alt.hn

12/29/2025 at 1:22:59 PM

Show HN: Vibe coding a bookshelf with Claude Code

 https://balajmarius.com/writings/vibe-coding-a-bookshelf-with-claude-code/

by balajmarius

12/29/2025 at 1:49:55 PM

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.

by spicyusername

12/29/2025 at 2:13:05 PM

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.)

by cube2222

12/29/2025 at 4:39:37 PM

> 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.

by OptionOfT

12/29/2025 at 4:54:03 PM

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.

by xur17

12/29/2025 at 5:20:06 PM

Yeah, this exactly. And if the AI wanders in confusion during #3, it means the plan isn’t well-defined enough.

by cube2222

12/30/2025 at 10:31:06 AM

There actually is a term for this LLM-assisted coding/engineering. Unfortunately it has been pushed away by the fake influencer & PR term "vibe coding" which conflates coding with unknowledgeable people just jerking the slot machine.

by mentalgear

12/29/2025 at 7:51:09 PM

Sounds like so much work just not to write it yourself.

by blks

12/30/2025 at 3:56:57 AM

Getting it right definitely takes some time and finesse, but when it works you spend 30 minutes to get 4-24+ hours of code.

And usually that code contains at least one or two insights you would not normally have considered, but that makes perfect sense, given the situation.

by spicyusername

12/29/2025 at 4:17:51 PM

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.

by pigpop

12/29/2025 at 5:18:26 PM

Is vibe architecting a thing too, or is architecting to make your vibe coder work better something that the human needs to know?

by tzs

12/29/2025 at 6:13:25 PM

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.

by pigpop

12/31/2025 at 12:21:24 AM

Or should we just call them microservices instead?

by fragmede

12/31/2025 at 1:51:46 PM

One thing I’ve noticed building a small “use it and leave” tool is that the models tend to self-select into roles.

For me, Codex ended up being the reliable executor for actual logic and glue code, while Claude Code (especially the frontend design skill) was much better at overall UI structure, spacing, and interaction flow. I stopped trying to make one model do everything and just let them do what they seemed naturally good at.

This only worked because the project was tiny and mostly stateless — once scope or dependencies grow, the coordination cost goes up fast. Curious if others have seen a similar split in practice, or if this is just project-type dependent.

by yarlinghe

12/29/2025 at 3:20:30 PM

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.

by mellosouls

12/29/2025 at 5:55:21 PM

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.

by wonderwonder

12/29/2025 at 2:55:11 PM 

  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.

by aurareturn

12/29/2025 at 3:34:21 PM

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.

by HarHarVeryFunny

12/29/2025 at 3:23:12 PM

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.

by __MatrixMan__

12/29/2025 at 5:36:17 PM

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...

by aurareturn

12/29/2025 at 6:54:31 PM

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.

by __MatrixMan__

12/30/2025 at 4:15:21 AM

The systems around the LLM will get built out. But do you think it will take 50 years to build out like you said before?

I’m thinking 5 years at most.

The key is that the LLMs get smart enough.

by aurareturn

12/30/2025 at 7:16:53 PM

The more I think of it the less likely I think it is that "all code written via LLM" will happen at all.

I use LLMs to generate systems that interpret code that I use to express my wishes, but I don't think is would be desirable to express those wishes in natural language all of the time.

by __MatrixMan__

12/31/2025 at 8:28:19 AM

That's why people don't think software engineers as a profession will disappear. It'll just change.

by aurareturn

12/29/2025 at 3:52:02 PM

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.

by anthonypasq

12/29/2025 at 5:05:46 PM

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.

by rabf

12/30/2025 at 8:46:06 PM

The harnesses are where most progress is made at the moment. There are some definite differences in the major models as to what kind of code they prefer, but I feel the harnesses make the biggest difference.

