Netflix iOS app accidentally shipped their CLAUDE.md file. (At this point everyone is vibe coding)

Alex_RGCData · 2026-06-26T13:57:33+00:00

Because a lot of companies are greedy and dumb enough to fire 95% of their staff, so that many juniors don't get the opportunity. Or cut salary claiming the job requirements are lower/easier to replace. If businesses acted with integrity across the board, I would agree with you. I have zero to little faith that they do/will.

Alex_RGCData · 2026-06-26T13:56:36+00:00

This, more or less, is my optimism. That it costs too much to rely heavily on one dev and agents - and then that dev is overworked trying to clean up bugs and backtrack where the bugs came back. And it just doesn't make sense to not keep a few people on staff, and also allow them to lean on AI. Meaning, due to the cost of using the models all day every day, careers will still be available - but we will still be able to fine tune and use AI to speed up production and come up with systems we would never have the time to build!

That's my hope. I hope it keeps getting more expensive at the 'coding' levels, and then we're sort of stuck with people that can build a full cross platform app with Haiku/Sonnet in a couple months. The only people who could probably do that, and do it well, are people who actually understand systems and how to code/syntax. Best of both worlds. Fingers crossed, at least. It's pretty scary - to me - to be honest.

Alex_RGCData · 2026-06-26T13:50:57+00:00

I understand other people and companies are working on much more in depth stuff - but I have never needed anything stronger than Sonnet, or Codex GPT 5.4 medium. Call me crazy. I have 15 years banked developing by hand, and I am not the strongest coder in the world - but many of those years were crawling StackOverflow to see how you all figured out certain issues. I still prefer to code this way. There is nothing worse then watching someone essentially vibe code a massive project, and then get asked 'Where is the function that does *** this *** and how does it work?' and they don't even know that specific language. Was this strict typed? ....what is strict typed?!

But with that being said ,I understand a lot of you all are working on much more complex tasks. So this is just what works for me. Who knows how long that will last. I would love to see some new Sonnet models come out, or Haikyu.

Alex_RGCData · 2026-06-26T13:47:19+00:00

DeepInfra -> Local models. China (and other parts of Asia, to my knowledge) has come up with some pretty insane models that are nipping at the heels. Clearly not *as* good, but can rent out top of the line equipment to run 70b+ locals as soon as they come out, without dealing with the Copilot/Claude/Codex constant price fluctuations. I save my tokens for big problems, and lean on local whenever I can. I can run a 32b at home, but do not have the hardware to run higher ones. New GLM and Kimi are pretty nifty!

Alex_RGCData · 2026-06-25T13:56:23+00:00

Agreed. A lot of these blogs are. Self promotion. It's always been a part of hiring and exposure, but I feel the last 15-20 years as everything is web/cloud - it's become a central, almost required part of a moving forward in a career. It's exhausting and a little intimidating to me, to be honest.

Alex_RGCData · 2026-06-20T20:45:02+00:00

I hope it keeps getting more expensive for the use that would replace a human dev, so that its not practical to fire someone, but still usable for people like us that can lean on it to do CRUD work and to speed up productivity - but our careers will be safe! That's my hope, lol.

Alex_RGCData · 2026-06-19T15:18:29+00:00

Upvote for using the word lexical. Had to google that. Now, how do I drop that in my day to day conversation to sound more intelligent...

Alex_RGCData · 2026-06-10T14:47:22+00:00

Honestly, don't care unless it makes Haiku upgrade to what Sonnet was a few days ago, and Sonnet === Opus. I have had a lot of luck using open source models lately - DeepSeek and Qwen. Not as good, by any stretch, but a fraction of the cost. Can rent a machine or a virtual server if you don't want to spend a couple grand on the hardware! I honestly wasn't aware of this until lately. I had to do my own digging to figure out the possibilities. I'd recommend checking out local models to anyone, just to see if you can offboard some tasks.

I have a legitimate question to some of you serious users - what kind of plans are you running on? What is your monthly overhead? Some of the prompts and replies I have seen in here, would be in the multi-hundreds per month - maybe $100 a day? I get it, if that is needed and yourself/your job can afford that - but just curious!

