What I like is how most such vibed tools - self-aware how ubiquitous they are - don't try to capture audience or offer paid services. Everything is suddenly available without logins, share via a simple url, self-hosting is expected. While AI diminishes the power, influence and recognition of creators, I find it overall a great democratizing force in software.
> keeping it up-to-date with its dependencies etc.
not if the software is functional today, and doesn't require interacting with third party systems (like this tinylittleoffice suite).
By the time the underlying infrastructure (like browser compatibility, or self-hosting OS becoming obsolete) fails, you're likely no longer using it anyway.
The "documents" seem exportable in text format, and in any case, potentially salvageable with another vibe-coded tool if such need arise.
Therefore, the original author is no required to maintain it.
That's a rosy eyed view. users running outdated code not getting security fixes are sweet honeypots for modern automated llm-backed mass exploitation machine long before something obviously fails for you.
you'll be spending tokens on getting it maintained, and if you don't spend enough you get pwned by guys who do. who exactly is winning in this scenario?
I am placing your time of digital fruition in the 00’s or later? Not bashing, but we bought floppies in the 80s with software with no updates. Cool kids got their software from Oh No More Warez + keygen in the early 90s. That went online in the late 90s.
Always online, internet of shit and perma update crap came at that same time, first for the OS and later for everything. Oh, plus two decades of using shady Russian software for virus scanning. Shit went up, update everything became everywhere and everyday. Plus gigabyte frameworks for functionality that was kilobytes before.
My point in cursing too much? (Sorry, mentally screaming FUD here.) That tiny code projects, even without an active maintainer, in the LLM-era are probably a lot more secure when run by the people they target (we run containers, and sandboxes, the cool kids run immutable distros). This is democratizing software, and it has the great feel of old.
Please everyone, vibe code tiny project with tiny codebases everyday. Dump them on GitHub in a free tier. Make so many that the people have a free choice again! And go watch Cliff Stoll again for that hacker energy!
This is the part managerial and marketing types don't understand. Their expectation is usually that "since its a computer system (sic) the tech team will support it from now on".
patching dependencies correctly was one of the first agentic coding tasks llm solved 100%. you will need to dedicate a session once a year to to such patches. Or community of vibe coders will do it for you .
That has always been the case with anything self-hosted. Otherwise you're putting a lot of faith in an upstream maintainer to actually put in the effort which they may or may not be doing.
>If it ever gets a serious user base, might easily sell ads or whatever else.
It would need to offer some pretty valuable features, otherwise I'd just vibecode the same app but without ads lol. What's funny is that I have already vibecoded a similar app for my own usage. It's a bit more complex (integrates with a backend I own), but this is something even a free LLM could easily generate.
>Also, it still costs money to host it, the creator won't eat the cost if it gets up to a serious amount of usage
This is a static app. It's free to host in a number of places. Odds are this is just a GitHub Page. I'd be willing to be the creator's only bill is the domain name.
That word is so misused in this context, it is now bereft of meaning. “Democratisation” does not mean that a person without a skill can now achieve a result. A local pastry shop which makes cakes to order does not “democratise” baking. LLMs do not “democratise” software, anyone with access to a computer could already build and host any of these tools.
“Democratisation” is the word shady actors want to put in our heads to make us not think of the bad parts. Like how countries with “democratic” and “people's republic” in the name are the least democratic. If you have to keep repeating how democratising you are, you aren’t at all.
Technically anyone could write a full book or transcribe them before the printing press came around, but it certainly was a democratizing force for publishing when it was invented. The democratization is in the scale and leverage available to the average person.
That's my point exactly. The average person could not take an idea from conception to a publishable program, and now they can. I'm actually surprised it fits as well as it does metaphors being imperfect and all that.
> The average person could not take an idea from conception to a publishable program
Of course they could, they just had to learn how, and that’s the point. There was no “gatekeeping”¹ and there was nothing “undemocratic”² about it. The information was already ample and freely available to all. Those who had the means (a computing device) before have the means now and the opposite isn’t true (you still need access to a computing device to prompt and a server to host the things which need hosting).
¹ You didn’t use that word, but it’s a common argument in these conversations.
² For something to be “democratising”, what came before had to be undemocratic.
> Don't give me that "everyone died at 25 and ate mud" BS.
