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points by delichon 4 days ago | 0 comments

Over the last four decades I've written several food logging apps for my own use. They've never been good enough to release, because I've always wanted more from them. But last week I made one in about a half hour that is by far the best I've ever written or used.

I added a GrokBot, told it that it is my food logger, and to create a Google spreadsheet with the columns and sheets I need. After a couple of short iterations it was ready to go. Now to log anything I just prompt the bot with a little voice, text, or a photo of a meal, and it makes a (usually accurate) guess about what exactly I mean, looks up the nutrient stats, and logs it to the spreadsheet. To change any feature or refactor the spreadsheet I just describe the change and boom.

Before LLMs this would have been magic for a sophisticated developer, now it's table stakes for the frontier AI vendors available to any muggle. This was Eunice slapping me in the face and shouting Wake Up!

[–] ImaCake 4 days ago

I think we underestimate how much skill we put into our prompts to build these personal apps or pretty much any of these few-shot vibe coded projects. Not that a complete noob couldn't do this, but they would get there much much faster if they had heard of Kotlin and downloaded an .apk from github. This isn't meant to dispute the Eunice claim or even the magic of a bot writing better programs with little more than an idea and an hour. Prompting lowers the barrier to entry, but those of us with experience are still having an easier time of it than the beginners.

[–] esperent 4 days ago

> But last week I made one in about a half hour that is by far the best I've ever written or used.

There's a discussion to be had about whether we software engineers can still say we made something or not. I think that with sufficient effort put in, we can still make that claim but should be careful about how we phrase it.

I also think that if you put in just 30 minutes of effort you absolutely cannot claim to have written it or had much input into it at all.

[–] delichon 4 days ago

I made it in the sense that a father makes a baby. I provided a little input at the conception and then someone else did most of the work. In this metaphor, fecund uteri have been commoditized.

[–] steele 4 days ago

We all pitched in but only you got to watch

[–] tokyovigilante 3 days ago

Arguably they spent years developing a spec for an app, which the LLM was then able to follow. Most of my pet projects are things I've been working on idly, developing in my head far in advance of actual time spent coding, which the LLMs are able to just go to town on building out very quickly.

[–] sincerely 4 days ago

I think “made” is probably fine, but it does bug me to see “I built/coded…” to describe a vibecoded project

[–] esperent 4 days ago

I'm mostly taking issue with the phrase "the best I've ever written" here after 30m of work prompting Claude.

[–] abstractspoon 4 days ago

[–] Raphael 4 days ago

That's the example app that Google suggests people make.

[–] Aboutplants 4 days ago

One of the benefits of any sort of “smart glasses” personally would be to have it automatically track my caloric intake.

[–] b33l 4 days ago

SmartTongue™: not just for sex!