Copilot + Sonnet is a complete idiot at times, while Claude Code + Sonnet is pretty good.

by theshrike79

12/29/2025 at 3:25:32 PM

Air traffic control software is not going to be vibe-coded anytime soon and neither is the firmware controlling the plane.

by rvz

12/29/2025 at 5:30:49 PM

Sure it will. But they will be tested far more stringently by both human experts and the smartest LLM models.

by aurareturn

12/29/2025 at 4:05:29 PM

I will be perfectly honest. Given what I am seeing, I fully expect someone to actually try just that.

by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2

12/29/2025 at 7:57:36 PM

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.

by blks

12/29/2025 at 3:25:43 PM

Successfully building an IKEA shelf doesn’t make you a carpenter.

by croes

12/29/2025 at 4:27:43 PM

no, but I have furniture. it's important to keep sight of the end goal, unless the carpentry is purely a hobby.

by exe34

12/29/2025 at 5:36:55 PM

What's the job title and education requirements for designing the supply chain and engineering of the ikea furniture?

by whattheheckheck

12/29/2025 at 8:06:49 PM

I don't know, I don't work at IKEA. Sorry.

by exe34

12/29/2025 at 3:21:07 PM

I've got a bridge to sell you

by spzb

12/29/2025 at 3:38:10 PM

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.

by pranavm27

12/29/2025 at 2:10:29 PM

> 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.

by solumunus

12/29/2025 at 2:56:57 PM

Yes. It is called programming.

by auggierose

12/29/2025 at 3:18:47 PM

Using agents is programming. Programming is done with the mind, the tapping of keys isn’t inherent to the process.

by solumunus

12/29/2025 at 4:05:42 PM

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.

by batshit_beaver

12/29/2025 at 9:22:35 PM

Of course not. It’s a tool.

by solumunus

12/29/2025 at 3:23:22 PM

[dead]

by dfilppi

12/29/2025 at 2:36:16 PM

> 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 :)

by Tiberium

12/29/2025 at 2:40:37 PM

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."

by AtreidesTyrant

12/29/2025 at 3:38:54 PM

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.

by TheChelsUK

12/29/2025 at 3:41:12 PM

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.

by skybrian

12/29/2025 at 4:58:52 PM

It's not that it didn't exist before. It's that it wasn't overused.

Heh.

by IshKebab

12/29/2025 at 6:14:19 PM

Neurodivergent people tend to write like this too, there was a study about it.

by 7moritz7

12/29/2025 at 2:56:03 PM

Yeah, I know, I just feel like at this point it's useless to call that out.

by Tiberium

12/29/2025 at 2:48:48 PM

We can learn useful rhetorical techniques from AI that can help us clearly communicate. We should separate those babies from the bathwater.

by delichon

12/29/2025 at 3:07:27 PM

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.

by estearum

12/29/2025 at 3:03:26 PM

Rhetorical techniques that are so easily identifiable as AI now.

by F7F7F7

12/29/2025 at 4:10:03 PM

You can also just find a book on writing. I recommend "On Writing Well" by William Zinsser. Dense and quite informative.

by skydhash

12/29/2025 at 10:00:22 PM

And the scripts of most recent YouTube videos, and the dialogue in Stranger Things Season 5 (the last 3 episodes specifically).

by idonotknowwhy

12/29/2025 at 5:53:04 PM

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?

by RickS

12/29/2025 at 7:10:26 PM

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.

by nyyp

12/29/2025 at 3:42:19 PM

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.

by pranavm27

12/29/2025 at 4:59:40 PM

“That was enough.”

by Terretta

12/29/2025 at 3:24:24 PM

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.

by spzb

12/29/2025 at 3:39:35 PM

> 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.

by boplicity

12/29/2025 at 4:11:38 PM

>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

by Teknomadix

12/29/2025 at 4:42:22 PM

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.

by pigpop

12/29/2025 at 3:50:14 PM

> 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.

by ncallaway

12/29/2025 at 4:08:01 PM

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".

by onion2k

12/29/2025 at 5:29:03 PM

> 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.

by BeetleB

12/30/2025 at 6:15:25 PM

Obviously I disagree.

The parent specifically noted that generally "people keep asking AI coding tools to be something other than what they currently are."

There's an explanation for why that is happening, so I think it's relevant here.

by ncallaway

12/29/2025 at 3:49:09 PM

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.

by BobbyJo

12/29/2025 at 4:18:17 PM

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?

by fiyec30375

12/29/2025 at 8:32:47 PM

[dead]

by oopwhat

12/30/2025 at 5:07:21 PM

I've been thinking a lot about the fact that so much of our software has become engagement driven. E.g. Duolingo isn't optimized for learning a language, Facebook isn't optimized for connecting with your friends and family.

I wonder if AI coding tools might get out of this for some cases at least. Make an app that is clearly derivative but actually is optimized to do the thing it actually is supposed to do.

