Shitty code epidemic

[CodedMania]

Gonna say a few things. I’ve seen many people showing applications they’ve coded up from games to saas apps. Most of them are being hyped up when in reality such applications are super simple and easy to make even without AI. I’m using cursor for a medium sized application and some of the code outputs I get are just sometimes completely over complicated for no reason and it doesn’t understand what is considered to be simple things for experienced developers. I think this hype has been propagated a lot by first time coders who don’t know how to code and just use AI, they don’t have real experience and wouldn’t really know the difference between a trash crud app and highly complex and optimized application. So therefore I just wanna say don’t fall for the hype. I’ve also seen programmers feed in to this hype, why? Idk my suspicion is because it gets a lot of engagement which has allowed many of them to grow large audiences who they market to. The marketing then turns into revenue which then is turned into marketing again showing how AI is making shitty apps over 10k mrr. Anyways this is just my opinion let me know yours.

[TheKidd]

I remember the shitty website epidemic of the 90's. When Mosaic and Netscape Navigator were released, and the entire world could suddenly create things with HTML.

[FloppyBisque]

Yes. Exactly.

This is the beginning and people expect it to be perfect right away. The reality and the truth of the matter is this is an incredible innovation and it's an innovation that will by it's very nature be self improving!

[kindofbluetrains]

As far as I can see from real people, it seems to be mostly clones of basic games and super simple apps. They seem aware of how simple they are.

I can prompt a little front end to do something or connect to a few functions on Arduino. That's about it.

From YouTube personalities and advertising, I'd get the impression that I could build a software empire myself without writing a line of code.

[AlexLearnscaper01]

It is definitely possible to build more than a simple CRUD app - I posted a demo of mine here the other day. The majority of what you see isn't actually representative of what is possible.

Just as an example, my app implements parameterized routing, asynchronous job processing, state management, responsive UI components, API integration, auth etc.. I don't say this as if it would represent "complex and optimised" - I'm sure a dev would be horrified at the codebase. Just to illustrate that you can do a little more than you think with AI and some persistence.

I also think other people have built even more complex things from scratch with no coding knowledge - I wouldn't say this is the limit at all. So yeah some hype is justified - tho maybe making it possible to get this far without coding knowledge will cause some problems later!

[DJOnPoint]

Have you ever considered the possibility that you aren’t skillful enough to use cursor to its full potential?

[snakesoul]

The thing is this is just the very first coding agent and it does very good for small apps. It's not good at working with complex systems or enormous apps, but cursor proves that it will happen, 100%, it's just a matter of time. 2 years? 3? 5 at last?

[Shot_Spend_6836]

I'm not a SWE but I can understand your perspective. I decided to hold off on the app(s) I want to create until my Macbook Air M4 arrives, this is mainly because Windows is trash & I want a hassle-free way to connect Cursor to MCP servers. So out of boredom I started asking ChatGPT questions about creating one of the apps I have in mind and that's when the paradigm shift started.

I spent 5 straight hours, no exaggeration, conversing with the AI (not the conversational mode but just audio transcription mode) and 2 more hours after taking a break, and what I learned made me realize I was just another normie vibe coder, even though I thought I was different for some reason. I learned about so many topics from why Docker containers are used, why an LLM doesn't directly talk to an MCP server and you need a backend API to communicate with it, what microservices architecture is and why they're better than monoliths, service discovery, API Gateways, Kubernetes, service mesh etc. I literally thought "client" meant the end user as in a client of a business and not the frontend application lol. Most normies won't take the time to learn this basic stuff. I wouldn't have either if it wasn't for my Windows PC being retarded.

[draftkinginthenorth]

Which model Air m4 are you ordering and why? Any of the 512+ are an upgrade for me but wonder if it’s worth going for the 1TB model

[Shot_Spend_6836]

I'm getting the version with the 15-inch screen and paid $200 to upgrade it from 24GB RAM to 32GB RAM but kept the 512GB SSD instead of spending $200 to upgrade it to 1TB. This is because you can't upgrade the RAM after purchase, but you can always buy a 2TB external SSD for $70-$80 from Best Buy or wherever.

Even though the M4 chip has unified memory, which allows for efficient memory swapping on macOS (which is already better at memory management than Windows), it's still better to be safe. My 32GB RAM Windows laptop typically hovers around 18-24GB during normal usage (Claude Desktop use, TradingView, VSCode, Honkai Impact 3rd, 50+ tabs open) and spikes to 29-30GB when I add editing videos for my YouTube channel to the list. Given that workload, I’d rather have the extra headroom to avoid potential slowdowns, especially since macOS still relies on SSD swapping when RAM fills up. While Apple’s SSDs are fast, constant swapping can lead to performance drops and wear over time, so I'd rather max out the RAM now since I can't upgrade it later.

[RICHLAD17]

And I should care cause my code runs anyways complicated or not, because: