, but with some very heavy guidance
| and worktrees its still (feels at least) quicker than if i
| wrote it out.
|
| cool to check out your version as well thanks for sharing.
| Tiberium wrote:
| > What I needed was not a better app, but a way to tolerate
| imperfection without the whole system falling apart.
|
| > Claude did not invent that idea. It executed it.
|
| > Claude handled implementation. I handled taste.
|
| This style of writing always gets me now :)
| AtreidesTyrant wrote:
| This style of writing isnt human. Its AI.
|
| ^^ These dramatic statements are almost always AI influenced, I
| seem to always see them in people's emails now as well. "we
| didnt reinvent the wheel. we are the wheel."
| delichon wrote:
| We can learn useful rhetorical techniques from AI that can
| help us clearly communicate. We should separate those babies
| from the bathwater.
| F7F7F7 wrote:
| Rhetorical techniques that are so easily identifiable as AI
| now.
| estearum wrote:
| So far, any "useful rhetorical technique" one could've
| learned from AI has become a dead giveaway of AI slop (lazy
| writing and lazy thinking).
|
| Seriously: what tool do you want to use that's immediately
| available to the absolute lowest common denominator
| "writers" on the Internet?
|
| "It's not X, it's Y" literally makes my stomach churn from
| seeing so much of it on LinkedIn.
| skydhash wrote:
| You can also just find a book on writing. I recommend "On
| Writing Well" by William Zinsser. Dense and quite
| informative.
| Tiberium wrote:
| Yeah, I know, I just feel like at this point it's useless to
| call that out.
| TheChelsUK wrote:
| You are absolutely right. It's not X that's the give away,
| it's A, and B -- moreover it's C that is the clincher.
| skybrian wrote:
| AI is popularizing a writing style that has been common in
| advertising for quite some time. For example, Apple uses it a
| lot. Now everyone can imitate advertising copy.
| IshKebab wrote:
| It's not that it didn't exist before. It's that it wasn't
| overused.
|
| Heh.
| 7moritz7 wrote:
| Neurodivergent people tend to write like this too, there was
| a study about it.
| idonotknowwhy wrote:
| And the scripts of most recent YouTube videos, and the
| dialogue in Stranger Things Season 5 (the last 3 episodes
| specifically).
| pranavm27 wrote:
| I feel ya but it didn't get me on this one for some reason. But
| it gets me a lot on Linkedin - due to which I lost control and
| blasted off a post yesterday.
|
| I think it some kind of value - vibe dynamics that play in
| making the brain conscious about it being written with AI or
| otherwise.
| Terretta wrote:
| _"That was enough."_
| RickS wrote:
| Others, please chime in, I want to take a sort of poll here:
|
| I usually grimace at "GPT smell". The lines you quoted stood
| out to me as well, but I interpreted them as "early career
| blogger smell". It's similar, but it didn't come off as AI. I
| think because it avoided grandiose words, and because it reused
| the exact same phrase format (like a human tic) rather than
| randomly sampling the format category (like an AI). This is
| what human text looks like when it's coming from someone who is
| earnestly trying to have a punchy, intentional writing style,
| but who has not yet developed an editor's eye (or asked others
| to proofread), which would help smooth out behaviors that seem
| additive in isolation but amateur in aggregate.
|
| Did others share the impression that it's a human doing the
| same classic tricks that AI is trained to copy, or does
| anything in this category immediately betray AI usage?
| nyyp wrote:
| This post felt AI-touched to me, but the usage falls on a
| spectrum. You can write the whole post yourself, have an LLM
| write the whole post, or - what I suspect is the case here -
| have the LLM "polish" your first draft.
|
| Many weaker or non-native writers might use AI for that
| "editor's eye" without realizing that they are being driven
| to sound identical to every other blog post these days. And
| while I'm certainly growing tired of constantly reading the
| same LLM style, it's hard to fault someone for wanting to
| polish what they publish.
| zittur wrote:
| I really love how the bookshelf display looks. Most sites just
| use a standard grid for books, which can feel a bit cookie-
| cutter. The way you've mixed in stacked and bookend-style
| arrangements is a breath of fresh air, it really stands out.
| ionicabizau wrote:
| Wonderful project, Marius! :) I shared it with my brother who has
| a lot of books and tracks them in his own little app. Keep up the
| great work! So happy to see you around!
| tahirk99 wrote:
| The size boundary point is real. Once projects get past a few
| thousand lines, you stop vibe coding and start managing intent
| and context again. At that stage the LLM becomes more of a fast
| junior than a magic wand.
| xnx wrote:
| Sounds like the author did thing the hard way when he probably
| could've uploaded a few seconds of video to Gemini and said "make
| a virtual bookshelf app"
| https://fedi.simonwillison.net/@simon/111971103847972384
| ear7h wrote:
| > I own more books than I can read.
|
| > I started asking for things I did not need.
|
| For a community that prides itself on depth of conversation,
| ideas, etc. I'm surprised to so much praise for a post like this.
| I'll be the skeptic. What does it bring to you to vibe code your
| vibe shelf?
|
| To me, this project perfectly encapsulates the uselessness of AI,
| small projects like this are good learning or relearning
| experience and by outsourcing your thinking to AI you deprive
| yourself of any learning, ownership, or the self fulfillment that
| comes with it. Unless, of course, you think engaging in "tedious"
| activities with things you enjoy have zero value, and if getting
| lost in the weeds isn't the whole point. Perhaps in one of those
| books you didn't read, you missed a lesson about the journey
| being more important than the destination, but idk I'm more of a
| film person.