Harder with network effect apps but might be possible for others.

by convenwis

12/29/2025 at 3:52:25 PM

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).

by blauditore

12/29/2025 at 4:12:08 PM

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.

by simonw

12/29/2025 at 3:54:45 PM

Can we get specific? What company and salesperson made what claim?

Let's not disregard interesting achievements because they are not something else.

by darkerside

12/29/2025 at 3:51:14 PM

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?

by boplicity

12/29/2025 at 4:35:10 PM

> 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.

by falcor84

12/29/2025 at 9:53:37 PM

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?

by darkwater

12/29/2025 at 11:46:34 PM

As I see it, it's because it didn't want to.

Hear me out: let's say that generating a new and better compression algorithm is something that might take a dedicated researcher about a year of their life, and that person is being paid to work on it, in the industry or via a grant. Is there anyone who has been running Claude Code instances for a human-year in a loop with the instruction to try different approaches until it has a better compression algorithm?

by falcor84

12/29/2025 at 8:55:21 PM

>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.

by Arisaka1

12/29/2025 at 3:53:11 PM

> 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.

by spzb

12/29/2025 at 4:54:17 PM

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.)

by pigpop

12/29/2025 at 4:39:53 PM

That's nitpicking; in this manner you can dismiss any analogy, by finding an aspect on which it's different from the original comparandum.

by falcor84

12/29/2025 at 3:35:11 PM

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

by anon7000

12/29/2025 at 5:11:52 PM

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/

by pigpop

12/30/2025 at 9:10:10 PM

Exactly. LLMs aren't taking the jobs of developers - unless they're selling some micro-SaaS stuff that anyone with enough domain knowledge can duplicate with a Claude subscription over a weekend.

Like the DVD catalogue software I was using[0] became subscription based, and I'm not paying 50€/year for that.

Just rewrote the bits that I need this afternoon with Claude. It definitely doesn't have the same features as the CLZ Movies app had, but it has all the ones I need specifically (adding movies easily, quickly seeing if I already own a movie).

And the same will happen to more and more SaaS style things unless they offer something unique a self-made and self-hosted one can't provide.

[0] https://clz.com/movies

by theshrike79

12/29/2025 at 3:27:23 PM

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

by Forgeties79

12/29/2025 at 3:32:12 PM

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.

by jungturk

12/29/2025 at 3:58:03 PM

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

by SOLAR_FIELDS

12/29/2025 at 3:51:36 PM

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.

by skrotumnisse

12/29/2025 at 3:36:09 PM

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

by MontyCarloHall

12/29/2025 at 4:15:01 PM

> 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.)

by simonw

12/29/2025 at 7:13:18 PM

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.

by SQLite

12/29/2025 at 8:28:32 PM

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

by mtlynch

12/29/2025 at 8:37:33 PM

Yes, that "does not accept patches" line must have been where I picked up my incorrect mental model.

by simonw

12/30/2025 at 2:02:59 PM

Website updated with more precise wording. Sorry for the confusion.

by SQLite

12/29/2025 at 7:41:53 PM

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/

by simonw

12/30/2025 at 5:12:57 PM

Man, your behavior when you realize you got something wrong is something the rest of us can aspire to. This is one of the things I like the best about you.

by QuinnyPig

12/30/2025 at 6:13:17 PM

It's a devious credibility hack!

I learned it from newspapers: papers that publish prompt and clear corrections when they publish mistakes are more credible than papers that don't acknowledge their errors.

by simonw

12/29/2025 at 3:39:24 PM

> 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.

by zwnow

12/29/2025 at 3:43:51 PM

It's no different from supervising a naïve 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.

by MontyCarloHall

12/29/2025 at 3:46:25 PM

Naive junior engineers eventually learn and become competent senior engineers. LLMs forget everything they "learn" as soon as the context window gets too big.

by spzb

12/29/2025 at 3:47:53 PM

Very true! I liken AI to having an endless supply of newly hired interns with near-infinite knowledge but intern-level skills.

by MontyCarloHall

12/29/2025 at 5:46:19 PM

There are like a dozen well-established ways to overcome this. Learn how to use the basic tools and patterns my dude.

by cheevly

12/29/2025 at 5:07:30 PM

I have yet to see a junior trying to install random/non existing libs.

by zwnow

12/29/2025 at 5:16:33 PM

If you forced them to try it from memory without giving them access to the web you sure would.