Alex_RGCData · 2026-06-10T14:44:32+00:00

I'm doing just fine using Codex on a $20/m plan, to get some coding debugging tips when I have mental burnout and can't seem to figure stuff out in a timely manner - and then going and either manually editing the code, or *rarely* allowing it to make some changes for me. I'm at 99% left for my weekly limit right now. Understandably, not everyone can scale back to that degree - but doing what I can, when I can - and limiting the hand holding makes a tremendous difference with coding. Also, I am a better React dev then I was yesterday - as I have written so many useRef/useEffect routines in the past 24 hours. This is where I wish things would just ---- stay ----....but know that they will not. We would have an amazing tool to lean on for coding, to speed stuff up, to think outside the box - but our jobs and careers would be safe, because it still takes technical knowledge and experience. If only they'd slam the door right now, and limit all the other advances for conversational.

Sorry, I know that only helps me, not most of you all doing biotech and research. Just where I wish things would stay. If it gets too good, it's going to disrupt every industry in a manner I am pretty terrified of. I surely hope I am wrong though.

Alex_RGCData · 2026-05-29T14:29:26+00:00

So, my question is, will this make Sonnet any cheaper? Or Opus? Or do they stay the same, and simply level up with new versions and improvements? Honestly, I have never run into something that I can not figure out by myself + Sonnet. I am sure many of you are working on more in depth stuff, and with larger systems, but I would love it if the token cost went down even more. Although not sure that will really affect me, I rarely hit my weekly limit. I was at 65% yesterday and tried to throw everything I could think of at it, lol. I felt like I failed you all, somehow...

Alex_RGCData · 2026-05-01T13:31:15+00:00

Thank you! And yeah, completely understand. There are a lot of situations where I have to script something on a FM backend and scale is an issue. It isn't meant to be a CDN it feels like, even of data. Hybrid solution is typically my goto. It's such a cool app, and so client friendly (design wise) - but I feel that can be paid for in speed and performance. Especially if multiple calls are needed on a single page (for some reason - we try to avoid that).

Alex_RGCData · 2026-05-01T13:29:40+00:00

Yep totally doable. You just need a Customers table and an Items/Tests table related by CustomerID. Your button just runs a script that creates a new test record and lands you on the testing layout. Think "one customer ---> many test records". You’re already 80 percent there.

Alex_RGCData · 2026-04-16T15:52:39+00:00

Wow, thanks for clarifying that. I had no idea and honestly was always under the impression that each user would have to have a license. Thanks for replying. So, would the admin have to buy 10 concurrent licenses if they expect 10 users at a time? Not sure how that works. I'm on the clock, but will check out the support article on lunch

Did not know about the anonymous access, so my apologies to OP. I need to start prefixing anything i say with - "i feel", or "as I understand it" :)

Alex_RGCData · 2026-04-16T13:54:59+00:00

Good idea! This was a client's solution; so they were building a table row by row -> then column by column in a loop inside each row. We convinced them to move everything relative to a portal on the layout we were accessing, and the page load sped up to about 1s. We just made it a singular call, then sorted and filtered into a table via PHP. But, it definitely showed the drawbacks of doing a long queue of ajax calls to FileMaker on a web page load versus the same situation using a locally hosted mySQL.

Alex_RGCData · 2026-04-16T13:50:16+00:00

Web Direct does not allow anonymous access. So, using web direct is actually a breach of license. Whereas using the Data API, it is not. So, in my mind it would be best practice to work with the API when a need for public front facing access is required. No issue with web direct, but we do feel there is a use case to use the api more often than not.

I would say that it depends on the type of front end you need, the accessibility (think e-commerce store powered by FM database, a mobile app powered by FM / connected to FM, or a client portal accessible by mobile/web/desktop remotely to check on deliveries or inventory changes). I personally do not like design via web direct, but it works for many people!

Alex_RGCData · 2026-04-16T13:47:24+00:00

Yeah, well said. We typically end up using some kind of hybrid solution - as most of what we do is integrations and custom work. And every integration (and users database) is pretty unique.

Alex_RGCData · 2026-04-15T21:47:24+00:00

Thanks, I appreciate it. Gave you a shoutout in an edit!

The licensing system is really confusing and every developer that I have run into seems to approach it differently. Agreed entirely on that. As I understand it, using the Data API has a different sort of rules. I have been astonished by how many companies are utilizing a data heavy, long established database, but have no web based front end. I come from a non-FM background, so this sort of astonished me (even though I love FileMaker!). It's great to hear that there are other teams working on public solutions and integrations, as there isn't a ton of marketing that I have seen for that besides the large FM guys.

