Just want to clarify, this is not my Substack, I’m just sharing this because I found it insightful.
The author describes himself as a “fractional CTO”(no clue what that means, don’t ask me) and advisor. His clients asked him how they could leverage AI. He decided to experience it for himself. From the author(emphasis mine):
I forced myself to use Claude Code exclusively to build a product. Three months. Not a single line of code written by me. I wanted to experience what my clients were considering—100% AI adoption. I needed to know firsthand why that 95% failure rate exists.
I got the product launched. It worked. I was proud of what I’d created. Then came the moment that validated every concern in that MIT study: I needed to make a small change and realized I wasn’t confident I could do it. My own product, built under my direction, and I’d lost confidence in my ability to modify it.
Now when clients ask me about AI adoption, I can tell them exactly what 100% looks like: it looks like failure. Not immediate failure—that’s the trap. Initial metrics look great. You ship faster. You feel productive. Then three months later, you realize nobody actually understands what you’ve built.
AI is really great for small apps. I’ve saved so many hours over weekends that would otherwise be spent coding a small thing I need a few times whereas now I can get an AI to spit it out for me.
But anything big and it’s fucking stupid, it cannot track large projects at all.
What kind of small things have you vibed out that you needed?
FWIW that’s a good question but IMHO the better question is :
What kind of small things have you vibed out that you needed that didn’t actually exist or at least you couldn’t find after a 5min search on open source forges like CodeBerg, Gitblab, Github, etc?
Because making something quick that kind of works is nice… but why even do so in the first place if it’s already out there, maybe maintained but at least tested?
Since you put such emphasis on “better”: I’d still like to have an answer to the one I posed.
Yours would be a reasonable follow-up question if we noticed that their vibed projects are utilities already available in the ecosystem. 👍
Sure, you’re right, I just worry (maybe needlessly) about people re-inventing the wheel because it’s “easier” than searching without properly understand the cost of the entire process.
Very valid!
So if it can be vibe coded, it’s pretty much certainly already a “thing”, but with some awkwardness.
Maybe what you need is a combination of two utilities, maybe the interface is very awkward for your use case, maybe you have to make a tiny compromise because it doesn’t quite match.
Maybe you want a little utility to do stuff with media. Now you could navigate your way through ffmpeg and mkvextract, which together handles what you want, with some scripting to keep you from having to remember the specific way to do things in the myriad of stuff those utilities do. An LLM could probably knock that script out for you quickly without having to delve too deeply into the documentation for the projects.
If I understand correctly then this means mostly adapting the interface?
It’s certainly a use case that LLM has a decent shot at.
Of course, having said that I gave it a spin with Gemini 3 and it just hallucinated a bunch of crap that doesn’t exist instead of properly identifying capable libraries or frontending media tools…
But in principle and upon occasion it can take care of little convenience utilities/functions like that. I continue to have no idea though why some people seem to claim to be able to ‘vibe code’ up anything of significance, even as I thought I was giving it an easy hit it completely screwed it up…
Having used both Gemini and Claude… I use Gemini when I need to quickly find something I don’t want to waste time searching for, or I need a recipe found and then modified to fit what I have on hand.
Everytime I used Gemini for coding has ended in failure. It constantly forgets things, forgets what version of a package you’re using so it tells you to do something that is deprecated, it was hell. I had to hold its hand the entire time and talk to it like it’s a stupid child.
Claude just works. I use Claude for so many things both chat and API. I didn’t care for AI until I tried Claude. There’s a whole whack of novels by a Russian author I like but they stopped translating the series. Claude vibe coded an app to read the Russian ebooks, translate them by chapter in a way that prevented context bleed. I can read any book in any language for about $2.50 in API tokens.
I’ve been using Claude to mediocre results, so this time I used Gemini 3 because everyone in my company is screaming “this time it works, trust us bro”. Claude has not been working so great for me for my day job either.
What if I can find it but it’s either shit or bloated for my needs?
Open an issue to explain why it’s not enough for you? If you can make a PR for it that actually implements the things you need, do it?
My point to say everything is already out there and perfectly fits your need, only that a LOT is already out there. If all re-invent the wheel in our own corner it’s basically impossible to learn from each other.
These are the principles I follow:
https://indieweb.org/make_what_you_need
https://indieweb.org/use_what_you_make
I don’t have time to argue with FOSS creators to get my stuff in their projects, nor do I have the energy to maintain a personal fork of someone else’s work.
It’s much faster for me to start up Claude and code a very bespoke system just for my needs.
I don’t like web UIs nor do I want to run stuff in a Docker container. I just want a scriptable CLI application.
Like I just did a subtitle translation tool in 2-3 nights that produces much better quality than any of the ready made solutions I found on GitHub. One of which was an *arr stack web monstrosity and the other was a GUI application.
Neither did what I needed in the level of quality I want, so I made my own. One I can automate like I want and have running on my own server.
Not OP but I made a little menu thing for launching VMs and a script for grabbing trailers for downloaded movies that reads the name of the folder, finds the trailer and uses yt-dlp to grab it, puts it in the folder and renames it.
Definitely sounds like a tiny shell script but yeah, I guess it’s seconds with an agent rather than a few minutes with manual coding 👍
It never seconds. The first three versions will don’t do what you want (or not work at all), so you will end up arguing with this shit for significant amount of time without realising it
Yeah pretty much! TBH for the first one there are already things online that can do that, I just wanted to test how the AI would do so I gave it a simple thing, it worked well and so I kept using it. The second one I wasn’t sure about because it’s a bit copyright-y, but yeah like you say it was just quicker. I wouldn’t use the AI for anything super important, but I figured it’d do for a quick little script that only needs to do one specific thing just for me.
I’m curious about that too since you can “create” most small applications with a few lines of Bash, pipes, and all the available tools on Linux.
Maybe they don’t run Linux. 🤭
Encryption, login systems and pricing algorithms. Just the small annoying things /s