No one has said that. You’ve already demonstrated you are arguing in profound bad faith (in all three of your comments) so forgive me if I choose to not engage you any further in your quest for a “gotcha” moment. You can keep your internet points.
Language evolves. What is certainly true is that the scribal class of people who could program has had its gates of entry almost deleted, and people, without sacrificing a meaningful part of their available time, can build tools to solve their problems.
To me, this is democratization.
Sure anyone could have, but that's always a scale.
Of course. My objection is that the word democratisation was specifically chosen to manipulate us. That’s what bad actors do, they pick positive words to describe bad things so it’s hard to argue against them.
It’s fascinating how a community who can clearly see through “think of the children” as the ruse that it is¹ just gobbles up “democratisation” until they choke. Tech people love to believe they’re immune to manipulation, when doing so is the easiest trick in the book. All you have to do is make the problem interesting enough and the critical part of the brain shuts off.
¹ Because of course we should protect children, that’s positive. The issue becomes when bad actors use that as an excuse to promote actions which do not have protecting children as their true intent.
> We teach the population at the cheapest possible rate; and the aim all the democratization (if we may use the word) of literature proposes to itself in this country, is to store the minds of the many, of the anonymous multitude, with a large portion of valuable, because practically useful, facts. [Meliora, vol. ii, no. 6, 1860]
I’m not sure you understand that quote, or how it (doesn’t) relate to the point.
For one, it even has a parenthetical saying “if we may use the word” meaning the word isn’t being used in it’s proper sense, that’s the whole point of that expression. For another, the quote itself is referring to teaching, as in imparting a skill, and a central point of my comment is that having a skill and having a result done for you are not the same thing. Finally, if you have to go back two centuries to find an example… The countries that I mentioned didn’t even have those names yet, it is clear (if you engage in good faith) that the point regards the modern world and is not a criticism of societies since the dawn of men.
My disagreement is about the usage of the word, not about whether marketers or politicians have used it for other purposes. Sure, using “democratize” to mean “make broadly accessible” has bleached its political force, but that sense has been attested since the late 1700s to the present. Prescriptively, you can argue it shouldn’t be used that way. Descriptively, it has been, for a long time.
> Sure, using “democratize” to mean “make broadly accessible” has bleached its political force
Making and distributing software was already “broadly accessible”. The people who could build and host software before (those with access to computing device) are the same who can do it now.
Of course they could, don’t engage in bad faith and properly steel man the argument. They might not have known how but they could certainly learn and there was absolutely nothing stopping them to do so and crack on. All the resources were already ample and free. They just didn’t want to spend the time on it. Which is fine, not everyone should learn to code, but it’s absurd to claim they couldn’t do it before and can now.
"Democratisation doesn't mean this, and it doesn't mean that...." but you never outline what it does mean, to you. It's a perfect foil to attack others while claiming moral superiority.
Also, I don't recognize your authority to gatekeep word definitions. Here in my little hovel, words mean whatever the general mass of readers think they do.
It's because the creators can't vouch for the work at all and it probably has whack issues. It could be a literal crime to charge for this kind of stuff.
Literal crime seems a bit exaggerated, no? It seems more like the epitome of “move fast, break things”. Folks are moving so fast now that they don’t even bother to try to recoup value for the effort they may have invested anymore.
If that’s a crime, there are a lot of companies that made a lot of money breaking that law.
Your take is worth responding to. See my reply to the similar question. The gist is, move fast and violating patent law is not the same as breaking things. Also it can be illegal to sell products that are broken when there are claims of them... Not being broken. Depends on the situation.
Unfortunately "literal" has come to mean "metaphorical" and descriptivists bully everyone into accepting this (ironically its own form of prescriptivism).
It's a rip off of an office suite, the code for said office suite may or may not have came from derivatives of unpermissive licenses, or from patented work(msft has a portfolio of patents for their office products), depending on what the prompts/developer thinks it does and what it actually does could be false advertising or fraud, the list goes on and on. Also gdpr, pcidss. It's a lot safer to make things free when they can't be vouched for and someone's actual ass or reputation is on the line.
I feel like some people confront their internal dissonance on AI by constructing a fantasy past that never, ever existed.
Zero programmers have ever "vouched" for their work. Everything has bugs and faults and rough edges. Everyone is building stuff that in the end is overwhelmingly code that they didn't write and have never looked at (I mean...do you think that Python script you wrote is "your" code? 99.999% of the runtime is in code you have never looked at).