by pigpop

12/29/2025 at 3:47:35 PM

the creator of claude code said on twitter he hasnt opened an ide in a month and merged 200 prs.

by anthonypasq

12/29/2025 at 3:53:54 PM

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.

by MontyCarloHall

12/29/2025 at 4:15:54 PM

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.

by simonw

12/29/2025 at 5:28:23 PM

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.

by shimman

12/29/2025 at 7:07:22 PM

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

by simonw

12/30/2025 at 9:14:11 PM

I think it might be more about the fact that he has free and unlimited access to Opus =)

by theshrike79

12/29/2025 at 3:44:17 PM

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...

by spzb

12/29/2025 at 3:53:50 PM

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

by leleat

12/29/2025 at 4:47:04 PM

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.

by fny

12/29/2025 at 4:23:25 PM

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.

by falcor84

12/29/2025 at 7:27:52 PM

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.

by lowkey_

12/29/2025 at 4:16:47 PM

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 100× the usual speed.

Things go even worst, when you ask the model to review a Cloud Architecture....

by belter

12/29/2025 at 4:34:58 PM

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.

by gjimmel

12/29/2025 at 4:59:34 PM

>> Chatbot which is optimized to impress nontechnical people

Is that how we call Opus 4.5 now? :-)

by belter

12/29/2025 at 5:23:33 PM

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.

by rabf

12/29/2025 at 11:19:58 PM

The name of the model is not the end of the story. There is a Pareto frontier of performance vs computational cost, and the companies have various knobs and dials they can tune to trade off performance for cost. This is why openai reports costs of $1k/problem when they test their models on the math/coding benchmarks, yet charge you only $15/month for a subscription to their web interface.

by gjimmel

12/29/2025 at 6:03:39 PM

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.

by pigpop

12/29/2025 at 4:36:38 PM

You clearly live in a different reality than me entirely. Complete opposite experience.

by cheevly

12/29/2025 at 4:57:49 PM

Would you kindly please detail how your experience is different? Complete opposite experience without details does not really say much.

by belter

12/29/2025 at 3:47:18 PM

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".

by pranavm27

12/29/2025 at 3:30:43 PM

https://thenewstack.io/how-deepminds-alphatensor-ai-devised-...

Not either of the species of algorithms you've described, but still an advance.

by SJMG

12/29/2025 at 3:50:05 PM

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.

by spzb

12/29/2025 at 4:43:42 PM

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?

by fiyec30375

12/29/2025 at 5:55:46 PM

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.

by spzb

12/29/2025 at 5:57:27 PM

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.

by wonderwonder

12/29/2025 at 4:33:06 PM

… 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.

by plaidfuji

12/29/2025 at 3:50:47 PM

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.

by dboreham

12/29/2025 at 5:31:13 PM

"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.

by rabf

12/29/2025 at 3:55:25 PM

2. is not really true. There are famous people claiming that AI will fix climate change, so we as humans should stop bothering.

by blauditore

12/29/2025 at 6:47:05 PM

10x productivity can also mean allowing a single staff member to do the boring work of 10 humans.

by bdcravens

12/29/2025 at 3:56:40 PM

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 ]

by zellyn

12/29/2025 at 7:59:04 PM

It will not generate anything novel because it can’t.

by blks

12/29/2025 at 3:54:27 PM

> 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.

by cube2222

12/29/2025 at 4:13:23 PM

[dead]

by fiyec30375

12/29/2025 at 3:31:41 PM

> 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'.

by rvz

12/29/2025 at 2:35:23 PM

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.

by nindalf

12/30/2025 at 9:05:02 AM

This is neat. How do you fill this in? I assume the highlights and notes come from a Kindle or similar reader.

I also have a bookshelf (fully manual, in another comment), and I’m looking for better ways for retention. I do highlights but I rarely do notes. Also with audiobooks I have yet to find a good way to do this outside of my text note for each book I’m reading/listening-to.

by yoz-y

12/30/2025 at 12:27:06 PM

Yes, that's right. I mainly read on the kindle and I make a lot of notes and highlights while reading. These notes are synced to Amazon's cloud, which I can access by scraping read.amazon.com. I read paperbacks too, but I just add these to the library manually. No highlights from these.

