John Siracusa in ATP 701:

I see lots of discussion about “everyone will be making their own custom apps with vibe coding” or whatever. Software development is software development, even if you’re literally not writing the code. I’ve made an app and I think it works on all these test files and then you get a real file and you try and it doesn’t work, that happens with apps that humans code too, all the time.

That’s just app development. You’re like, “oh, I’m done with my app. I made this little tool and it’s great.” Well, have you? How many bugs does your little tool have? Probably a ton.

Whether you wrote it or whether an LLM wrote it, it’s probably filled with bugs.

And so you’re going to use it, and then you’re going to find more bugs, and there is no avoiding the maintenance of writing something, keeping it, working on it, and finding all of the bugs in all the dark corners where they’re hiding. There’s no escape from that, at least so far with current technology, with or without humans.

So, here I am making these toy apps to make my life easier. All it’s doing is reminding me that software development is software development, even if you’re not writing the code.

I think about this every time I make a new project with AI. I start thinking about the long term — will I still be interested in this in 3 months? Utilities. Sure. Go wild. But what about apps I want to rely on and use day to day? Am I really up to that and willing to support this?

So here we are back at “just because you can make something doesn’t mean you should” and the limiting factor is still my time and attention.

The point is: making good apps is hard. Making a great app is incredibly difficult. Even when the code is easy to make, that wasn’t really the hard and most people are going to want to futz with that. They just want something that works.