The "literal crime" just puts the hysterics of this to the next level.
People don't charge for this stuff because in the supply/demand equation, there is basically infinite supply to create fun little things in just a few prompts. Infinite supply means that the ability to charge disappears. This isn't super hard to understand.
And FWIW, infinite supply applies to more and more of the market. I mean, I'm sure people have seen the guy who cloned Photoshop via vibe coding. Again the dissonance there is amazing where people need to believe it's terrible, but as someone who used Photoshop for decades...it's astonishingly good given everything, and iterating rapidly. Similarly, charging to build websites and the like...well, a lot of the market has seen the pricing floor disappear.
30+ years of professional software development, at all scales of projects and teams.
Yeah, your silly rhetoric is just a laugh. And to be clear, I was responding generally for HN, not for you. I was just having a laugh at your "literal crime!" nonsense (which you've doubled down on -- newsflash, HN, it's a crime to have bugs in your code! All of you to the slammer!).
And to be clear, it's easy upvotes to do the "I'm a purist that hand crafts every instruction, and I generally have no idea how anything works so I believe this nonsense, and AI is terrible and only bad people use it" bit on HN, as there are other unemployed sorts like you who think they can contrive a reality if they just say it enough. It's honestly pathetic business at this point.
I'm impressed youve made products for 30 years without ever having been responsible for the work, or having any awareness of the laws and regulations surrounding software/products and monetization thereof. Given how you have extensive experience "working" like this I could see how you would be confused by what I said. Thanks for explaining.
If folks like this kind of thing, I discovered https://bento.page/ from a HN post and have been using it off and on for the past few months. It has a much larger featureset but is specifically focused on presentations (for now!). Unlike this project, the editor and content embed themselves in an html file, so you aren't dependent on the host site existing to serve the editor.
Maybe I'm a 2026 luddite but I can't bring myself to read about let alone try using products whose landing page is such a cookie cutter AI design. At least put some effort in to sand off the horrible unnecessary gloss and choose different fonts, colour schemes and layouts from every other project.
I am gradually becoming resigned to the fact that I'll have to get over this prejudice, though I'm not sure how I will.
I agree with you, but it is so funny that three years ago, a website that look like this would probably make the front page for its excellent design alone. Now, it gives off similar energy to a wix website.
Landing pages are always a proxy for quality. Quality in implementation, quality in domain knowledge, in communication…
At a time when building such a page was hard, it communicated quality in implementation. Now it fakes that, and that is deceptive and therefore met with negative reviews reaction.
Counterexample: highly skilled low level engineers would end up with a crappy front page most of the time, but still the compiler/system/kernel whatever could be high quality.
That depends on how you look at it. These front pages are made in a certain way that tells me "low level engineer".
I could make other examples: websites of online shops that have been around for a while and that are just medium-sized, local businesses, tend to look much worse than your average influencer webshop. But the medium-sized local business tends to have the much better value for money ratio, and I can tell it from their website.
Design says something. AI is trying to imitate that very thing that a specific design used to tell you, and that imitation annoys people, rightfully so. That has little to do with AI per se and everything with the immitation the human behind it does.
You are right, then again: I think three years ago someone would have commented about the gloss in the background as well (saying that it’s unhelpful, distracting and resource intensive).
> I can't bring myself to read about let alone try using products whose landing page is such a cookie cutter AI design.
My issue isn't cookie-cutter, but if by gloss you mean unnecessarily animated, then yeah. But I've had this issue for over a decade. AI without direction is just mimicking popular site designs that were doing this same crap before.
> At least put some effort in to sand off the horrible unnecessary gloss and choose different fonts, colour schemes and layouts from every other project.
We had few submissions and links in comments this week to some very "young" projects and their home pages looked like pressed from the same machine.
But if it works for people who just want to share their software and avoid working around the packaging and presentation, then I guess "it is what it is".
Not only the design but the text. Like it says so much and so little at the same time and constantly repeats the same cliches like "the file is the app" or "the api is the x". Unmemorable, unfocused and boring is what it comes across. I know devs don't care about marketing copy but it does make a difference on how you're presenting your app to first time potential users.
it's a fair criticism though. learning and eventually relying on new tools is an investment. it helps to know the developer is invested too, not just moonlighting.