I think highlighting is why I strongly prefer ebooks nowadays.

by nindalf

12/29/2025 at 6:42:11 PM

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.

by quinnjh

12/29/2025 at 3:33:31 PM

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.

by tharos47

12/29/2025 at 4:20:09 PM

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.

by nindalf

12/29/2025 at 5:58:25 PM

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

by disconcision

12/29/2025 at 2:01:28 PM

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

by felixding

12/29/2025 at 2:21:31 PM

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.

by dewey

12/29/2025 at 8:03:17 PM

Same, I remember being in awe of how well-designed this app was.

by _august

12/29/2025 at 3:37:09 PM

Wow, this is cool. I had COMPLETELY forgotten about Delicious Library. That is such a nice look-and-feel for this sort of app.

by pixelmonkey

12/29/2025 at 2:24:42 PM

> 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.

by m-hodges

12/29/2025 at 2:31:55 PM

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.

by JKCalhoun

12/30/2025 at 9:23:25 PM

Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.

So many people's lives would be better if 90% of their daily tasks could be automated by LLMs, letting them spend more time doing the hard 10% properly.

by theshrike79

12/29/2025 at 4:14:00 PM

> 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.

by nithinbekal

12/29/2025 at 5:21:24 PM

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.

by cdcarter

12/29/2025 at 6:04:35 PM

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.

by pixelmonkey

12/29/2025 at 3:05:32 PM

"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.

by wek

12/29/2025 at 10:11:18 PM

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.

by keyle

12/30/2025 at 12:17:06 AM

> complete moo point

Like a cows opinion - it doesn't matter?

> this is...a tool of entertainment (consumption) and not productivity as original intended.

And? I wrote BASIC as a kid, and everything I coded was for entertainment, not productivity.

The usability for him appears high. If you're building a tool just for yourself (or or fun), why does it matter?

by apublicfrog

12/29/2025 at 3:50:44 PM

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/

by yoz-y

12/29/2025 at 6:01:11 PM

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.

by RickS

12/29/2025 at 2:49:42 PM

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.

by tahirk99

12/29/2025 at 2:59:50 PM

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.

by butlike

12/29/2025 at 10:27:51 PM

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

by darkwater

12/29/2025 at 2:22:01 PM

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.

by cube2222

12/29/2025 at 2:16:26 PM

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?

by samwho

12/29/2025 at 2:35:34 PM

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.

by balajmarius

12/29/2025 at 2:41:56 PM

I like that it's fun, and that is what AI vibe coding should be.

by AtreidesTyrant

12/29/2025 at 7:20:16 PM

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

by pokemyiout

12/29/2025 at 4:25:46 PM

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.

by oleggromov

12/29/2025 at 2:47:16 PM

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!

by ionicabizau

12/29/2025 at 3:09:52 PM

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.

by monerozcash

12/29/2025 at 2:59:34 PM

> 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.

by ear7h

12/29/2025 at 7:18:51 PM

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.

by NewsaHackO

12/30/2025 at 12:08:02 AM

I'm not trying to _convince_ a stranger on the internet whether to use AI for their vibe shelf hobby project; I'm engaging with a project being presented by it's creator. Interesting that you think continuing to use AI is some enormous own against my presumed attempt at persuasion. Sounds like maybe you're the one needing validation for your viewpoint. It's clearly easy to achieve such validation given the evidence in this comment section so, I'm not sure why you're seeking it from me.

As for the main concern in your comment, I did in fact read the blog post; see how I quoted multiple parts, verbatim ("word for word")?. I now understand this audience may not be entirely familiar with literature or reading beyond basic instructions from their preferred datacenter or advertising company, but generally the beginning of a piece of writing (the "introduction") serves as the premise while the end (the "conclusion") describes the abstract ideas a reader should take away from the entire piece. I'll even let you in on a little secret: the word "conclusion" is synonymous with "a judgement following logical steps". As I mentioned in my original comment there is also a middle section which can often be more important or meaningful (to both characters and readers) than the introduction or conclusion. Howver, in this piece of writing it amounted to "I didn't know how to do something so I asked AI and when it didn't do the right thing I asked it again" which isn't a very engaging story (there's a similar famous premise about an "oracle" that can respond to three "queries", however the entertainment relies on this limitation). Anyways, the badic premise seems to be well received already and lacking any interesting description of the process, I chose to engage with the conclusion. The question of taste.