|
| The only piece of wisdom here is the final sentence:
|
| > Taste still does not [get cheaper].
|
| Though, only in irony.
| NewsaHackO wrote:
| I don't think you fully understood the purpose of the project.
| He wanted an end product (the bookshelf app) that he had been
| putting off due to the time commitment. He did not say he
| wanted to learn about how to program in general, nor did he
| even say he liked programming. People care about results and
| the end product. If you like to program as a hobby, LLMs in no
| way stop you from doing this. At the end of the day, people
| with your viewpoint fall short of convincing people against
| using AI because you are being extremely condescending to the
| desires of regular people. Also, it is quite ironic that you
| attempted to make a point about him not reading all 500 books
| on his bookshelf, yet you don't seem to have read (or
| understood) the opening section of the post.
| pixelmonkey wrote:
| Digitizing my physical bookshelf was one of the first fun "vibe
| coding" projects I did with ChatGPT4o in 2024.
|
| First, I took photographs of all my physical books simply by
| photographing the bookshelves such that the book spines were
| visible.
|
| Then passed the photographs with a prompt akin to, "These are
| photographs of bookshelves. Create a table of book title and book
| author based on the spines of the books in these photographed
| shelves." ChatGPT4's vision model handled this no problem with
| pretty high accuracy.
|
| I then vibe-coded a Python program with ChatGPT4 to use the
| Google Books API (an API key for that is free) to generate a
| table, and then a CSV, of: book title, book author, and isbn13.
| Google Books API lets you look up an ISBN based on other metadata
| like title and author easily.
|
| Finally, I uploaded the enriched CSV into a free account of
| https://libib.com. This is a free SaaS that creates a digital
| bookshelf and it can import books en masse if you have their
| ISBNs. You can see the result of this here for my bookshelf:
|
| https://www.libib.com/u/freenode-fr33n0d3
|
| There are some nice titles in there for HN readers! My admin app
| for Libib (the one at https://libib.com) is more full-featured
| than the above public website showcases. It's basically software
| for running small lending libraries. But, in my case, the
| "lending library" is just my office's physical bookshelf.
|
| I also added a Libib collection there that is a sync of my
| Goodreads history, since I read way more Kindle books than
| physical books these days. That was a similarly vibe-coded
| project. But easier since Goodreads can export your book
| collection, including isbn13, to a file.
|
| As for my actual physical bookshelf, it is more a collection of
| books I either prefer in print, or that are old, or out-of-print,
| or pre-digital & never-digitized.
|
| I liked the Libib software so much I end up donating to it every
| year. I originally discovered it because it is used for Recurse
| Center's lending library in the Recurse Center space in Brooklyn,
| NY (https://recurse.com).
|
| Also, Libib has a Android, iPhoneOS, and iPadOS apps -- these are
| very basic but they do allow you to add new books simply by
| scanning their ISBN barcode, which is quite handy when I pick up
| new items.
|
| I did enjoy reading the OP writeup, it's a fun idea to vibe-code
| the actual digital bookshelf app, as well!
| butlike wrote:
| It's nice that the project probably helps cut down on
| accidentally re-buying already owned books. I would hope the
| project doesn't remove the joy of randomly rediscovering joyous
| books in your own collection from time to time.
| wek wrote:
| "The gap between intention and execution was small, but it was
| enough to keep the project permanently parked in the someday
| pile." Well said!
|
| This is my experience with agents, particularly Claude Code. It
| supplies sufficient activation energy to get me over the hump. It
| makes each next step easy enough that I take it.
| monerozcash wrote:
| It's a shame the blog post had to be written by AI too. If you're
| going to use AI to rewrite your text, you could at least ask it
| to keep the changes minimal.
| spzb wrote:
| I am yet to see a vibe coded success that isn't a small program
| that already exists in multiple forms in the training data. Let's
| see something ground-breaking. If AI coding is so great and is
| going to take us to 10x or 100x productivity let's see it
| generate a new, highly efficient compression algorithm or a
| state-of-art travelling salesman solution.
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| And to add to this, for some reason people really bristle if
| you say that many LLM's are just search with extra steps. This
| feels like an extension of that. It's just reinventing the
| wheel over and over again based on a third party's (admittedly
| often a solid approximation but still not exact) educated guess
| of what a wheel may be. It all seems like a rather circuitous
| way to accomplish things unless your goal isn't to build a
| wheel but rather tinker and experiment with the concept of a
| wheel and learn something in the process. Totally valid, but
| I'm pretty sure that's not what open AI et al are pitching lol
| SJMG wrote:
| https://thenewstack.io/how-deepminds-alphatensor-ai-devised-...
|
| Not either of the species of algorithms you've described, but
| still an advance.
| spzb wrote:
| That's about as far removed from vibe coding as you can get.
| It's the result of an algorithm developed for a specific
| purpose by researchers at one of the most advanced machine
| learning companies.
| fiyec30375 wrote:
| Who really cares? The goalpost of "AI is useless because I
| can't vibe code novel discoveries" is a strawman. AI and
| vibe coding are transformational. So are AI-enhanced
| efforts to solve longstanding, difficult scientific
| problems. If cancer is cured with AI assistance, does it
| really matter if it was vibe-cured or state-of-the-art-lab-
| cured?
| spzb wrote:
| Ironic to call it a strawman whilst making a strawman
| yourself. I never said AI was useless, I said vibe coding
| hasn't produced anything novel.