Interesting, though on initial scan I could not easily determine who made it, why, what's the future for it, any terms or licenses, etc. With complex html and downloads, I have no idea what else may be sneaking in and/or phoning home :-/
same, i've been using it extensively and it's very convenient having the ability to let Codex/ClaudeCode generate a whole deck, and then do the last edits myself in the browser.
As a kid in the late 1980s, my dad got me a PC (an Olivetti IBM clone to be precise).
I distinctly remember that there were separate apps for spreadsheets (Lotus 1-2-3 [0]), charts (Harvard Graphics [1]) and word processing (Chi Writer [2]).
And now we just have a basic office suite for free in one website.
Why not just get your agent to write LaTeX? Use the beamer template and get a much more professional, customisable, git-commitable and transferable presentation.
I'm intrigued about the "Trip Planner" being a top-level app. Only tried it in a very surface level way, but the recent trips I've planned (Ottawa for 6 people, Cancun for ~20) have ended up as an ugly mishmash of spreadsheets + google maps saved locations list + random chatgpt sessions.
It feels like there's an unmet need there for managing something more flexible than a minute by minute itinerary, maybe like a list of must-do and want-do activities and dining options, with the system able to figure out what is open when and has other constraints like the weather, costs, what activities pair well together, which group members some things are more or less suited to, what the contact details are for things like a private tour, etc etc.
Definitely there is a need, as you say, but the Internet lacks a cross-site (DB-like) transaction capability. Hotel bookings and flight leg bookings are interdependent, and you will want to lock them in (transaction "COMMIT") once the complete path has been validated as available; if, in contrast, one flight leg or one hotel night are unavailable, the whole plan path may have to be cancelled.
Such a tool would be enormously helpful even for individuals traveling (e.g. business people or scientists visiting customers or trade fairs), which is important as this massively increases market size/potential user base scale.
Holding flights and hotel bookings like that is possible although any kind of online travel agent doing it at scale will not last very long. Travel is still pretty relationship focused when it comes to inventory and if an OTA tries to do things that create churn on that inventory then it will get flagged pretty quickly.
An aggregator or AI assistant like Muse might have better luck although the mechanism for those will require charging whatever credit card you give it. For flights, it should work just fine in the US. There is a mandatory fully-refundable 24 hour cancellation period on all flights booked more than 7 days in advance through US point-of-sale, or they have to honor a 24 hour hold without payment but not both. Hotels get a bit dicier since the policy there will be dependent on each hotel.
At least for myself, business travel remains relatively simple: go to Perk or whatever the business-supplied travel portal is, put in the dates, book whatever flight and hotel are in-policy, when I get there report to the conference/customer/whatever, and buy whatever food is available when I get hungry.
It's travel for pleasure (especially with groups) where all the complexity comes in: there's a lot more stuff to schedule, more slop in what exactly happens when, more competing preferences, more need to have multiple things on deck so you can react to changing energy levels, etc.
Not too hard to see why a lot of people just give up and book an all-inclusive where every day is the same and everyone can just "do whatever", but with better tools, maybe rolling your own vacation could be made more practical and coherent for a normal busy person to put together.
On the matter of transactions in particular, I think airlines largely solve this with 24hr no-questions refund periods. So, book your airfare, then your lodgings, and if there's some problem with the lodgings, then refund the airfare and start over.
I have a cheap VPS. I somewhat know what I'm doing, but now I just get Grok Bot to babysit it for me and nothing's gone wrong yet. According to Grok Bot, anyway.
Why do you need an llm bot for that? Every single distro has one or several autoupdate packaging tools that will update packages and reboot your vm automatically if needed.
> you're doing something very wrong, or more likely don't know what you're doing.
That is probably it. Nothing to do with the ecosystem or convenience (an esoteric concept known as valuing your time, which is rarely appreciated here*). The only thing missing is "RTFM".
It’s really not much harder than reading the docs on Workers or whatever proprietary platform you’re using. And LLMs are quite good at configuring servers. Took me maybe 5 minutes of my time the last time I set up a Rocky server, and it’s still chugging along with no effort from me for 6 months.
When I saw this I thought of the old PSION computer that would keep your state no matter where you were in the thing.
Go to contacts add a new item, type a few letters, Go to word processor, type a few letters, go back to contacts and it's right where you left it, go back to WP, same thing. I think this would be a great tool for that idea where every single things is sticky.
