YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Explaining to business people why building software is still hard

18 points fagnerbrack 1 hour ago 11 comments

miranaproarrow 27 minutes ago | parent

My manager who vibe coded our entire webapp in claude design. Has difficulty understanding why its still not production ready.

My job is to wire to our backend data, and a lot of these wiring require me to be in there and actually think about the features. These take time, and I just haven't figure out a way to speed this process up with Claude.

holoduke 5 minutes ago | parent

On the other hand. If his tool does the job why not. If you asked a 90s engineer how javascript triggers millions of cpu instructions for just a few code steps he would call you crazy.

vanschelven 20 minutes ago | parent

TBH I think we still need to explain this to ourselves first.

jmclnx 19 minutes ago | parent

My experience over many decades is this:

* If a business person thinks a change or new program is very easy to do, it is really a very hard project.

* If a business person thinks the change or new program us hard to do, usually it is a trivial project.

For me, this has been true for well over 40 years. I never use any kind AI for my work, it did not exist before I retired.

etothepii 12 minutes ago | parent

This is is relatable but I think the issue is that they are uncorrelated.

If it's easy and the business thinks it's easy it gets done. If it's hard and the business thinks it's hard it doesn't.

radial_symmetry 16 minutes ago | parent

Typical experience with Lovable from everyone I've talked to.

Check out Synthetiq if you want to actually get into production

etothepii 13 minutes ago | parent

> "Never really finish building it" is the key insight.

The problem with software is that it is never done. There is always another feature you could have and worse than building a property the work is only done by the people on the outside.

pianopatrick 8 minutes ago | parent

To me stories like this seem like just a moment in time.

Like in 1 to 5 years, vibe coding without looking at the code will likely be a lot better.

LastTrain 7 minutes ago | parent

We’re in the self driving car stage right now. A Waymo can drive itself but the belts and suspenders involved are more expensive than a normal car.

joshdavham 1 minute ago | parent

This is definitely getting my favorite. I’m also going to shamelessly steal this house analogy.

Thanks for writing this!

sublinear 1 minute ago | parent

It's the rest of the owl.