| rvz wrote:
| > let's see it generate a new, highly efficient compression
| algorithm or a state-of-art travelling salesman solution.
|
| This is the "promise" that was being sold here and in reality,
| we yet haven't seen anything innovative or even a sophisticated
| original groundbreaking discovery from an LLM with most of the
| claims being faked or unverified.
|
| Most of the 'vibe-coding' uses here are quite frankly
| performative or used for someone's blog for 'content'.
| jungturk wrote:
| Much of the coding we do is repetitive and exists in the
| training data, so I think its pretty great if AI can eliminate
| that toil and liberate the meat to focus on the creative work.
| SOLAR_FIELDS wrote:
| There's a reason they call working at Google "shuffling
| protobufs" for the vast majority of engineers. Most software
| work isn't innovative compression algorithms. It's moving
| data around, which is a well understood problem
| anon7000 wrote:
| You're right, but at the same time, 99% of software people need
| has already been done in some form. This gets back to the
| article on "perfect software" [1] posted last week. This
| bookshelf is perfect for the guy who wrote it and there isn't
| anything exactly like it out there. The common tools on the App
| Store (goodreads) don't fit his needs. But he was able to
| create a piece of "perfect software" that exactly meets his own
| goals and his own design preferences. And it was very easy to
| accomplish with LLMs, just by putting together pieces of things
| that have been done before.
|
| This is still pretty great!
|
| 1: https://outofdesk.netlify.app/blog/perfect-software
| pigpop wrote:
| Yes, that's an excellent framing of where we're at and the
| role that LLM generated software is excelling in. Custom
| software has been out of reach for many people who would
| benefit from it due to requiring either a lot of money to pay
| someone to build it or a lot of time to learn how to build it
| yourself and execute on that process. Right now you can
| essentially use services like Claude as a custom software
| "app store", although I'd really call it a service, where you
| can say "I'd like an app that does X" and depending on the
| scope you can get that app as a Claude Artifact in a few
| minutes or, if you're familiar with software development and
| build/deployment processes, in a few hours to days as a more
| traditional software artifact which you can host somewhere or
| install locally. Google is working hard to make this even
| more achievable for non-developers with Google AI Studio
| https://aistudio.google.com/ and Firebase Studio
| https://firebase.studio/
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| Forget utterly groundbreaking things, I want to hear
| maintainers of complex, actively developed, and widely used
| open-source projects (e.g. ffmpeg, curl, openssh, sqlite) start
| touting a massive uptick in positive contributions, pointing to
| a concrete influx of high-quality AI-assisted commits. If AI is
| indeed a 10x force multiplier, shouldn't these projects have
| seen 10 years' worth of development in the last year?
|
| Don't get me wrong, AI is at least as game-changing for
| programming as StackOverflow and Google were back in the day.
| Being able to not only look up but automatically integrate
| things into your codebase that already exist in some form in
| the training data is incredibly useful. I use it every day, and
| it's saved me hours of work for certain specific tasks [0]. For
| tasks like that, it is indeed a 10x productivity multiplier.
| But since these tasks only comprise a small fraction of the
| full software development process, the rest of which cannot be
| so easily automated, AI is not the overall 10x force multiplier
| that some claim.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45511128
| zwnow wrote:
| > Being able to not only look up but automatically integrate
| things into your codebase that already exist in some form in
| the training data is incredibly useful.
|
| Until it decides to include code it gathered from a
| stackoverflow post 15 years ago probably introducing security
| related issues or makes up libraries on the go or even worse,
| tries to make u install libs that were part of a data
| poisoning attack.
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| It's no different from supervising a naive junior engineer
| who also copy/pastes from 15 year old SO posts (a tale as
| old as time): you need to carefully review and actually
| grok the code the junior/AI writes. Sometimes this ends up
| taking longer than writing it yourself, sometimes it
| doesn't. As with all decisions in delegating work, the
| trick is knowing ahead of time whether this will be the
| case.
| spzb wrote:
| Naive junior engineers eventually learn and become
| competent senior engineers. LLMs forget everything they
| "learn" as soon as the context window gets too big.
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| Very true! I liken AI to having an endless supply of
| newly hired interns with near-infinite knowledge but
| intern-level skills.
| cheevly wrote:
| There are like a dozen well-established ways to overcome
| this. Learn how to use the basic tools and patterns my
| dude.
| zwnow wrote:
| I have yet to see a junior trying to install random/non
| existing libs.
| pigpop wrote:
| If you forced them to try it from memory without giving
| them access to the web you sure would.
| spzb wrote:
| curl in particular is being plagued by AI-slop security
| reports which are actively slowing development by forcing the
| maintainers to triage crap when they could be working on new
| features (or, you know, enjoying their lives) eg https://www.
| theregister.com/2025/07/15/curl_creator_mulls_ni...
| leleat wrote:
| On the other hand, we had this story[^1], where the
| maintainer of curl mentions a a bunch of actual useful
| reports by someone using AI tools.
|
| [^1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45449348
| anthonypasq wrote:
| the creator of claude code said on twitter he hasnt opened an
| ide in a month and merged 200 prs.