Open street map servers aren't really meant to be used in end user applications. They are primarily to support the editing of the map data. Usage like this should be with a provider like Mapbox, or your own supplied tiles.
I've recently found out that this is not quite true - while the primary purpose of their tile servers is mapping and editing applications, they do allow third party apps to use the servers as long as they follow usage policies: https://operations.osmfoundation.org/policies/tiles/
Yeah, the concept and execution are really impressive but lack of any import is a real blocker I think. Especially in case of spreadsheets - quite often they are not started from scratch, but require previous data or data from other sources etc.
It worked well on my machine, git clone, install, start dev server... also it seems the worker is up and running again. I guess public sharing will only work to some extend when running the dev server for testing.
Something like that is nice if it's got long-term support, works all in a single downloadable file (i. e. in a similar manner as TiddlyWiki), has good documentation, and isn't vibe-coded/written. As a nice part in a browser-based swiss army knife. Otherwise, no thanks.
This is vibecoded in three days.
The chances that this is usable now or be around in a year are tiny.
It looks good on the surface and I like to be proven wrong in a year.
It's a File as a Software. Will it matter if it's wrong in a year? You're also witnessing people trying new things. File as a Software? I guess that was an eventuality since agents write, execute, and forget bits of code just for specific applications. Maybe AI is to code as Guttenberg was to the Bible? It just became available to the masses.
My recent strategy to design presentations has been to record meetings, summarize them and dump it all in onn agent. It can create something that is pretty much perfect very quickly. It's all about context and giving to agents as much of it. Of course you need to prompt them a lot to focus on specific areas you want, but the extra raw context really does help.
can I do a PR for live collaboration? to be transparent, I'm going to use my own project puter.js for webrtc, but the project is open-source (https://github.com/HeyPuter/puter)
It's a shame the self-hosting route is mostly based on Cloudfare's cloud services and there's no documented way to set it up locally using Docker-compose and sqlite (or Postgres) for storage. Great tool, though!
I’m waiting until somebody vibe code a proper desktop apps to provide more diversity than MS vs Open Office. just like I see options blossomed in the “Creative Suite” field.
But maybe I’m just one of those who don’t like web office apps and/or google docs related workflows.
I was musing on something like this. There is non zero chance that some US administration disables GSuite / Office365 for all of us living in shithole countries.
If I ask 10 of the best developers on the planet to build me something and describe it in great detail, they will all build wildly different things unless I actually point them at the exact thing. And even then, the intent might be identical and the surface might be identical, but everything else in between will be different. Oh, and quality will still vary even in this best base scenario.
That's going to be even worse with LLMs. We would need the exact LLM model and its overall configuration (for open weights), the exact prompts and then the luck of the draw.
We should still encourage open prompts, but it's not a panacea.
yes but love makes sense in the context that this is their passion, but respect? what does it stand for? when they vibe coded this they spoke with respect to the agent?
You would rather trust a package installer and/or binary executable that might inject malware like a keyboard logger, bitcoin miner, back orifice, etc?
I would prefer using sources and making that mandatory.
But I prefer trusted binaries over "private" web app in open internet. And even locally - html and all layers of http stack is inferior to pixels. Or vectors.
The only bug I found is that the presentation previews in dark mode have the text as black on a dark background, when it should be white (matching the canvas text).
The bottom of the README has instructions to run locally and self-host.
Looks good to me.
not if the software is functional today, and doesn't require interacting with third party systems (like this tinylittleoffice suite).
By the time the underlying infrastructure (like browser compatibility, or self-hosting OS becoming obsolete) fails, you're likely no longer using it anyway.
The "documents" seem exportable in text format, and in any case, potentially salvageable with another vibe-coded tool if such need arise.
Therefore, the original author is no required to maintain it.
you'll be spending tokens on getting it maintained, and if you don't spend enough you get pwned by guys who do. who exactly is winning in this scenario?
"democratizing software"...
Always online, internet of shit and perma update crap came at that same time, first for the OS and later for everything. Oh, plus two decades of using shady Russian software for virus scanning. Shit went up, update everything became everywhere and everyday. Plus gigabyte frameworks for functionality that was kilobytes before.
My point in cursing too much? (Sorry, mentally screaming FUD here.) That tiny code projects, even without an active maintainer, in the LLM-era are probably a lot more secure when run by the people they target (we run containers, and sandboxes, the cool kids run immutable distros). This is democratizing software, and it has the great feel of old.