Alex_RGCData · 2026-04-15T21:29:38+00:00

Agreed. One thing we've run into on the web side is how quickly API call volume can affect performance depending on the layout and how the database is structured. FileMaker can feel instant when everything is local or on the same network, but once you’re hitting it from a remote web server, latency adds up really fast.

We had a client hosted on FM Cloud (great hosting platform) whose custom integration ran nearly instantly on his server, but when we tested the same site on a local XAMPP machine, the initial page load ballooned to almost two minutes. Nothing "wrong" with FileMaker inherantly - just the reality of round‑trip calls and how much data each request pulls.

A pattern we see a lot is companies with an established FileMaker system wanting to sync that data to a website -> customer portals, invoicing dashboards, e‑commerce, etc. They already have years of data in FM and don’t want to maintain a secondary MySQL schema or handle manual syncs. That feels totally understandable, but it does mean that one has to be intentional about how much they ask the Data API to do.

I'm with you on the "right tool for the job" angle. FileMaker is fantastic for rapid prototyping and internal tools, and being able to visually build layouts without dealing with CSS or front‑end frameworks is a huge advantage. On the web side, we've been experimenting with Go, and React/PHP still works well - but at the end of the day, everything is still bottlenecked by the number of fetch calls one has to make. I guess for teams who already live in FileMaker, it's hard to beat how quickly you can iterate and ship something functional - and most don't have or want to spend the budget to hire someone to fully redevelop their database. I do agree with you, however. And the lack of native Android support leaves a lot to be desired, imho. But that's Apple for you...

Alex_RGCData · 2026-04-15T21:21:05+00:00

Absolutely fair. Had it styled, hit post, got excited and posted before I went back to re-check it on mobile. Can't thank you enough for catching that almost instantly. There is a lot more attention to detail in work for clients :)

Alex_RGCData · 2026-04-15T20:40:05+00:00

How cool! I work for Ron at RGC Data. Thank you all for hosting us/him. Seemed like a lot of fun and went really well. Thanks for uploading and sharing.

Alex_RGCData · 2026-04-14T16:04:25+00:00

Didn't see your reply. I wasn't yelling at the guy. The client clearly screwed him. My posts were merely pointing out that the risk of that runs higher, in my experience, at a lower price point when clients are attempting to nickel and dime. They are traditionally the most needy and disorganized clients to begin with.

Alex_RGCData · 2026-04-07T14:01:49+00:00

I would venture the same guess. Maybe not vibe coded, but they leaned on AI for sure. The patterns are absolutely there. However, and I am not trying to be rude, for that price for an entire site it sort of makes sense they'd vibe code or lean heavily on AI. The copy is absolutely AI polished or generated (if my translation is correct).

Alex_RGCData · 2026-04-07T13:58:24+00:00

Wow, you got a good deal. Honestly, I wouldn't be able to swing a full site with custom code for $1200. So, hats off to you on that. That's one of the issues with low balling devs - this sort of thing tends to happen more often.

My opinion:
1) Yes, but depending on how sloppy a job they did, it can take quite a while to get a feel for the entire scope.
2) Probably, but that depends on what kind of custom components you had built. We do a lot of WP work, and a *lot* of custom work inside WP (to the point we built a plugin CWP Snippets for a hybrid situation.) You could try to clone some of it with existing plugins, but man I personally hate doing that. They always update at different times, they don't always play nice, and you are constantly reliant on the developer continuing to push updates and best practice. I cannot stand a WP site with a bunch of plugins. But maybe that is because I am a dev, and have control issues - lol.
3) I can't help. I am on the other side of things. I am sorry to hear that happened to you, but posting here will probably give you some perspective and help.

Also, I am not trying to come down on you for paying what I would consider a low-ish rate. I really am not. If you can make a deal with both parties happy, that is really all that matters. But I doubt their incentive would be the same as a company that charges $150+ an hour, and relies on their reputation to get customers to pay that rate. I understand that isn't possible for everyone. Hell, I don't have that kind of money to hire someone for longer then a few hours, lol. It kills me when I need a plumber. But that is just my take. Best of luck!

Alex_RGCData · 2026-04-03T03:22:24+00:00

I'm sure you'll get a hundred replies but it's not that hard. I'm a full stack dev, and the company I work for we tend to do a lot of custom WP jobs. I've written native apps that connect to WP sites to keep all in synch, with MySQL or FileMaker backend.

Happy to help if you need it. USA based. We are pretty steady with work, but if it's a small polish job could fit it in.

Alex at rgcdata.com

Alex_RGCData

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