The author believes, or rather instructed an LLM to generate an article from the perspective in which someone belives, generative AI can enable the good taste of someone in prototype hell to come to fruition. But in my original comment I'm making the point that creating something of good taste is inextricably linked to engagement with the medium. But the author shows a willful lack of engagement, with their medium whether that be software or a book shelf.

If you'd like to engage with my original comment in good faith, here are some questions: * do you really think this project constitutes good taste? for software? for book shelves? * can someone with an apathy for a craft as extreme the author have good taste? * might this even be considered bad taste given the technological sensibilities of this forum? (disdain for js bloat, foss, "elegant solutions")

by ear7h

12/31/2025 at 12:09:53 AM

Since you said you read the post, explain this to me:

>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.

In the context of his first paragraph

>I own more books than I can read. Not in a charming, aspirational way, but in the practical sense that at some point I stopped knowing what I owned. Somewhere around 500 books, memory stopped being a reliable catalog.[...] For years, I told myself I would fix this. Nothing elaborate, nothing worthy of a startup idea. A spreadsheet would have been enough. I never did it, not because it was hard, but because it was tedious.

Wouldn't your statement be completely moot because he plainly said the purpose of the project was to create a system to handle his books, and the only reason he hasn't done it yet was because it was tedious? (Hint: if you need the paragraph or thge rest of his article to be broken down for you more, I suggest asking ChatGPT to give a summary for you).

by NewsaHackO

12/29/2025 at 8:21:35 PM

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

by TheGoodBarn

12/29/2025 at 1:57:04 PM

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.

by kgthegreat

12/29/2025 at 2:10:28 PM

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.

by neogodless

12/29/2025 at 2:17:24 PM

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.

by MattRix

12/29/2025 at 2:11:06 PM

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

by micromacrofoot

12/29/2025 at 2:12:36 PM

Author has a great taste, you can see it by just visiting their website.

by wiseowise

12/30/2025 at 5:53:51 PM

didn't say that they didn't! but taste isn't really going to stave off AI

by micromacrofoot

12/29/2025 at 2:09:22 PM

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

by troupo

12/29/2025 at 3:33:56 PM

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.

by pranavm27

12/29/2025 at 2:46:48 PM

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.

by zittur

12/29/2025 at 1:49:04 PM

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.

by kingkongjaffa

12/29/2025 at 3:53:11 PM

I’d love to see how much it cost though, particularly around the images.

by dawnerd

12/29/2025 at 5:31:52 PM

Why wouldn't the author share code? Or did I miss it?

by shimman

12/29/2025 at 3:38:50 PM

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.

by damnitbuilds

12/29/2025 at 1:59:06 PM

This nails what vibe coding actually is. The model handles execution, but intent and taste stay human. That’s where the real leverage is.

by vtemian

12/29/2025 at 3:54:01 PM

> 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!

by walthamstow

12/29/2025 at 4:41:50 PM

How do you search if a book is in there? They don't seem to be in any predictable order.

by phyzix5761

12/29/2025 at 2:01:49 PM

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.

by stevesearer

12/29/2025 at 2:15:12 PM

I Love the fact that the browser search functionality works in the bookshelf.

by mihaibalint

12/29/2025 at 3:52:59 PM

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

by guluarte

12/29/2025 at 2:19:20 PM

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 :)

by stanrunge

12/29/2025 at 3:32:35 PM

“the cost of trying ideas had collapsed”

This is a critical observation of the vibocene.

by godber

12/29/2025 at 2:59:38 PM

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!

by pixelmonkey

12/29/2025 at 2:33:56 PM

“Claude handled implementation. I handled taste.”

This is the right mindset.

by asasidh

12/29/2025 at 2:41:18 PM

This is an LLM-ism.

by ikamm

12/30/2025 at 12:45:40 AM

Claude handled the blog post too from the looks of it.

by hu3

12/29/2025 at 6:48:49 PM

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.

by theturtletalks

12/29/2025 at 3:36:00 PM

Please add an rss feed to your website/writing

by TheChelsUK

12/29/2025 at 2:05:57 PM

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.

by stevesearer

12/29/2025 at 2:08:27 PM

Nobody tell him

by Shadowmist

12/29/2025 at 4:51:28 PM

"Execution keeps getting cheaper. Taste still does not." yes yes yes!

by kaizenb

12/29/2025 at 2:55:55 PM

[dead]

by k4rnaj1k

12/29/2025 at 2:04:51 PM

[flagged]

by necromanc