Please everyone, vibe code tiny project with tiny codebases everyday. Dump them on GitHub in a free tier. Make so many that the people have a free choice again! And go watch Cliff Stoll again for that hacker energy!
when the software is supposedly maintained, too
> > a great democratizing force
> a great democratizing force
Where have I heard this before? This will surely end well.
Also, it still costs money to host it, the creator won't eat the cost if it gets up to a serious amount of usage
It would need to offer some pretty valuable features, otherwise I'd just vibecode the same app but without ads lol. What's funny is that I have already vibecoded a similar app for my own usage. It's a bit more complex (integrates with a backend I own), but this is something even a free LLM could easily generate.
>Also, it still costs money to host it, the creator won't eat the cost if it gets up to a serious amount of usage
This is a static app. It's free to host in a number of places. Odds are this is just a GitHub Page. I'd be willing to be the creator's only bill is the domain name.
That word is so misused in this context, it is now bereft of meaning. “Democratisation” does not mean that a person without a skill can now achieve a result. A local pastry shop which makes cakes to order does not “democratise” baking. LLMs do not “democratise” software, anyone with access to a computer could already build and host any of these tools.
“Democratisation” is the word shady actors want to put in our heads to make us not think of the bad parts. Like how countries with “democratic” and “people's republic” in the name are the least democratic. If you have to keep repeating how democratising you are, you aren’t at all.
No, no they could not. Access to books was very limited then and not that many could read and write. That comparison does not work in the slightest.
Of course they could, they just had to learn how, and that’s the point. There was no “gatekeeping”¹ and there was nothing “undemocratic”² about it. The information was already ample and freely available to all. Those who had the means (a computing device) before have the means now and the opposite isn’t true (you still need access to a computing device to prompt and a server to host the things which need hosting).
¹ You didn’t use that word, but it’s a common argument in these conversations.
² For something to be “democratising”, what came before had to be undemocratic.
Warning: I study medieval writings, from fiction books to clerical notes on supplies. Don't give me that "everyone died at 25 and ate mud" BS.
No one has said that. You’ve already demonstrated you are arguing in profound bad faith (in all three of your comments) so forgive me if I choose to not engage you any further in your quest for a “gotcha” moment. You can keep your internet points.
To me, this is democratization.
Sure anyone could have, but that's always a scale.
Of course. My objection is that the word democratisation was specifically chosen to manipulate us. That’s what bad actors do, they pick positive words to describe bad things so it’s hard to argue against them.
It’s fascinating how a community who can clearly see through “think of the children” as the ruse that it is¹ just gobbles up “democratisation” until they choke. Tech people love to believe they’re immune to manipulation, when doing so is the easiest trick in the book. All you have to do is make the problem interesting enough and the critical part of the brain shuts off.
¹ Because of course we should protect children, that’s positive. The issue becomes when bad actors use that as an excuse to promote actions which do not have protecting children as their true intent.
> We teach the population at the cheapest possible rate; and the aim all the democratization (if we may use the word) of literature proposes to itself in this country, is to store the minds of the many, of the anonymous multitude, with a large portion of valuable, because practically useful, facts. [Meliora, vol. ii, no. 6, 1860]
For one, it even has a parenthetical saying “if we may use the word” meaning the word isn’t being used in it’s proper sense, that’s the whole point of that expression. For another, the quote itself is referring to teaching, as in imparting a skill, and a central point of my comment is that having a skill and having a result done for you are not the same thing. Finally, if you have to go back two centuries to find an example… The countries that I mentioned didn’t even have those names yet, it is clear (if you engage in good faith) that the point regards the modern world and is not a criticism of societies since the dawn of men.
So is mine.
> Sure, using “democratize” to mean “make broadly accessible” has bleached its political force
Making and distributing software was already “broadly accessible”. The people who could build and host software before (those with access to computing device) are the same who can do it now.
Of course they could, don’t engage in bad faith and properly steel man the argument. They might not have known how but they could certainly learn and there was absolutely nothing stopping them to do so and crack on. All the resources were already ample and free. They just didn’t want to spend the time on it. Which is fine, not everyone should learn to code, but it’s absurd to claim they couldn’t do it before and can now.