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| Might the creator of Claude Code have some ... incentives
| ... to develop like that, or at least claim that he does?
|
| As someone who frequently uses Claude Code, I cannot say
| that a year's worth of features/improvements have been
| added in the last month. It bears repeating: if AI is truly
| a 10x force multiplier, you should expect to see a ~year's
| worth of progress in a month.
| simonw wrote:
| Opus 4.5 is just a few days over a month old. Boris would
| have had access to that for a while before its release
| though.
| shimman wrote:
| Boris is someone that is employed by Anthropic and has a
| massive stake in them going public, standing to make
| millions.
|
| They are by definition a biased source and should not be
| referenced as such.
| simonw wrote:
| Nobody here claimed that Boris wasn't a biased source.
|
| I do however think he is not an actively dishonest
| source. When he says "In the last thirty days, I landed
| 259 PRs -- 497 commits, 40k lines added, 38k lines
| removed. Every single line was written by Claude Code +
| Opus 4.5." I believe he is telling the truth.
|
| That's what dogfooding your own product looks like!
|
| https://twitter.com/bcherny/status/2004887829252317325
| simonw wrote:
| > I want to hear maintainers of complex, actively developed,
| and widely used open-source projects (e.g. ffmpeg, curl,
| openssh, sqlite) start touting a massive uptick in positive
| contributions
|
| That's obviously not going to happen, because AI tools can't
| solve for taste. Just because a developer can churn out
| working code with an LLM doesn't mean they have the skills to
| figure out what the _right_ working code to contribute to a
| project is, and how to do so in a way that makes the
| maintainers lives easier and not harder.
|
| That skill will remain rare.
|
| (Also SQLite famously refuses to accept external
| contributions, but that's a different issue.)
| SQLite wrote:
| No, Simon, we don't "refuse". We are just very selective
| and there is a lot of paperwork involved to confirm the
| contribution is in the public domain and does not
| contaminate the SQLite core with licensed code. Please put
| the false narrative that "SQLite refuses outside
| contributions" to rest. The bar is high to get there, but
| the SQLite code base does contain contributed code.
| simonw wrote:
| Thanks for the correction, and sorry for getting that
| wrong. I genuinely didn't know that.
|
| Found that paperwork here:
| https://www.sqlite.org/copyright-release.html
|
| I will make sure not to spread that misinformation
| further in the future!
|
| Update: I had a look in fossil and counted 38
| contributors: brew install fossil
| fossil clone https://www.sqlite.org/src sqlite.fossil
| fossil sql -R sqlite.fossil " SELECT user,
| COUNT(*) as commits FROM event WHERE type='ci'
| GROUP BY user ORDER BY commits DESC "
|
| Blogged about this (since it feels important to help
| spread the correction about this):
| https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/29/copyright-release/
| mtlynch wrote:
| Dr. Hipp, I love SQLite but also had simonw's
| misapprehension that the project did not accept
| contributions. The SQLite copyright page says:
|
| > _Contributed Code_
|
| > _In order to keep SQLite completely free and
| unencumbered by copyright, the project does not accept
| patches. If you would like to suggest a change and you
| include a patch as a proof-of-concept, that would be
| great. However, please do not be offended if we rewrite
| your patch from scratch._
|
| I realize that the section, "Open-Source, not Open-
| Contribution" says that the project accepts
| contributions, but I'm having trouble understanding how
| that section and the "Contributed Code" section can both
| be accurate. Is there a distinction between accepting a
| "patch" vs. accepting a "contribution?"
|
| If you're planning to update this page to reduce
| confusion of the contribution policy, I humbly suggest a
| rewrite of this sentence to eliminate the single and
| double negatives, which make it harder to understand:
|
| > _In order to keep SQLite in the public domain and
| ensure that the code does not become contaminated with
| proprietary or licensed content, the project does not
| accept patches from people who have not submitted an
| affidavit dedicating their contribution into the public
| domain._
|
| Could be rewritten as:
|
| > _In order to keep SQLite in the public domain and
| prevent contamination of the code from proprietary or
| licensed content, the project only accepts patches from
| people who have submitted an affidavit dedicating their
| contribution into the public domain._
|
| [0] https://sqlite.org/copyright.html
| simonw wrote:
| Yes, that "does not accept patches" line must have been
| where I picked up my incorrect mental model.
| boplicity wrote:
| > Let's see something ground-breaking
|
| Why? People don't ask _hammers_ to do much more than bash in
| nails into walls.
|
| AI coding tools can be incredibly powerful -- but shouldn't
| that power be focused on what the tool is actually good at?
|
| There are many, many times that AI coding tools can and should
| be used to create a "small program that already exists in
| multiple forms in the training data."
|
| I do things like this very regularly for my small business.
| It's allowed me to do things that I simply would not have been
| able to do previously.
|
| People keep asking AI coding tools to be something other than
| what they currently are. Sure, that would be cool. But they
| absolutely have increased my productivity 10x for exactly the
| type of work they're good at assisting with.
| BobbyJo wrote:
| Yes! I can't tell you the number of times I thought to myself
| "If only there was a way for this problem to be solved once
| instead of being solved over and over again". If that is the
| only thing AI is good at, then it's still a big step up for
| software IMO.
| fiyec30375 wrote:
| It's true. Why should everyone look up the same API docs
| and make the same mistakes when AI can write it for you
| instantly and correctly?
| ncallaway wrote:
| > People keep asking AI coding tools to be something other
| than what they currently are.
|
| I think it's for a very reasonable reason: the AI coding tool
| salespeople are often _selling_ the tools as something other
| than what they currently are.
|
| I think you're right, that if you calibrate your expectations
| to what the tools are capable of, there's definitely. It
| would be nice if the marketing around AI also did the same
| thing.
