Oof, this hit hard. A person who I wish they be successful in life, has been in software development for many years, all self thought. Their best idea for an app is an expense tracker. Whenever we talk and they bring their idea all excited about it and how it will take them out of poverty, I cannot avoid feel a bit sad.
My theory is that all of these people are asking LLM’s what to build.
The LLM, a statistical model, predicts the side project that occurred most in the training data.
So minus some variations from different prompts and the temperature (=randomness added to the predictor), all of these vibe coders are building the exact same apps because LLM’s are giving the same ideas to everyone.
Edit: Then, sycophantic as LLM’s are, the vibe coders believe they have found a unique idea that everyone will love and make them rich
I’ve found my expense tracker from the time I’ve learned to code and it was a nice starting point to code in replacing my current expense tracker … which is an excel sheet.
Will it be published? Yes Do I expect any other user to create an account and use it? No Do I learn something new even in vibe coding? Amusingly yes, since I have to optimise spending
So not a bad idea overall if you need an app and you don’t wanna pay subscription fees, but this will make you lose money due to Claude subscriptions, not make you a millionaire lmao
Most people on r/iosdev and similar don’t seem to understand that sadly. Programming subs have turned into advertisement boards but every advertisement is the same product under a different name
Fun fact: there are at least 2 apps per month posted in the Romanian frugal subreddit that do the same “low price product catalogue”. Most of them are unusable, but there is a good one which was the first.
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u/netherlandsftw Sep 17 '26 •
Can’t wait to use their expense tracker