Also, I don't recognize your authority to gatekeep word definitions. Here in my little hovel, words mean whatever the general mass of readers think they do.
If that’s a crime, there are a lot of companies that made a lot of money breaking that law.
Patent infringement is a tort, not a crime (in nearly all circumstances in nearly all countries).
A civil violation can result in financial penalties but not criminal penalties (prison)
How so?
Zero programmers have ever "vouched" for their work. Everything has bugs and faults and rough edges. Everyone is building stuff that in the end is overwhelmingly code that they didn't write and have never looked at (I mean...do you think that Python script you wrote is "your" code? 99.999% of the runtime is in code you have never looked at).
The "literal crime" just puts the hysterics of this to the next level.
People don't charge for this stuff because in the supply/demand equation, there is basically infinite supply to create fun little things in just a few prompts. Infinite supply means that the ability to charge disappears. This isn't super hard to understand.
And FWIW, infinite supply applies to more and more of the market. I mean, I'm sure people have seen the guy who cloned Photoshop via vibe coding. Again the dissonance there is amazing where people need to believe it's terrible, but as someone who used Photoshop for decades...it's astonishingly good given everything, and iterating rapidly. Similarly, charging to build websites and the like...well, a lot of the market has seen the pricing floor disappear.
Yeah, your silly rhetoric is just a laugh. And to be clear, I was responding generally for HN, not for you. I was just having a laugh at your "literal crime!" nonsense (which you've doubled down on -- newsflash, HN, it's a crime to have bugs in your code! All of you to the slammer!).
And to be clear, it's easy upvotes to do the "I'm a purist that hand crafts every instruction, and I generally have no idea how anything works so I believe this nonsense, and AI is terrible and only bad people use it" bit on HN, as there are other unemployed sorts like you who think they can contrive a reality if they just say it enough. It's honestly pathetic business at this point.
Do you maintain an account on HN just to troll? I see it's fresh, likely replacing a banned account, so it seems yes.
Thanks for your nonsense and a laugh to start the day.
Maybe I'm a 2026 luddite but I can't bring myself to read about let alone try using products whose landing page is such a cookie cutter AI design. At least put some effort in to sand off the horrible unnecessary gloss and choose different fonts, colour schemes and layouts from every other project.
I am gradually becoming resigned to the fact that I'll have to get over this prejudice, though I'm not sure how I will.
It makes me kinda tense up - I've become almost allergic to it. Kinda interesting really.
At a time when building such a page was hard, it communicated quality in implementation. Now it fakes that, and that is deceptive and therefore met with negative reviews reaction.
I find it completely logical.
Always is a very strong claim.
Counterexample: highly skilled low level engineers would end up with a crappy front page most of the time, but still the compiler/system/kernel whatever could be high quality.
I could make other examples: websites of online shops that have been around for a while and that are just medium-sized, local businesses, tend to look much worse than your average influencer webshop. But the medium-sized local business tends to have the much better value for money ratio, and I can tell it from their website.
Design says something. AI is trying to imitate that very thing that a specific design used to tell you, and that imitation annoys people, rightfully so. That has little to do with AI per se and everything with the immitation the human behind it does.
Now I see your point. Fair enough
It could be the case that marketing is high quality, but the actual project low (tho, of course, this doesn't have to be the case).
And vice versa with low quality (looking) landing page.
1. https://www.cosmos.so/alfirous/websites/landing
My issue isn't cookie-cutter, but if by gloss you mean unnecessarily animated, then yeah. But I've had this issue for over a decade. AI without direction is just mimicking popular site designs that were doing this same crap before.
> At least put some effort in to sand off the horrible unnecessary gloss and choose different fonts, colour schemes and layouts from every other project.
How do you feel about WordPress / Hugo themes?
But if it works for people who just want to share their software and avoid working around the packaging and presentation, then I guess "it is what it is".
I distinctly remember that there were separate apps for spreadsheets (Lotus 1-2-3 [0]), charts (Harvard Graphics [1]) and word processing (Chi Writer [2]).
And now we just have a basic office suite for free in one website.
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_1-2-3
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Graphics
2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChiWriter
Here's a deck I had it generate about how the URL format works: https://bit.ly/4yRBc1v
https://tools.simonwillison.net/latex
https://postimg.cc/0r4jrF59
That last slide with a QR code that purports to embed the entire document/deck is intriguing.
I presume there are practical limits to the file size here?