| onion2k wrote:
| AI sales seems to be very much aligned with productivity
| improvement - "do more of the same but faster" or "do the
| same with fewer people"). No one is selling "do more".
| BeetleB wrote:
| > I think it's for a very reasonable reason: the AI coding
| tool salespeople are often selling the tools as something
| other than what they currently are.
|
| And if this submission was an AI salesperson trying to sell
| something, the comment/concern would be pertinent. It is
| otherwise irrelevant here.
| boplicity wrote:
| To be clear, I see a lot of "magical thinking" among people
| who promote AI. They imagine a "perfect" AI tool that can
| basically do everything better than a human can.
|
| Maybe this is possible. Maybe not.
|
| However, it's a fantasy. Granted, it is a compelling fantasy.
| But its not one based on reality.
|
| A good example:
|
| "AI will probably be smarter than any single human next year.
| By 2029, AI is probably smarter than all humans combined." --
| Elon Musk
|
| This is, of course, ridiculous. But, why should we let
| reality get in the way of a good fantasy?
| falcor84 wrote:
| > AI will probably be smarter than any single human next
| year.
|
| Arguably that's already so. There's no clear single
| dimension for "smart"; even within exact sciences, I
| wouldn't know how to judge e.g. "Who was smarter, Einstein
| or Von Neumann?". But for any particular "smarts
| competition", especially if it's time limited, I'd expect
| Claude 4.5 Opus and Gemini 3 Pro to get higher scores than
| any single human.
| darkwater wrote:
| So we are back to the original comment that generated
| this thread: why hasn't AI generated a new and better
| compression algorithm, for example?
| blauditore wrote:
| Because that's the vision of many companies trying to sell
| AI. Saying that what it can do now is actually already good
| enough might be true, but it's also moving the goalposts
| compared to what was promised (or feared, depending who
| you're asking).
| darkerside wrote:
| Can we get specific? What company and salesperson made what
| claim?
|
| Let's not disregard interesting achievements because they
| are not something else.
| simonw wrote:
| One of the many important skills needed to navigate our
| weird new LLM landscape is ignoring what the salespeople
| say and listening to the non-incentivized practitioners
| instead.
| spzb wrote:
| > Why? People don't ask hammers to do much more than bash in
| nails into walls.
|
| No one is propping up a multi-billion dollar tech bubble by
| promising hammers that do more than bash nails. As a point of
| comparison that makes no sense.
| falcor84 wrote:
| That's nitpicking; in this manner you can dismiss any
| analogy, by finding an aspect on which it's different from
| the original comparandum.
| pigpop wrote:
| The software development market is measured in tens of
| billions to hundreds of billions of dollars depending on
| which parts you're looking at so inventing a better hammer
| (development tool) can be expected to drive billions of
| dollars of value. How many billions depends on how good of
| a tool it turns out to be in the end. That's only counting
| software, it's also directly applicable to all media
| (image, video, audio, text) and some scientific domains
| (genetics, medicine, materials, etc.)
| Teknomadix wrote:
| >People don't ask hammers to do much more than bash in nails
| into walls.
|
| "It resembles a normal hammer but is outfitted with an little
| motor and an flexible head part which moves back and forth in
| a hammering motion, sparing the user from moving his or her
| own hand to hammer something by their own force and by so
| making their job easier"
|
| https://gremlins.fandom.com/wiki/Electric_Hammer
| pigpop wrote:
| Good reference and a funny scene but doesn't quite hit home
| because we have invented improved hammers in the form of
| pneumatic nail guns and even cordless nailers (some
| pneumatic and some motorized) which could truly be called
| an "electric hammer".
|
| With this context the example may support the quote, nail
| guns do make driving nails much faster and easier but
| that's all they do. You can't pull a nail with a nail gun
| and you can't use it for any of the other things that a
| regular hammer can do. They do 10x your ability to drive
| nails though.
|
| On the other hand, LLMs are significantly more multi-
| purpose than a nail gun.
| Arisaka1 wrote:
| >Why?
|
| Because I keep wondering myself if AI is here and our output
| is charged up, then why am I keep seeing more of the same
| products but with an "AI" sticker slapped on top of them?
| From a group of technologists like HN and the startup world,
| that live on the edge of evolution and revolution, maybe my
| expectations were a bit too high.
|
| All I see is the equivalent of a "look how fast my new car
| made me go to the super market, when I'm not too demanding on
| the super market I want to end up with, and all I want is
| milk and eggs". Which is 100% fine, but at the end of the day
| I eat the same omelette as always. In this metaphor, I don't
| feel the slightest behind, or have any sense of FOMO if I
| cook my omelette slowly. I guess I have more time for my kids
| if I see the culinary arts as just a job. And it's not like
| restaurants suddenly get all their tables booked faster just
| because everyone cooks omelettes faster.
|
| >It's allowed me to do things that I simply would not have
| been able to do previously.
|
| You're not the one doing them. Me barking orders to John
| Carmack himself doesn't make me a Quake co-creator, and even
| if I micromanage his output like the world's most toxic
| micromanager who knows better I'm still not Carmack.
|
| On top of that, you would have been able to do previously, if
| you cared enough to upskill to the point where token feeding
| isn't needed for you to feel productive. Tons of programmers
| broke barriers, and solved problems that haven't been solved
| by anyone in their companies before.
|
| I don't see why everyone claiming that they previously
| couldn't do something is a bragging point. The LLM's that
| you're using were trained by the Google results you could've
| gotten if you Google searched.
