alt.hn

3/25/2025 at 6:09:11 AM

Reflecting on WikiTok

 https://www.aizk.sh/posts/reflecting-on-wikitok

by aizk

3/25/2025 at 10:26:10 AM

This:

  And with regards to AI taking jobs - it obviously will become a serious problem in future. But being a doomer right now is like lying down in a parking lot waiting to get run over - you're surrendering to a pointless outcome while the rest of the world keeps moving.
Great sentiment. I've had a similar experience with LLMs and writing code - helpful when keeping the requests small, and a background in the area is essential for knowing what is and isn't total crap. Feel the fear and do it anyway.

Inspiring to see you take on a different career path and go for it, I feel i'm on a similar journey right now, thanks for taking the time to write it up.

by Jdfmiller

3/25/2025 at 6:17:37 PM

This is not what a doomer is. A doomer is not a nihilist. A doomer is someone who recognizes a great threat of impending doom. They may raise the alarm bell in response. If they choose to lie down and wait to get run over, that's a nihilist doomer.

by throwawayk7h

3/26/2025 at 4:04:10 AM

Fatalist might be a better word choice than nihilist. Nihilism is about whether meaning exists, but a lack of inherent meaning doesn't imply a lack of action. If you choose to just let something happen to you because you believe it's unavoidable then you're a fatalist.

by strken

3/25/2025 at 10:41:34 PM

> If they choose to lie down and wait to get run over, that's a nihilist doomer.

So... almost all doomers?

by SR2Z

3/25/2025 at 8:04:01 PM

Laying down and rotting is it's own thing entirely and the Doomers and the Rotters are at odds.

by MarcelOlsz

3/25/2025 at 1:32:47 PM

> and a background in the area is essential

Yes, precisely. Maybe one could (re)make something using LLMs without understanding a thing, but that is as good as copy pasting from SO without understanding.

by johnisgood

3/25/2025 at 5:33:19 PM

> but that is as good as copy pasting from SO without understanding.

I'm sure there are a large amount of programmers who do this quite often..

by vondur

3/25/2025 at 7:57:58 PM

Of course, they now probably switched to LLMs.

by johnisgood

3/25/2025 at 9:44:44 AM

> I built wikitok.io in about 2 hours (but not the iphone app that doesn't work, nor the play store rip off, nor wikitok.net but I'm getting ahead of myself). It all came from this tweet.

This phrasing seems to suggest they think they invented the idea of "TikTok but it's Wikipedia". I see the author is OP, so my suggestion might be to consider rephrasing a bit as it comes off a bit accusatory.

I did try my hand on this project after seeing this bare-bones viral version. (I had the same idea in my notes app dated a couple years ago.) I went a different route, opting to pre-parse wikitext via my own API to deliver the app an AST that can be rendered natively & prettier than your standard Wikipedia page. Not a fun format to parse. Not fun at all. I don't recommend it. And it took significantly longer than 2 hours and was never released, so props to the author for turning this project around so fast.

by lwansbrough

3/25/2025 at 11:39:04 AM

> This phrasing seems to suggest they think they invented the idea of "TikTok but it's Wikipedia". I see the author is OP, so my suggestion might be to consider rephrasing a bit as it comes off a bit accusatory.

Am I missing something, it comes off as the precise opposite to me? OP wrote "I built X, but the idea came from this source" basically, acknowledging they built the thing but the idea came from somewhere else.

by diggan

3/25/2025 at 1:14:14 PM

Some of them came before me, but most of them were clones that came after me. I just wanted to highlight what happens when you go viral - there will be copycats.

by aizk

3/25/2025 at 1:11:53 PM

The point of that phrase was just to highlight the derivatives the I had no affiliation with.

I built it and marketed it, but the idea came from some tweets that were gaining momentum.

by aizk

3/25/2025 at 4:59:10 PM

Oh I see. My apologies, my assumption was that you had wrote the tweet.

by lwansbrough

3/25/2025 at 7:18:50 PM

Maybe I should've made that a screenshot or embedded tweet, if you scroll over it / don't click on it you lose context. Realtime website UI feedback here.

by aizk

3/25/2025 at 11:53:46 AM

> This phrasing seems to suggest they think they invented the idea of "TikTok but it's Wikipedia".

The author is giving credit. Literally the opposite of your interpretation.

> I had the same idea in my notes app dated a couple years ago.

On the other hand this seems as if you now want to claim to be the inventor of the idea?

by slevis

3/25/2025 at 1:16:12 PM

A mixture of both. Some of those were copycats and some of those came before me, (the iPhone app, but I didn't know about it when I made the website). The point I was making was there's lots of clones happening when you go viral.

by aizk

3/25/2025 at 6:37:27 PM

Bizarre confabulation: the text you quote says nothing of the sort. They say the made one site, not to be confused with other, similar sites, and that the idea originates with someone else's tweet. Why jump to negative conclusions when they are sharing their project for the first time?

by Emma_Goldman

3/25/2025 at 8:29:41 AM

It's great that LLMs provide opportunity for non-software engineers to make tech products, but I wonder how those "vibe-coded" products will fare when faced with actually maintaining the code (and also accounting for tech debt..)

by timkq

3/25/2025 at 10:21:31 AM

It's not like we're doing very well with maintenance and tech debt in any case. AI might be able to help with that in the future.

by pajamasam

3/25/2025 at 11:21:20 AM

Look at your tech stack, go down until you come to the level where things "just work". This is where the maintained software begins. The stuff you fill your docker base images with.

by blueflow

3/27/2025 at 11:20:24 PM

Are you really assuming most of your docker base images won't be AI generated spit in a few months from now? All maintainers are catching on.

by nidnogg

3/25/2025 at 9:59:49 AM

But OP is a software engineer, I doubt a non software engineer can turn around a vibe coded app so quickly.

by Onavo

3/25/2025 at 7:28:32 PM

Feel free to judge for yourself what I am. Started in civil engineering, pivoted hard 6 months ago. That gave me a leg up in UI/UX, design experience, all that.

https://www.aizk.sh/Isaac's%20Resume.pdf

Also vibe coding is useless without marketing skills, deployment skills, distribution, social media skills, etc.

by aizk

3/25/2025 at 11:41:46 AM

> faced with actually maintaining the code (and also accounting for tech debt..)