And images inside slides must be impossible to fit it right away?
It feels like there's an unmet need there for managing something more flexible than a minute by minute itinerary, maybe like a list of must-do and want-do activities and dining options, with the system able to figure out what is open when and has other constraints like the weather, costs, what activities pair well together, which group members some things are more or less suited to, what the contact details are for things like a private tour, etc etc.
Such a tool would be enormously helpful even for individuals traveling (e.g. business people or scientists visiting customers or trade fairs), which is important as this massively increases market size/potential user base scale.
An aggregator or AI assistant like Muse might have better luck although the mechanism for those will require charging whatever credit card you give it. For flights, it should work just fine in the US. There is a mandatory fully-refundable 24 hour cancellation period on all flights booked more than 7 days in advance through US point-of-sale, or they have to honor a 24 hour hold without payment but not both. Hotels get a bit dicier since the policy there will be dependent on each hotel.
It's travel for pleasure (especially with groups) where all the complexity comes in: there's a lot more stuff to schedule, more slop in what exactly happens when, more competing preferences, more need to have multiple things on deck so you can react to changing energy levels, etc.
Not too hard to see why a lot of people just give up and book an all-inclusive where every day is the same and everyone can just "do whatever", but with better tools, maybe rolling your own vacation could be made more practical and coherent for a normal busy person to put together.
On the matter of transactions in particular, I think airlines largely solve this with 24hr no-questions refund periods. So, book your airfare, then your lodgings, and if there's some problem with the lodgings, then refund the airfare and start over.
I wonder how this would fare on a cheap VPS. Probably better, is my guess.
A single Linode VPS is $5 and includes a terabyte of transfer. Probably wouldn't fall over under slashdotting if you served static pages.
Counting or not counting the time spent on babysitting the distro and all its shenanigans, including but not limited to systemd?
That is probably it. Nothing to do with the ecosystem or convenience (an esoteric concept known as valuing your time, which is rarely appreciated here*). The only thing missing is "RTFM".
(*) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
Random selection of one of the many, many pieces of text in the user interface for whatever this is. What does that mean? Does that mean anything?
Go to contacts add a new item, type a few letters, Go to word processor, type a few letters, go back to contacts and it's right where you left it, go back to WP, same thing. I think this would be a great tool for that idea where every single things is sticky.
This recently came across my radar as Home Assistant has migrated to the vector tiles hosted directly by OSMF for all deployments: https://github.com/home-assistant/frontend/pull/53816
For my own needs I usually just go for https://openfreemap.org/ though, I like the default style, and it feels maybe a little faster.
https://aboard.com/introducing-tinylittleoffice-com/
It seems they had the idea originally 6 years ago and did versions of it, but
> We moved on, and sadly, those sites fell off the web, and the old links all broke.
Most people will be able to host it locally and test it this way.
The entire 'document' is encoded in the URL and so there a quick limit to document size
Text documents max out at about 2,000 characters or so
[0] https://tiddlywiki.com
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TiddlyWiki
But maybe I’m just one of those who don’t like web office apps and/or google docs related workflows.
Edit: realized it looks like the data is stored in the url, which is a neat approach but I guess its not really that close.
Permalinks are needed to share documents, which would be something like a link shortener, with the target updating as the document is updated.
If I ask 10 of the best developers on the planet to build me something and describe it in great detail, they will all build wildly different things unless I actually point them at the exact thing. And even then, the intent might be identical and the surface might be identical, but everything else in between will be different. Oh, and quality will still vary even in this best base scenario.
That's going to be even worse with LLMs. We would need the exact LLM model and its overall configuration (for open weights), the exact prompts and then the luck of the draw.
We should still encourage open prompts, but it's not a panacea.
what does this even mean?
But I prefer trusted binaries over "private" web app in open internet. And even locally - html and all layers of http stack is inferior to pixels. Or vectors.
The only bug I found is that the presentation previews in dark mode have the text as black on a dark background, when it should be white (matching the canvas text).
It's a great idea, but this limits the size of the serialized document to 2048 kiB for Chrome, and 64 kiB for Firefox.
Why someone spends time on making this, and why someone would want to spend time using this?
Much more advanced software is available for free for all platforms. Why not just go and install LibreOffice?
and the functionality has been available already for decades. solved problems, kiddos
How is it easy to share megabytes encoded in a link?