| pranavm27 wrote:
| Its good that way right? Let me as a human do the interesting
| thinking for which my brains are meant while you AI do what
| they chips were built for.
|
| I am happy as is tbh, not even looking for AGI and all. Just
| that the LLM be close enough to my thinking scale so that it
| does not feel "why am I talking with this robot".
| dboreham wrote:
| This comment is wrong in two ways:
|
| 1. Current LLMs do much better than produce "small programs
| that already exist in multiple forms in the training data". Of
| course the knowledge they use does need to exist somewhere in
| training data, but they operate at a higher level of
| abstraction than simply spitting out programs they've already
| seen whole cloth. Way higher.
|
| 2. Inventing a new compression algorithm is beyond the
| expectations of all but the the most wild-eyed LLM proponents,
| today.
| blauditore wrote:
| 2. is not really true. There are famous people claiming that
| AI will fix climate change, so we as humans should stop
| bothering.
| rabf wrote:
| "the knowledge they use does need to exist somewhere in
| training data", I'm not to sure about that. The current
| coding enviroments for AI give the models a lot of reasoning
| power with tooling to test, iterate and web search. They
| frequently look at the results of their code runs now and try
| different approaches to get the desired result. Its common
| for them to write their own tests unprompted and re-evaluate
| accordingly.
| skrotumnisse wrote:
| I find this type of comment depressing. This is a time for
| exploration and learning new things. This is a prefect way to
| do so. It's a small project that solves the problem. Better
| time spent vibe coding it then to evaluate existing
| alternatives.
| cube2222 wrote:
| > If AI coding is so great and is going to take us to 10x or
| 100x productivity
|
| That seems to be a strawman here, no? Sure, there exist
| people/companies claiming 10x-100x productivity improvements. I
| agree it's bullshit.
|
| But the article doesn't seem to be claiming anything like this
| - it's showing the use of vibe-coding for a small personalized
| side-project, something that's completely valid, sensible, and
| a perfect use-case for vibe-coding.
| zellyn wrote:
| trifling.org is an entire Python coding site, offline first
| (localstorage after first load), with docs, turtle graphics,
| canvas, and avatar editor, vibe coded from start to finish,
| with all conversations in the GitHub repo here:
| https://github.com/zellyn/trifling/tree/main/docs/sessions
|
| This is going to destroy my home network, since I never moved
| it off the little Lenovo box sitting in my laundry room beside
| the Eero waypoint, but I'm out of town for three days, so
|
| Granted, the seed of the idea was someone posting about how
| they wired pyiodide to Ace in 400 lines of JavaScript, so I
| can't truly argue it's non-trivial.
|
| As a light troll to hackernews, only AI-written contributions
| are accepted
|
| [Edit: the true inception of this project was my kid learning
| Python at school and trinket.io inexplicably putting Python 3
| but not 2 behind the paywall. Alas, Securely will not let him
| and his classmates actually access it ]
| belter wrote:
| Every two months, I run a very simple experiment to decide
| whether I should stop shorting NVDA....Think of it as my
| personal Pelican on a Bike test. :-)
|
| Here is how it works: I take the latest state of the art model,
| usually one of the two or three currently being hyped....and
| ask it to create a short document that teaches Java, Python, or
| Rust, in 30 to 60 min, complete with code examples. Then I ask
| the same model to review its own produced artifact, for
| correctness and best practices.
|
| What happens next is remarkably consistent. The model produces
| a glowing review, confidently declaring the document
| "production ready"... while the code either does not compile,
| contains obvious bugs, or relies on outright bad practices.
|
| When I point this out, the model apologizes profusely and
| generates a "fixed" version which still contains errors. I
| rinse and repeat until I give up.
|
| This is still true today, including with models like Opus 4.5
| and ChatGPT 5.2. So whenever I read comments about these models
| being historic breakthroughs, I can't help but imagine they are
| mostly coming from teams proudly generating technical debt at
| 100x the usual speed.
|
| Things go even worst, when you ask the model to review a Cloud
| Architecture....
| gjimmel wrote:
| Ok, but if you wrote some massive corpus of code with no
| testing it probably would not compile either.
|
| I think if you want to make this a useful experiment you
| should use one of the coding assistants that can test and
| iterate on its code, not some chatbot which is optimized to
| impress nontechnical people while being as cheap as possible
| to run.
| belter wrote:
| >> Chatbot which is optimized to impress nontechnical
| people
|
| Is that how we call Opus 4.5 now? :-)
| rabf wrote:
| That depends a lot on the system prompt and the tooling
| available to the model. Are you trying thin in Claude
| code or Factory.ai, or are you using a chat interface?
| The difference in the outcome can be large.
| belter wrote:
| Random anecdotes from the Internet say no:
|
| "I paid for the $100 Claude Max plan so you don't have to
| - an honest review" -https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/co
| mments/1l5h2ds/i_paid_fo...
| cheevly wrote:
| You clearly live in a different reality than me entirely.
| Complete opposite experience.
| belter wrote:
| Would you kindly please detail how your experience is
| different? Complete opposite experience without details
| does not really say much.