I guess they'll learn it as they come across it? "Oh Claude, my code is almost like a plate of spaghetti, how can I make it easier to add new features without breaking something else?" "Dear user, here is what technical debt and unit tests mean: ..."

Besides, all of us self-learned programmers mostly learned about those things the hard way as well, by experiencing the real drawbacks of not caring about such things until too late and stuff is already up and running with real users.

by diggan

3/25/2025 at 1:07:54 PM

Here's the thing: the formally trained programmers learn it that way too. They're just less inclined to admit it.

by ryukoposting

3/25/2025 at 4:55:01 PM

Does writing software with an LLM not make me a software engineer?

by aizk

3/25/2025 at 6:05:46 PM

OP is a software engineer, so this is a software engineer using LLM's to make tech products.

by non-

3/25/2025 at 10:26:49 PM

Tech debt of your hobby pet project? It's not like millions of people will be using it.

by mrkramer

3/25/2025 at 9:13:29 AM

I feel like I could easily be caught by one of those journalist scams. Especially when low on sleep.

by wonger_

3/25/2025 at 5:30:14 PM

Disagree on the “algorithm” bit but that’s ok.

“Random” is an algorithm. It just says that the next article you should read has no relationship with anything you’ve read before. That is a point of view. It’s good for an “explore” phase, where you want to expose yourself to as much variety as possible.

But eventually most people want to “exploit” their impressions from before. Just like I don’t want to always roll the dice on restaurants, sometimes I want to go back to one that I know is good.

by janalsncm

3/25/2025 at 5:54:46 PM

Hey, I'm also a former civil engineer-turned SWE in the NJ/NYC area! Nice to know that there are more of us out there. I already spend hours looking through Wikipedia articles, so when your site dropped I was on it right away. I dodged the AI conversation entirely by getting into a state government position where my job is all but guaranteed by the union.

by the-chitmonger

3/26/2025 at 2:24:52 AM

I've always held a passing curiosity about civil engineering; have you ever seen someone make the reverse switch? Or, is the career of a SWE simply that much more enviable?

by gavmor

3/28/2025 at 6:43:26 PM

In addition to what the other commenter said, my main gripe with it was that it felt a tad bit racially discriminatory (only speaking from my own experience). I'm not a white man, and I worked in towns with predominantly white populations. I received a lot of undue complaints, and I ended up getting shunted to night shift work before I made the switch.

Also the pay as a civil engineer with 3 years of experience was roughly half what I ended up making my first year as a software engineer.

by the-chitmonger

3/26/2025 at 5:38:03 AM

There are some. If you're married with kids and what you really need is stability above all else it's a decent idea.

But civil has serious issues (very low pay for how high the legal liability is).

If you search for jobs in civil you'll see hundreds of civil engineering firms are desperate for people to hire - it's similar to accounting where there's a mass exodus.

That may be a blog post in and of itself, why that industry is struggling and what that means.

by aizk

3/25/2025 at 9:17:24 AM

There's no date on the article so its hard to know when its from.

by wewewedxfgdf

3/25/2025 at 1:10:10 PM

Thanks for the feedback I'll push a fix for that tomorrow.

by aizk

3/26/2025 at 6:08:37 AM

Fixed!

by aizk

3/25/2025 at 10:20:45 AM

I like this point of view:

> And with regards to AI taking jobs - it obviously will become a serious problem in future. But being a doomer right now is like lying down in a parking lot waiting to get run over - you're surrendering to a pointless outcome while the rest of the world keeps moving. There's still so much to build and accomplish.

by pajamasam

3/25/2025 at 1:11:50 PM

I really like this idea! Thank you for making it! I personally prefer web-apps to phone-apps but wouldn't mind installing one if its in the pipeline from OP!

by dev_chhatbar

3/25/2025 at 1:13:29 PM

There is no phone app! There's a progressive web app you can download. Funnily, I thought I solved the mobile issue making the PWA until I realized 99% of people have no idea what a progressive web app is.

by aizk

3/25/2025 at 1:17:51 PM

"I realized 99% of people have no idea what a progressive web app."

I never used it, Yeah I know it exist but who tf use that???? and I'm considering myself "techy"

by tonyhart7

3/25/2025 at 1:25:05 PM

Yeah I had a request on GitHub for it, so I implemented it! But it was only a "fix" for a very specific technical group people, not ALL the users. Good lesson learned there.

by aizk

3/25/2025 at 6:06:34 PM

Maybe a "Download App" button that installs the PWA would help

by non-

3/25/2025 at 7:38:26 PM

That smart but not ideal - think of the people who will navigate directly to the app store and type "wikitok"

by aizk

3/25/2025 at 5:36:09 PM

It's shocking how unhinged scammers can be... Unstoppable farting dog? Seriously...?

by bradleykingz