| pigpop wrote:
| I'm sorry but I don't quite believe you because I've done
| exactly this for learning much more complicated topics. For
| fun I've been learning about video game programming in the
| Odin programming language using a Claude project where I have
| Opus 4.5 write tutorials, including working code examples
| that are designed to be integrated with each other into a
| larger project. We've covered maze generation, Delaunay
| triangulation, MSTs, state machines, rendering via Raylib and
| RayGUI, and tweening for animations. All of those worked
| quite well with only very minor corrections which Opus was
| also very helpful for diagnosing and fixing. I also had it
| produce a full tutorial on implementing a relational database
| in Odin but I haven't had time to work my way through all of
| it yet. This is all with a somewhat niche language like Odin
| that I wouldn't expect there to be a lot of training data for
| so you'll excuse my incredulity that you couldn't get usable
| introductory code for much more commonly used languages like
| Java and Python.
|
| I'm wondering if your test includes allowing the models to
| run their code in order to validate it and then fix it using
| the error output? Would you be willing to share the prompts
| and maybe some examples of the errors?
|
| I haven't had many problems working in Claude Code even with
| full on "vibe coding". One notable recent exception was in
| writing integration tests for a p2p app that uses WebRTC,
| XTerm.js, and Yjs where it ran into some difficulty creating
| a testing framework that involved a headless client and a
| local MQTT broker where we had to fork a few child processes
| to test communication between them. Opus got bogged down
| working on its own so I stepped in and got things set up
| correctly (while chatting with Opus through the web interface
| instead of CC). The problem seemed to be due to overfilling
| the context since the test suite files were too long so I
| could have probably avoided the manual work by just having
| Opus break those up first.
| falcor84 wrote:
| I am yet to see an "AI doesn't impress me" comment that added
| anything to the discussion. Yes, there's always going to be a
| state of the art and things that are as of yet beyond the state
| of the art.
| plaidfuji wrote:
| ... or, let's see humans who are now 10-100x more productive
| (due to automation of mundane tasks that are already part of
| the training data) do the things you're asking for.
| josu wrote:
| I was able to lead these two competitions using LLM agents,
| with no prior rust or c++ knowledge. They both have real world
| applications.
|
| - https://highload.fun/tasks/15/leaderboard
|
| - https://highload.fun/tasks/24/leaderboard
|
| In both cases my score showed other players that there were
| better solutions and pushed them to improve their scores as
| well.
| fny wrote:
| I have worked on out of sample problems, and AI absolutely
| struggles, but it dramatically accelerates the research
| process. Testing ideas is cheap, support tools are quick to
| write, and the LLM itself is a tremendous research tool itself.
|
| More generally, I do think LLMs grant 10x+ performance for most
| common work: most of what people do manually is in the training
| data (which is why there's so much of it in the first place.)
| 10x+ in those domains can in theory free up more brain space to
| solve the problems you're talking about.
|
| My advice to you is to tone down the cynicism, and see how it
| could help you. I'll admit, AI makes me incredibly anxious
| about my future, but it's still fun to use.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| Microsoft is currently hiring engineers to rewrite their entire
| codebase in Rust via vibecoding. Something to the tune of a
| million lines of code per developer per month.
| bdcravens wrote:
| 10x productivity can also mean allowing a single staff member
| to do the boring work of 10 humans.
| lowkey_ wrote:
| You're just asking for the opposite of what AI does.
|
| 90-99% of an engineer's work isn't entirely novel coding that
| has never existed before, so by succeeding at what "already
| exists", it can take us to 10x-100x productivity.
|
| The automation of all that work is groundbreaking in and of
| itself.
|
| I think that, for a while into the future at least, humans will
| be relegated to generating that groundbreaking work, and the AI
| will increasingly handle the rest.
| blks wrote:
| It will not generate anything novel because it can't.
| godber wrote:
| "the cost of trying ideas had collapsed"
|
| This is a critical observation of the vibocene.
| pranavm27 wrote:
| Love it, only issue on my mobile is the scroll surface overlaps.
| I would want that shelf to be perfect fitting on my screen before
| I start scrolling.
|
| Vibe coded a library last month for my website however its much
| simpler and has Antilibrary section for all the stuff I have not
| read.
| TheChelsUK wrote:
| Please add an rss feed to your website/writing
| damnitbuilds wrote:
| I am glad more people think book spines are important.
|
| I wish book archive sites like archive.org scanned and stored the
| book spines as well as the covers, but AFAICT none do.
| yoz-y wrote:
| At some point I also made a virtual bookshelf but for a different
| reason: I found that I often didn't remember what I read about.
| So I started taking notes while reading and also making pixel art
| covers for the books I've written about. I feel that writing down
| ideas makes it easier to revisit them.
|
| https://yozy.net/books/
| RickS wrote:
| I love that the OP made this app for themselves, enjoyed the
| result, and shared the journey, so that we could all have this
| convo. With that said, I feel that you've done what this
| "should have been" IMO. It doesn't have flashy spring motion
| scroll, but it does interactively capture what I'd care about,
| which is recording whether I've read the book, what I found
| relevant/important/memorable, and how it connects to other
| things I've read/thought about.
| guluarte wrote:
| one thing i use the models for is shopping, do my shopping list
| in a .txt, copy it and send it to gpt/claude and tell it to
| organize by shelves, get out of the store in less than 10 minutes
| lol
| dawnerd wrote:
| I'd love to see how much it cost though, particularly around the
| images.
| walthamstow wrote:
| > I started asking for things I did not need ... Knowing when to
| delete working code is not something an AI can decide for you.
|
| Very relatable!
| nithinbekal wrote:
| > Four hundred and sixty books is not a scale problem. Knowing
| when to delete working code is not something an AI can decide for
| you.
|
| This is such a key thing I remind myself when I build apps like
| this for myself. I have a similar app that has a page with
| 900-odd ratings, and another with 550 owned books. I decided that
| I won't bother with infinite scroll or complex search and
| filtering until my browser can no longer handle rendering that
| data. "Find in page" works well enough for me for now.
| oleggromov wrote:
| Good project, nice write-up.
|
| However, to me as a person with an anti-library as well, this
| kind of defies the purpose of having it in the first place. I
| can't say I browse my books too often but when I want to find
| something, I'd rather browse physical things on a shelf rather
| than some out-of-date UI with fetched thumbnails. Of course the
| organization happens in physical space too: this is why we have
| shelves, labels and such.
|
| Obviously no judgement or criticism for the author, just sharing
| thoughts.
| aboardRat4 wrote:
| I found a printable book shelf poster generator (which is itself
| a fork).
|
| https://gitlab.com/Lockywolf/bookshelf
| phyzix5761 wrote:
| How do you search if a book is in there? They don't seem to be in
| any predictable order.
| kaizenb wrote:
| "Execution keeps getting cheaper. Taste still does not." yes yes
| yes!
| cdcarter wrote:
| I vibe coded an app to track my movie watches, at
| https://moviesonthe.computer.
|
| I really enjoy the ability to get started quickly with a known
| idea like "make a single user letterboxd clone" with a system
| prompt that explains my preferred tech stack. From there it's
| relatively easy to start going in and being the tastemaker for
| the project.
|
| I think people being able to build their own bespoke apps is a
| huge super power. Unfortunately I don't think the tools today do
| a good job of teaching you how to think if you aren't already a
| software engineer. Sonnet rarely grasps for an abstraction.
| pixelmonkey wrote:
| That's cool. I've wanted to track my movie watch history for
| awhile but just couldn't find the right software to do it. I
| really dislike Letterboxd. I also agree with your point that
| having a software engineering (programming) background makes
| projects like these a bit easier to prompt for in a direct way.
| shimman wrote:
| Why wouldn't the author share code? Or did I miss it?
| disconcision wrote:
| I actually did something similar recently for my website* and it
| was actually a Claude failure case; helped a little but
| ultimately cost me more time than doing it entirely myself. For
| my version I wanted the actual book spine images; since there's
| no database for these, I took pictures of my shelves (milkcrates)
| and wanted clickable regions. I also wanted the spines to link to
| a reasonable webpage for the book, falling back to goodreads if
| nothing else was available.
|
| It was very surprising to me that claude wasn't very good at even
| the latter. It took several rounds of prompt refinement,
| including very detailed instructions, to get even 75% non-broken
| links, from ~30% on first attempt. It really liked to hallucinate
| goodreads URLs with the book title in them but an invalid ID (the
| title part of URLs is ignored by goodreads).
|
| The former was less surprising... It attempted a very rough
| manual strategy for generating superimposed SVG outlines on the
| books, which often started okay but by the right side of the the
| image often didn't even intersect the actual spines. I tried to
| verbally coax it into using a third party segmenter, but with no
| luck. We eventually found a binary search style iterative
| cropping strategy that worked well but was taking 6 minutes and
| nearly a couple dollars per spine so I killed that and just did
| the SVG outlines in figma myself.
|
| * https://andrewblinn.com scroll down to find the bookcase and
| drag down on it to zoom and unlock the books
| theturtletalks wrote:
| Will people use SaaS in the future or roll their own?
|
| I've been working on opensource.builders, and what I keep seeing
| is that proprietary software has incentives that make personal
| software appealing. Commercial software is built for many
| different use cases and as it grows, it probably wants to capture
| more of the market. But with each new use case, new complexity is
| introduced. At some point, users are "programming," but it's just
| your config. With AI, why not program something that works
| exactly for your business?
|
| That's why so many people are getting into vibe coding. They've
| gone through the nightmare of using software where they only need
| one feature, or tools that have slowly gotten enshittified, and
| they realize it might actually be easier to build something that
| fits them instead of wrestling with layers of complexity that
| exist for everyone else's edge cases.
| pokemyiout wrote:
| I like the scroll animation!
|
| I've actually been working on something similar since I also had
| this pain (plus I'm too cheap to buy all the books I'm reading)
|
| To solve the issue related to having take the photos myself, I
| scrape from places like eBay to get the accurate spine images.
| Obviously this isn't 100% accurate, but like you I also decided
| 90% accuracy is good enough.
|
| https://www.tinyshelf.me/maler/fav
| TheGoodBarn wrote:
| An aside, I love the animation at the end of your website when
| you scroll at the bottom and the blue expands out. Awesome touch
| keyle wrote:
| I'm not sure anyone commented on this but the usability of what
| he vibe produced is absolutely terrible.
|
| It's amusing that the author might feel a sense of accomplishment
| and super powers when in fact this is a complete moo point in
| terms of real gain and a tool of entertainment (consumption) and
| not productivity as original intended.
|
| There is a silver line in there, for the people that care about
| software.
| darkwater wrote:
| I have recently vibe-coded an Android app, written in Kotlin, to
| scratch an itch and also as an experiment as an LLM skeptical
| [1]. It's a greenfield app that basically displays read-only data
| that's retrieved from a REST JSON API, so it's where Claude Code
| should shine the most and... yes, I'm actually positively
| impressed! I would have never been able to write that app myself,
| and at least surely not over a weekend (while cooking and doing
| other things with my family).
|
| I wanted to try a Show HN as well but I feared that the HN crowd
| would tear it and me down so... I didn't.
|
| [1] check my comments history
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